Mar 10, 2022
Here were the resources we covered in the episode:
Email the guest: jon@shape.io
Coupon Code on Shape.io: B2
NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript
AJ Wilcox
Managing budgets on LinkedIn Ads is so hard. Help! Well, not when
you're using one specific tool. Stay tuned to hear all about it on
this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
AJ Wilcox
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So the LinkedIn Ads partner
ecosystem is still pretty thin, especially when we compare it with
those super robust partner ecosystems across all the other ad
platforms. So we want to start shining a spotlight on some of the
most valuable and useful tools that us advertisers can get used to
and get to use for better performance. Today's episode is covering
a LinkedIn Ads tool that you may not have heard of, Shape.io. It's
a tool for budget reporting, budget prediction, and even budget
management. It's a very niche offering, but the things that it
does, it does very, very well and it's priced very reasonably. Most
advertisers I've talked to haven't heard of the tool, so I wanted
to introduce it a little bit to you. Now this episode is not meant
to be an ad for Shape.io. I'm a longtime user, for sure, and I do
gush a bit in the episode about just how useful we found the app.
The recommendations that I make here, though, are my own and shape
didn't compensate us to be featured here. Alright, with that out of
the way. Let's jump into the interview with Jon.
AJ Wilcox
All right, Jon Davis. Jon is a co-founder of Shape. He spent seven
years as a PPC consultant, an agency analyst, and a department
manager before leaving to build useful apps for other PPC analysts.
The origins of shape come from problems Jon saw firsthand in our
industry, he focuses on product direction, customer service, and
sales for the company. Jon, anything I missed here in the
intro?
Jon Davis
Yeah, well, AJ, first off, thanks a lot for having me, I'd say a
little, maybe just a little bit more about where our company is
Bend, Oregon. Really cool town, if you're into mountain biking, or
skiing, snowboarding. Or if you'd like to play golf, like I do golf
more my favorite hobbies. I've got two little boys that are four
and six years old, that take up a lot of my time and not too much
else really, truly interesting about me to be honest. My wife is
pretty interesting. She is a former professional cyclist for about
10 years. Raced for team USA, has climbed every mountain in Europe
on her bike, and has a lot of really cool stories. She ran track at
University of Oregon, which is a really big deal for us out here
that live in Oregon. So that's a little bit about the personal life
and if you want to hear anything really interesting, get my wife on
maybe if she ever gets into digital marketing.
AJ Wilcox
Love it! Well, I can't say any way that I would have like come
across your wife because I have not climbed every mountain in
Europe. I was just skiing this last weekend. So that is super cool.
I will have to make my way up there to Bend.
Jon Davis
Yeah, we're about let's see from our office here about 25 minutes
from the bottom of the lift at Mount Bachelor, which is our local
mountain here that has a lot of great terrain and a little bit of a
bummer this year, low on the snow here in Oregon this year. But
Bend is a great town to come in the summertime. Really great
weather, no humidity. And I could go on and on and sound like a
tourist worker for the City of Bend, but if you like high elevation
mountain towns, you should come check out Bend for sure.
AJ Wilcox
I do. I like how high elevation and I especially love the no
humidity thing. I'm on my way now.
Jon Davis
Yeah, I lived in Georgia for about 10 years so I'm ready to never
go back to humidity ever again.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, I get that. Cool. Well, obviously, I want to have you on here
as a tool spotlight because Shape is I think the only tool I know
of for LinkedIn ads that does what it does. So do you want to tell
us a little bit about what the challenges are that advertisers face
and how shapes solves them?
Jon Davis
Sure. First off, I'd be really curious. How would you describe what
Shape does? As a customer? Are we allowed to say that?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, we totally get you. Okay, so I probably will have said this
in the intro. But I've been a longtime user of Shape, right, as
soon as you guys got access to LinkedIn's API. I think I was one of
the first if not the first user and I'm a big fan. So that being
said, yeah. What Shape does it from my experience here is its
budget tracking and its budget prediction. You know, for all of our
clients, let's say we have 50 clients all advertising right now, at
any given time, we can be getting alerts of like, hey, we've spent
48% of our month's budget on like, halfway through the month, and
I'll know I'm on track, or we can have it automatically pause
campaigns, if it's three days till the end of the month, and we've
already spent all of the budget. So it's pretty much an insurance
policy against like, spending a client's budget incorrectly. What
would you add to that?
Jon Davis
Yeah, good job. Are you interested in SDR role or anything here at
Shape? That's really our focus is budgeting and helping PPC
analysts budget at scale. My background, like you said is in PPC,
working as an outside consultant to agency analysts to managing a
department of eight analysts at an agency and my background was
working specifically in industries like self storage, multifamily
housing, senior living communities. Our clients had lots of
different budgets in lots of different places, all with managers at
that apartment community that had a vested interest in how their
budget was being spent. They had a lot of stakeholders. One thing I
always say is, nobody has overspent more PPC budgets than me and my
career back when I was an analyst. I got promoted to a manager
role, but was still trying to manage budgets, and was over my head
and things were slipping through the cracks. For me, it always felt
like man, this shouldn't be this hard. And that is, you know,
really where Shape tries to step in and help. The first version of
shape was really focused on, like you were saying, just a pure
alerting out to you, hey, you're about to run out of your budget,
here's an email alert. Phase two of shape was allowing you to from
the interface, when you got that alert went in, saw, oh, man, I
need to pause these campaigns, or I need to raise the budget,
whatever it is to do that right from Shape and be able to push
those edits. So to move out from just being that reporting and
alerting tool and then the phase that we're still living in today
with Shape is to do a lot of that through automations and layering
different automations on there, if you choose. So let's say you've
got a PPC client with a $500 a month budget, you've got 10
campaigns across Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, all these places,
feeding off that $500 budget, link those campaigns into that budget
and when our system detects, you've hit that $500, like you see,
will shut those campaigns down, pause them for the rest of the
month, wait either to the beginning of the next month, or for more
budget to be added and turn those campaigns back on. So really
automating a lot of that manual work. I've seen every budgeting
spreadsheet template you could imagine working in this space over
the years and there's just no substitute for software coming in
checking it every hour, every half hour for spend providing
predictions, like you say, to help you kind of predict where you're
going as well. We really primarily sell to agencies because they're
facing that scale problem more than an in house team. We have a few
in house customers, which we say are like in house teams with
agency dynamics. So maybe they have a lot of franchises they're
managing or something like that. But for us, really, we found that
PPC agencies are where we have the most product market fit and
where people find the most value. Our original name was Steady
Budget, before we change to Shape and rebranded. So we've really
been focused on budgeting since we released this product.
AJ Wilcox
Alright, so this might be leading the witness a little bit, but I'm
curious to hear from you. Why is this an important problem to
solve? What's the downsides or risks to overspending a budget?
Jon Davis
Sure. Yeah, I speak from my experience as an analyst. I knew the
client would like kind of care maybe about what the cost per click
was, I knew they at least have some interest in click through rate
to see like how well their ads were responding. But I knew for
sure, they cared about how much they spent at the end of that
month, or the end of that cycle. And so for me, budgeting has
always been one of those core things that really, clients are
really focused on. I've really view a lot of PPC really kind of
circles around three main pillars. There's the client, there's the
analyst that they've hired, and there's the budget that they both
agreed to. And that budget, client, customer, analyst relationship
is one that kind of rotates around almost every PPC campaign, I
think out there and by kind of like keeping that at the core and
organizing all your data in Shape around those budgets, I think it
works really well for agencies that that's really the first goal,
okay, let's make sure we spend the budget accurately. You've got
that confidence with your client and customer that hey, they said
they're gonna spend $600 bucks they spend $600 bucks, we can trust
them to do that. Now let's focus on more deeper agency client
relationship things through communication and writing new ad copy
and getting new test set up.
AJ Wilcox
I love it. I just want to add on to that. When I very first started
B2Linked as an ad agency, I went out and I had to get business
insurance and looked at all kinds of different insurances. I
realized the most important thing, the worst thing that I could end
up doing to a client is overspending their budget. This is spending
money that they did not give us permission to spend. So I talked to
several insurance agents at the time, not a single one of the
policies I was looking at would cover overspending. So I realized I
am on my own, it only took one overspending a client's budget
before I went, Ah, I get this. This leaves me legally liable here.
I think I need Shape.
Jon Davis
Yeah, we've been there too. We've researched the same thing from
our end, like, hey, let's say servers went out, stuff that goes
crazy early on, and there's a hiccup can we get insurance for that?
Really it doesn't exist. Early on in Steady Budget Shape history in
2014-2015, I definitely stayed up at night a little worried about
that. Now six, seven years in, if we ever get a support ticket,
that's like a Shape overspent by budget or there's, you know, some
fire like that that comes up, I know for sure that shape did what
it was supposed to do, because that's our number one priority as a
software. We have to be that insurance policy and every single time
somebody or client or customer comes to us, you know, they believe
in overspend occurred in Shape, it's every single time user error,
or some setting they didn't get changed maybe the way they were
supposed to. We really view that as our responsibility to help
educate them on that, but from our perspective, I now sleep soundly
knowing that we pause the campaigns when we're supposed to pause
them, we turn them on when we're just supposed to turn them on. The
code is as bulletproof as it could possibly be because we are out
there. You know, we're out on the limb saying we're not going to
overspend these budgets. Shape processes over a billion dollars a
year in ad spend for our customers. And I promise you, we don't
have a billion dollars in our bank account right now to potentially
cover that overspend. So one thing that we believe 100% is the
logic is rock solid because it has to be.
AJ Wilcox
Very cool. One technical question I've got for you. I wonder how
much will Shape allow a campaign or an account to overspend? And
also having API access to LinkedIn Ads myself, I know that the API
is kind of weak, it's limited, at least in the past, LinkedIn has
limited us to say, you are not allowed to request the same
information more than four times per day or something. So realizing
that you can only inquire from LinkedIn's API every so often, how
much exposure does that allow you or kind of force Shape to not
have noticed and overspend since the last time it requested?
Jon Davis
Sure, yeah, the good thing is working with them like on the tech
side as a software provider, that's then going to license your
software out to other providers, as you get a little different
parameters and a little bit more often than maybe, you know, going
as an individual through the API for your own account. So we have
the ability, we're pulling in to make sure that no overspends
occur. On a platform like LinkedIn where you're seeing pretty high
cost per clicks and, you know, if you get a setting wrong, you can
get away from you quick, we're able to really check on that spend
at least once an hour through the day.
AJ Wilcox
Great. Is there any sort of logic to say, it looks like we're
getting close to a budget so we're gonna start checking more often?
We're gonna check every 15 minutes rather than every hour?
Jon Davis
Yeah, great question. And we do. So as we like, see that percentage
of budget remaining kind of tightening up it, those types of
budgets will float a little higher up into the queue priority that
we have run it through and our logic that's just constantly
churning through all the budgets on our platform. So we're trying
to check that a little more often as we can as it gets kind of down
closer. The other thing is, we've got a lot of previous data on how
rapidly the those campaigns can spend so we can make a judgment
around, okay, well, we don't have to start dialing up that check
just yet, because we got a really good feel for how much this is
going to spend based on historical data and with some of our
automations we've got a little built in buffer on the underspend
side of a couple percent, to make sure that if we err one way or
another, we're going to make sure we under spend that budget by a
percent or half percent then over spend it by a percent or half
percent.
AJ Wilcox
I love it. That's fantastic. We've mentioned a little bit about
this, but tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as
the other ad platforms. Who do you support? What's your
relationship like all that?
Jon Davis
Well, my personal relationship with LinkedIn is mostly as a user,
somebody out there trying to promote my B2B software, putting How
To videos up. It's really been, for our company, one of our most
powerful channels to getting new product releases out there,
getting some engagement on videos. I've run LinkedIn campaigns for
myself and others and have some experience in there, but my primary
professional background is with Google Search Ads. That's where I
spent the majority of my career before leaving to work on software
to solve PPC problems. I graduated college in 2006. In about mid
2007 was learning more about, I was in marketing, I was working in
sales making 100 outbound calls a day. I thought hmmm, it'd be a
lot easier if people called me and started working on our company
website to get optimized for some SEO basics, which back then you
could send almost anything to page one with a few easy tweaks, it
was a magical time to be in digital marketing. From that time of
like 2007, when I realized that these are people searching for
products. Here's, you know, this search engine serving up ads for
people that want to be shown to those people, it really did feel
like magic to me, and I've been in PPC for the last 15 years ever
since. So my relationship kind of goes back through the agency
world every way you kind of touched the various platforms and Shape
in particular, we sync with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, along with the Facebook, you get instagram along with
Google, there's YouTube. So for those real main platforms, we go
really deep with our integrations, there may be other PPC platforms
out there or reporting platforms that have 500 data connections
with every possible place, you can imagine pulling in a piece of
data, we've really honed in on the top five, eight places that be
placing ads for your clients and focused on really deep
integrations with those where instead of just reporting on that
data, we're pushing back out a lot of automations to all these
platforms that we can. And so I think I've tended to live a lot in
the search world, so one of the big reason Shape exists is
combining search and social kind of into one budget. You know, a
lot of these ad platforms don't have too much incentive to really
integrate with other data. I don't think it's going to be too soon
to where Google is going to be pulling in LinkedIn data. And
LinkedIn is going to be allowing them to make like two way changes
on a lot of campaigns through their tool. Through the years,
there's maybe like backdoor ways in platforms have done it, and
you're seeing Microsoft maybe take some steps. But none of the
products are really enterprise or agency scale level, they're
really meant to kind of help the individual advertiser manage, you
know, a few campaigns, not the agency manage 1,000s of campaigns.
So that's where one of the big things that Shape allows you to do
is pull in all those campaigns from different places, put it under
one client, micro group those in the budgets, and feel really good.
You're spending your budget allocation where you want to be
spending it.
Jon Davis
Love it. Any future plans for other platforms, like are you
thinking Snap, or TikTok or any of those that you might want to
support in the future?
Jon Davis
Yeah, so we're always getting requests, for sure. Really, that
those are, you named a lot of the next big ones that we're looking
at. Snap, Pinterest, TikTok are on our list, and really focused on
bringing in new types of Google campaigns that they're finally
allowing through the API. So really, where we run into more
friction with our customers isn't necessarily bring on a new
outside, like TikTok type, but not being able to pull in Google
campaigns that they don't allow through the API. So up until like
six days ago, you couldn't get any local service ads from Google
out of their API and now it's just in beta and we're able to run
testing. We're also exploring, there's some kind of data
aggregation tools out there like Airbyte, and some other places
where you can normalize a bunch of data and we could offer a lot
more integrations. We're quickly kind of using that as a middleman,
but right now Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, definitely the ones that
we're targeting the most right now in terms of moving into those
platforms and really as somebody that thinks a lot about our
product direction, that's the one thing I really feel good about is
a lot of our feature requests aren't necessarily like, hey, we need
shape to do this new thing around budget management, it's more,
hey, can you bring in these other campaigns and have them do for us
what shape does for these other platforms?
AJ Wilcox
How mean is that of Google to be like, hey, we'll pass through the
API, any information about your spend, except this one ad format,
or this one objective? And all of a sudden, you're like, hey, of
course, we want to be able to support all this, but the platform
itself doesn't let us like, oh, you know, gets my goat. Sorry about
that.
Jon Davis
Yeah, that's right. And that's one thing that we kind of, look at
it. And in terms of we like to kind of look at ourselves as sort of
a speedometer that can like accept any spend from any platform and
give you, you know, the analyst a really good idea of what speed
everything's spending at and moving at, and being able to pull in
more channels there is key. Without that data feed and without
Google allowing everything to be pulled in, you know, it's a
struggle for us to add value. But the new Google Ads API know we're
focused on LinkedIn, but the new Google Ads API that just has
finally come out of beta and has been released has been a real huge
thing for third party software's like us. It's been a lot of work
to change every single call over to the new ads API, but Google, I
think, can be slow to react in this case, they're finally give it
understanding that, hey, if these third party software's like ours
are supporting these clients, we need to give them the ability to
pull all their spend in these tools because they're building
workflows and systems around them.
AJ Wilcox
Totally. Alright, what strategies have you seen advertisers use and
see great results because of using Shape?
Jon Davis
Yeah, I think really, the best way that we help analysts deliver
better results is saving them a lot of time budgeting. Time that
can be better spent, you know, thinking about how to improve those
results, not just how do I spend $22 a day on this campaign or $38
a day? How do I get back on pace? Freeing up that time that you're
not exporting a download into Google Sheets, reformatting,
emailing, putting a CSV together and emailing out to the customer.
Those are really places where we've seen the big savings. Within
the app, we've got tools like Budget Pacer, that help people to see
maybe opportunities to put more spend into a certain campaign with
a lower CPA or a higher return on investment, whatever data you're
pulling into Shape. With Budget Pacer, your there's a lot of
different tools and dials you can turn to give you sort of like,
hey, I want to prioritize CPA or I want to prioritize just raw
conversions and get different predictions on what daily budget you
should be saying at the campaign level based on those parameters.
We see a lot of customers getting great results with Budget Pacer,
We will see changes come through that are, you know, so and so
changed daily budget to $38.12. And I'm like, Well, I know that was
a Budget Pacer change, because I don't think they calculate, you
know, $38.12. So we really see good results there from helping
people one save a lot of time that they were previously doing
manual work out of spreadsheets and workflows that were brutal. You
know, as an analyst, I knew like the beginning of the month was
always rough for us, because it was like, Okay, this is reporting
time, I'm going to go, I'm going to be downloading a bunch of
stuff, I'm entering in all these spreadsheets, and, you know, to
kind of have a tool that would break that I kind of always wanted
when I was in that scenario sort of break out of that kind of cycle
and focus on more of the creative side. That's where we've seen the
most positive results. And, you know, I think our core feature of
pausing campaigns before they overspend is one that kind of
eventually gets people don't even think about it anymore. They're
they're not even worried about overspending a campaign ever again,
where before they came to us a lot of customers that was like you
were saying one of their chief concerns that the company was not
overspending these budgets they've been trusted with?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I see what you mean by time savings, can't tell you the
number of times that past companies, the CMO would come to me and
say, Hey, are we on budget? Like, what number are we going to hit
by the end of the month? And if I would have had Shape back then, I
could have just looked at the graph and said, but instead I had to
export everything by day. And, you know, plot spend by day and
figure out how many days left in the month and do a trend line to
show it. I'm decent at Excel, but I'm not a wizard. So that kind of
report might take me 20, 30 minutes to put together whereas Shape
tells you exactly what you're shooting towards. So I love that.
AJ Wilcox
All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right
back into Shape.
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.
AJ Wilcox
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you,
B2Linked as the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over
$150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting
you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official
LinkedIn partners. And you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts
from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com
to chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to work with
you. All right, now, let's jump back into it.
AJ Wilcox
What are some of the results that your advertisers have seen in
doing business with you? Have you had any like case studies or
anecdotal evidence where they come to you and say, Thanks, you
saved my bacon? Or this helped us so much? Or what are some of
those?
Jon Davis
Yeah, well, I think, you know, most people out there thinking about
LinkedIn are focused on LinkedIn. We've got a case study on our
site. I don't know if it's company you've heard of, it's called
B2Linked? Haha! When we talked to your team about what was life
like before Shape or after Shape? What we really found was like
just what we were saying your team estimated about 70% of their
time that they previously spent on budgeting, which is hours and
hours and hours a week. Now, it's just gone. And what we see really
across the board with people that are trying to manage a lot of
budgets is once everything's on boarded, set up, immediately, all
that time that was spent budgeting is now freed up for other
things. It's not uncommon for me to hear from an analyst like, Oh,
I've got 10 hours in my week back, 15 hours in a week back. Working
with larger agencies, we interact with a lot of accounting teams
too that are responsible for reconciling ad platform spend at the
end of the month. Just last week, an accountant sent me a thing,
it's like we've just on boarded shape and now I need to pick up a
new hobby because I don't have to spend as much time in the
evenings manually entering ad spend that's getting reported on from
PPC. Those are really fun for me to hear, because I was that
analyst spending hours a day in Excel. To know that now they're
able to think about the landing page they're sending the ads to,
think about testing this new Google campaign type, and just pulling
it into shape and not worrying that it's going to go crazy spend.
Those are the things that I think are really fun about PPC and will
keep better and smarter people in the industry for longer.
AJ Wilcox
Totally. That definitely resounds with me. If we as creative
professionals and technical marketers are spending all of our time
doing mind numbing, like crap work, busy work, rather than doing
what we should be doing, which is developing good offers and good
creative and managing the platform. I think it's a great thing. I'm
curious. I know Google was famous early on for allowing you to
spend more than your daily budget. And now LinkedIn has followed
suit, depending on the objective you choose. They can overspend
your daily budget by 20 to 100%. Have you found a situation where
Shape has caught an overspend and been able to pause it before even
the platform itself could do it?
Jon Davis
Yes. So one of our core features is really based around protecting
against just that from the ad platforms. We have a feature called
autopilot and there's two different settings on that. The first
setting is let's give a budget a $1,000, here's the 10 campaigns.
Let's turn on autopilot and let's say it's a monthly budget, we hit
the $1,000 this month, turn it off, wait for the first day ofthe
next month, turn it back on. Another version of that autopilot is
daily autopilot. What that does is it takes the amount of budget
you've got left divided by the number of days and sets a daily
budget for those campaigns and when we see that daily budget
reached, we take action to pause those campaigns within that day,
wait for the midnight start of the next day, and then turn it back
on. So let's say you've got your daily budget set at $50. Okay,
Google and LinkedIn, they were rubbing their hands are like,
alright, 50 bucks, that means 100, I'm ready to go. At about, 1:00
or 2:00 in the afternoon, you spent your 50 bucks, Shape comes
through does the data update says well, you've hit your daily 50
bucks your campaigns off. Now Google and LinkedIn, they can't spend
on a paused campaign for the rest of that day and that's been a
really powerful thing for us to offer our customers you know, that
gives you the ability to go into LinkedIn and even set just like a
lifetime budget. And then make sure you've got daily autopilot
involved and you're gonna pace on that daily budget for the life of
that budget without needing to change those micro parameters from
within LinkedIn along the way. So you can change any type of budget
into a daily budget if you want to using those systems And that's
again, where we view ourselves as that like speedometer, you're
saying, hey, Google, hey, LinkedIn, I only want you to take this
car 50 miles per hour, I'm not approving you to go 100 miles per
hour, like you say, in your conditions, I want you to go 50 miles
an hour, we make sure your cruise controlled to hang right
there.
Jon Davis
That always makes me laugh when platforms act like they can't pause
a campaign when it's overspending. Like, oh, we need allowance to
spend 20% or 50% or 100% over because, you know, we're gonna throw
a whole bunch of ads out there. And we have no idea how many of
those are going to get clicked on? Yeah, maybe if you're spending
millions of dollars per month, I get it. Like you're gonna have a
lot out there. But especially for LinkedIn, where the majority of
advertisers I'm guessing, are paying on CPM. It's like, the second
your campaign is shown that 1,000th time and you know, it's spent
that amount, the platform should be able to stop on a dime. It
seems ridiculous, but I'm so glad that there's a tool like Shape
that will allow us to override that.
Jon Davis
Yeah, I can see where the product design is there. And I can see
how and why they can genuinely believe that, hey, giving us that
freedom will get you better results at the end of this 30 or 60 day
period because we've identified something in this moment, that
means we should be spending more, but ut I think that doesn't
always make it really easy on the analyst communicate that back
through to their clients. And I think as clients sometimes are
willing to sacrifice maybe that last morsel of performance to have
some predictability around what is this gonna spend on a daily
basis, when you know, about the same amount is going to be spent at
the beginning of the month, that's going to be spent at the end of
the month. And I think in a lot of cases, there's still value to
that kind of predictability and to be able to set a setting on
budget and have the platform stick to that budget should be an
option.
AJ Wilcox
I totally agree. And with Google, I totally expect the platform to
be able to say, hey, if we overspend right now we'll get you better
performance. And I'm okay with that. I don't even think that
LinkedIn does claim that if they overspend your budgets, because
it's going to perform well. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just, we
don't have faith in our platform being able to shut it off on time.
That's what it seems like to me anyway. Tell me about some of the
nuances with budgeting, either with Shape or without on LinkedIn
Ads specifically. Like any nuances with the platform that we should
know about as advertisers, what can you teach us?
Jon Davis
Yeah, I mean, I think, from my perspective, I probably have no
grand insights there. But I think the one unique thing about
LinkedIn versus some of the other platforms is just the sheer cost
per click in some scenarios and that can be really challenging when
it comes to budget management. If four or five clicks are costing
you $10 to $20 a click, especially if you're working with a smaller
business, that's a big chunk of change really fast. And, you know,
I don't think that's a surprise, obviously, to anybody out there
that's been running LinkedIn campaigns, and I think is one of the
bigger barriers like to entry for people, you know, making the leap
and getting into LinkedIn campaigns. But I think really, what I see
in terms of like the nuances around on LinkedIn is just paying a
lot of attention to how that bid is affecting your positioning. The
magic part for me around LinkedIn is really being able to focus on
that bid, get the amount of impressions, make sure you're not like
two impressions a day, or 2 million a day, finding that sort of
sweet spot in your bids so that you don't necessarily have to
always CPA or CPM bid, you can bid more for performance and kind of
enter that auction where I think you've got, you know, Google Ads
guy in my background, I'm kind of an auction believer, in some
cases there. I think if you're able to bid, obviously CPM, you're
still involved in that auction somewhere, but you've got a little
bit more of a finger on the dial there. So I think being able to
kind of set up to make sure you're not overspending and then really
kind of hone in where that bid needs to be, is where we see kind of
the nuance and LinkedIn over maybe some of the other platforms.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, very well said. I love that explanation. So what's your
favorite aspect of shape? Just some area of the product that you
are really excited about or you think makes the biggest
difference?
Jon Davis
For me, I still get really excited about the core thing we set out
to solve in 2014, 2015 when we were launching the product, and that
is, I've got a budget for this month and within shape, you can set
a budget for any duration, it doesn't have to be monthly, it can be
a one time, it can be a 17 day recurring budget for whatever crazy
reason you might need it, but for me, I still get really excited
about the fact that, let's say I set up campaigns, and I set a $500
a month budget, I set those campaigns that could run for the rest
of time. and I know it's going to spend $500 a month as long as the
volume in those campaigns will get the clicks and Google keeps
showing the ads, you know, the quality scores don't go down too low
or LinkedIn keeps showing those ads, I know in some ways Shape
would just manage that likeRobots should. On, off when it should,
pace the budget when it should. That kind of core features still
leads every one of our sales calls, it still is the core of a lot
of our marketing material that we talk about. I think as we've seen
a lot of third party software in our space that started around the
2010 to 2015 zone, they were really focused on optimizing your
campaigns and how can you spend your $500 a month more effectively,
within the search engines are the ad platforms like LinkedIn, where
we kind of thought the market was going back in 2014 2015, was that
eventually all the ad networks are going to be way better at all
that then third party software would ever be. We need to focus on
building solutions where the ad networks weren't as excited about
solving those problems, like limiting your budget, or bringing in
data from multiple channels into one place. So I think, luckily, we
haven't had to chase too much on the product and really just
continuing to do our core function of pacing and managing PPC
budgets, and removing all the manual work and staying kind of laser
focused on that. One thing I've admired about B2Linked has been
like your focus as a company and being able to really succinctly
kind of say, Hey, we're the best and LinkedIn Ads in the world.
That's our Jim Collins hedgehog concept. You know, that's our one
thing we do great. I feel really lucky to have a company where I
can, you know, say we do PPC budgeting, PPC management, budget
management X scale better than any other platform out there. That's
been a real focus of ours is to stay in that budgeting world and
not chase, you know, the next AI algorithm because Google has, you
know, I don't even know 5,000 engineers thinking about exactly that
one thing and all the data in the world you could imagine and
they're just not going to release enough of that data to third
parties for us to make better recommendations than they could. So
solving those problems and kind of filling in those cracks that the
platform's leave open is something that gets me really excited
about Shape. New campaign types getting pulled into shape gets me
really excited. Being able to now add a lot of these new Google
campaigns as LinkedIn keeps testing new types of campaigns and
falls a lot of the same way. I get excited when each of those new
campaign types get pulled in there. Because it means people now are
pulling it in, not worrying about budgeting, focusing on like,
okay, is this campaign type the best place or the best channel for
me to be putting my clients money?
AJ Wilcox
Love it, if I can share my favorite feature? It's the fact that you
can create a specific budget. It's not just like, one of our
clients per month, we get to know are they going to spend or
understand or whatever their budget, but it's the fact that we can
group individual campaigns by name and give them their own budgets.
So for instance, if we're running ABM campaigns, we could take
their three ABM campaigns, group them into one budget on Shape and
say, Hey, tell us how we're pacing here. Are we going to spend our
ABM budget versus the overall account level budget? So that's one
that I think is really cool. I just don't ever see any of the
platforms releasing the ability to do this. I feel like you're on
solid ground where the platforms aren't going to compete with you
to try to take your business.
Jon Davis
Yeah. And that's been a real conscious decision on our end. And
it's another one of the reasons we haven't really chased super in
depth like reporting solutions. Instead, we have a one click
integration with Data Studio where that's, you know, your reporting
place now to go because everybody's working with data studio now.
And they've got every little dial you could ever imagine. We'd be
coding on just some new reporting dashboard for the next four years
to get up to what Data Studio and some of these other tools are
doing today. So instead of like fighting the battle on the
reporting front, fighting the battle on the optimization front, all
areas where big teams, big companies have a lot of incentive
playing both those games, we want to be where they don't want to
play. And they don't really want to play and project management and
building tools to make it easier on a PPC agency to manage a lot of
clients, you know, in a lot of the ad platforms mind, you know, the
agency is really just a management fee that's taking more ad spend
that could be going to the platform. And so a lot of their products
aren't designed with the agency in mind. Our third party software,
we can design specifically for the agencies and solve problems in
that way that we just haven't seen the ad networks really take on
that challenge yet. And it makes sense why they wouldn't. Their
focus is on building tools so that an individual advertiser feels
like you know what, I can run my own LinkedIn Ads campaigns, I
don't need to go to be to links and, you know, pay for them. I
think it's good enough, I can turn these few dials and LinkedIn
will handle it. You know, that's really the problems they're trying
to solve and focused on not how do we help B2Linked to manage
10,000 clients at the same time?
AJ Wilcox
Totally, it doesn't seem like it's in the platform's best interest
to give their clients tools like that. I would argue that if you're
having a good experience with the platform, if the platform feels
like it's taking care of your money, they're a steward of it, that
you probably want to spend more, you probably want to come back.
But hey, you know, Google is one of the biggest companies in the
world and they should have enough data to analyze. If they feel
like it's still okay, to overspend a budget, then they must get
more money out of it, it must be a good business decision. So I
like the business you're in, keeping them honest.
Jon Davis
I don't think you can ever go too wrong if you just follow the
money in the decisions and the product. They're beholden to
stakeholders and it makes sense why they're doing what they do, but
I think that leaves a lot of opportunity for third party software
and companies like ours to fill in those cracks and add value.
AJ Wilcox
So true. Give us an idea. We've been talking about the product,
give us an idea on pricing. What can any of our listeners expect to
spend to get access to these features?
Jon Davis
Sure, well, first off, you can get complete feel of Shape, all our
automations through a free trial. You can manage up to 20 budget on
our free trial for as long as you want to get a feel for it. If you
feel like that's limiting you in any way reach out to me
personally, I'll help you do a little bigger trial, if you need it.
During that time, they let your team get a feel for it. After the
free trial, our lowest tier is $299 a month. $299 a month and for
that you can manage up to $100,000 of ad spend through your
accounts. From there it progresses, you know, every $250,000 in ad
spend goes up roughly about $500 a month. It works out to be
anywhere from like, .1% to .2% of your ad spend is roughly the
Shape fee you could ballpark expect to spend.
AJ Wilcox
It's really reasonable. As longtime clients, I can I can attest to
that. Not that this is meant to be an ad or anything, but honestly,
I want to share the partner ecosystem and I want to highlight which
tools we actually think are worth paying for and which aren't.
Shape definitely fits squarely in our bucket of yeah, this is
definitely worth paying for. We like it.
Jon Davis
Thanks. That means a lot for me coming from you and to hear
that.From our perspective, we work with small, medium, large
agencies, all of them are fighting a battle against smaller margins
over the last 5, 10 years, you know, management fees are dropping,
clients expect more, for less, and that's where we've tried to keep
our Shape software fee as a pretty minor percentage of your overall
adspend. We did also set up a coupon code for anybody listening. If
you go through the free trial and you decide that hey, shape is for
me, coupon code just B2. So B2 and get you 50% off your first three
months.
AJ Wilcox
Love it. Thanks for creating a custom code for us. That's awesome.
I know you'll treat our listeners. Great. So everyone who's
considering definitely take Jonn up on that offer.
Jon Davis
Yeah, if you submit a support ticket, it will either be me or
Nicole, one of my colleagues here answering it so you can reach me
jon@shape.io. Don't hesitate to reach out and answer any questions
or I can give a more in depth demo for anybody interested in
Shape.
AJ Wilcox
Beautiful. Alright, so away from business here or this could
include business, too, but I'm curious, what are you most excited
about either professionally or personally coming up? Like what's
getting you out of bed in the morning?
Jon Davis
Yeah, I mean, I think professionally for us, it's really now we've
made it through a lot of the hard startup years, the beginning
years. We're seven years now and we have a really good belief in
our product market fit. And for an entrepreneur, there's no better
feeling to get you out of bed than feeling like you've got product
market fit. And I think that's the one thing that is really nobody
can ever predict if you're going to get it. Nobody knows if you
have it before you have it. And the only way to get it is to really
try and go out there and knowing that we're building a product
1,000s of people use every day, that's an easy reason to get out of
bed and make sure that we're helping them with their jobs. You
know, when my kids asked, What do you do? It's kind of hard to
explain to a four year old what being a co-founder of PPC
management software startup is, but I pretty much just say I help
make tools that live in the computer that help make people's jobs
easier and more fun. And I think that's really the core of what
helps me get out of bed professionally. Just hanging out with my
kiddos and seeing what they're going to get into next. We've been
doing a bunch of skiing this year and hoping maybe this is the
summer they pick up golf a little bit more. And let's see my old
1994 Land Cruiser that I just picked up a little while ago helps
get me out of bed to figure out what I'm going to fix up on that
next or build that up next for the trail.
AJ Wilcox
Sweet. You're speaking my language. I'm just headed out on our side
by side the end of this week doing some off roading. I'm not handy
enough to fix up my own Land Cruiser, but I'll play in the side by
side. That'll be fun.
Jon Davis
We'll have to connect up on that!
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, it'd be fun. Jon, thanks so much for joining us, sharing
about your product, giving us some insights, teaching us about
budgeting on LinkedIn and the other platform. So sincerely, thanks
for coming on. Anything else you want to share with us or anything
else or anything else we should know?
Jon Davis
No, I think that'll do it. Thanks so much for having me. I feel
like I've gotten to have like a 40 minute plug here so I don't need
to plug anything else. Most important thing is if you want to talk
to me or reach me about anything PPC related, jon@shape.io and I'll
be happy to talk to anybody that has any questions. It's really fun
to get to talk to new PPC analysts see how new teams are doing
stuff and if Shape can help them.
AJ Wilcox
Perfect. Thanks so much, Jon. Sure appreciate having you on!
Jon Davis
Thanks a bunch, AJ.
AJ Wilcox
All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up.
So stick around
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
AJ Wilcox
Alright, I've got the episode resources for you here. So first off,
Jon was so generous in giving us his email address. So if you want
to email him directly to ask any question about anything we've
covered here, it's jon@shape.io. You'll also see that down below in
the show notes. Next, if you do decide to sign up for Shape, use
the coupon code on shape.io of just the letter B and the number 2,
that's also going to be in the show notes as well. As a reminder,
if you have any colleagues or even you yourself are new to LinkedIn
Ads, and you're trying to learn it, definitely check out the course
that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is in the show notes
below and it is by far the most comprehensive, as well as one of
the cheapest courses you can find out there and LinkedIn stands
behind it. On whatever podcast player you're listening to this on,
if you like what you've heard, please hit that subscribe button so
you can hear all of our future episodes as we come out with them.
You may want to go back and binge a few along the way as well. I'm
not judging. If you do like what you've heard, please do review the
podcast. Most of those reviews happen on Apple podcasts. But I've
heard that reviews are starting to happen on Spotify as well. But
really anywhere that you listen, anywhere you find reviews, I would
absolutely love to see your review and I'll totally shout you out
as well. With any suggestions or corrections. You can reach out to
us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you
back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads
initiatives.