Feb 23, 2023
Show Resources
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Civil Rights Day (MLK Day) Ads Analysis
NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox
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Show Transcript
Did you know that the LinkedIn Ads definition for a video view is different from LinkedIn organic definition, or that a senior seniority isn't very senior at all? We're covering 11 things on LinkedIn Ads that don't mean what you think they mean, on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! The LinkedIn Ads platform continues to evolve. It's really coming into its own as a tier one channel, truly ungrateful. That being said, there are still several areas of the platform where LinkedIn's definition of something is not going to match up with your likely definition of that same something. In today's episode, we're going through the 11 areas to be on the lookout for so you can make sure that metrics and campaign manager don't lead you astray.
First in the news, LinkedIn recently came out with their workplace learning report. And it's actually based on LinkedIn Learning. And you'll find the link below in the show notes. It was actually a really complete report. And I read through it, and the one conclusion I came to is surprise, we're in a fast paced industry, and we need to keep learning and growing to stay ahead. The good news is, if you're listening to this podcast right now, which you obviously are, it means you likely already understand this. So I congratulate you for being in the top 1%. LinkedIn also released their 2023 most in demand skills. And this is based on skills that people are looking for in their job postings, and probably also based off of the skills that people have in their profiles that only LinkedIn has access to. And again, really no surprise here, they mentioned that things like social media as a skill are in demand. The problem with the skills on LinkedIn is that so many of them are so broad, that I don't even find them valuable to draw trends from, let me know if I'm off base and you disagree. But check out the report, as I've linked to it in the show notes as well. Also continuing from the popularity of our analysis around the holidays here in the US, we just published an analysis of ad performance around Civil Rights Day, or Martin Luther King Day here in the US. And that's live on the blog right now. Go check it out if you want to see the trends. And as a sneak peak, Superbowl and Valentine's Day are also coming up. So stay tuned. I want to highlight one of the reviews. It was left by the user name Giugiugiu. And they say, "AJ is probably the best LinkedIn Ads expert on the market. I attended one of his workshops in Boston a couple of years ago and I was in aw. I finally found someone who knows how this tool works. He's funny and very good in explaining all the functionalities. Absolutely the go to resource if you're starting with LinkedIn Ads. Thanks, AJ for sharing your knowledge." Well Giugiugiu. I wish I knew who you were. So I can thank you specifically. But I really appreciate the super kind review here, me and my whole team, we try so hard to explain the functionality very simply, and so grateful we can be a resource to you. A huge thank you to everyone who's been reviewing the podcast lately. It's really picked up aand I really, really appreciate. And if you haven't left a review yet, please do it. I want to feature you live here on the podcast. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it.
3:20
Like we talked about in the intro, we're talking about the
discrepancies that you might find in the platform today. So let's
say that there's a discrepancy in the platform. Why does this
actually matter? Why do you actually need to know about these
discrepancies? I think it's really important to know what you're
actually reporting on. You obviously want to make decisions with
accurate data so that they're the right decision. You also want to
have confidence in your data. That way you can defend it if you're
challenged. An example that I come across really often in digital
marketing is the bounce rate in Google Analytics, because it
doesn't mean what you think it means, unless you've actually done
like the Google Analytics training courses. I don't know if the
definition has changed for Google Analytics 4 that's rollout. But
with Universal Analytics, a bounce just meant that they didn't go
to another page. So if you're sending someone to a landing page
where the whole goal is to get them to convert, then it actually
makes a lot of sense that you have a 95% bounce rate. I want you to
be able to digest accurate information, because you're actually
using this data to go make decisions. It's not good business to be
heading the wrong direction at anytime. So now that we're in
agreeance, that this is actually important stuff, let's jump into
the first one we have.
4:34
Sponsored Messaging Ad Formats under
Performance
So sponsored messaging ad formats, if you're under the default look
for performance, you really can't trust much of the data there.
Anything relying on a click is just totally boldface wrong. If you
listen to episode 79 about the B2Believe event that happened in
November, you know that LinkedIn announced some big changes in Q2
2023. So this may or may not be relevant in the future, but I'm
guessing it is, I'm guessing this is still going to be an issue. So
if you're looking under performance, if you look at your clicks, as
well as your cost per click, and your click through rate, it's
actually calling an open a click. So you might look at your
sponsored messaging and say, wow, we have a 55% click through rate
and our cost per click is less than $1. I hear this a lot and tend
to just shake my head, because definitely, that's not what's
happening. What's happening is they're measuring your open rate and
your cost per open, which isn't very valuable if you ask me because
people will open it just to mark it as read. But a valuable
definition for a click to me is actually someone taking action on
the ad. That means clicking on some sort of a call to action that
I've given. The simple solution here is under the performance
column. Look under sponsored messaging. There, it actually breaks
out your sends, your opens, and your clicks, and gives you the
proper metrics. So this is one that's actually more or less been
fixed, if you're looking under the right column's breakdown.
6:05
Conversion Column
Another one that we come across really often is you're looking at
the conversions column, trying to decide your cost per conversion,
or your conversion rate and decide if that's good or not. It's very
important to understand that the conversions column should actually
be called total conversions. Because it's not just conversions,
it's made up of your click through conversions, which is great.
That's exactly what you want. But it also includes your view
through conversions, which, depending on your campaign, depending
on the other channels you're running may or may not be conversions
that you actually want to attribute to your LinkedIn Ads. The
solution here then is to go to the columns drop down and select
conversions and leads. You'll of course, see the conversions
column, but right next to it, you'll see your click conversions and
your view conversions. So when I'm taking my data and doing an
analysis, I'm gonna throw this data into Excel. And then I get to
decide which column I actually care about. And most of the time,
I'm going to use my click conversions column, instead of just my
conversions column. As an agency, I would be so embarrassed to go
to a client and tell them that yeah, we had 10 conversions when
they look in their CRM and see that there's only four. And then I
look like I'm lying.
7:21
Clicks Column
The next one is somewhat related. And that's just looking at your
clicks column. Because the click metric actually changes as your
objective changes, I think it should be called chargeable clicks.
If you're using the objective of engagement, the definition of a
click is any click that happened on that app. So if someone hits
like on your ad, or clicks to go see your company page, all of
those are going to be called clicks. But if you're using the
website conversions objective, a click is actually a lot more
indicative of what's happening, because that was someone who
clicked on your call to action that took them to your external
landing page. If your objective is lead generation, just like
engagement, you'll notice that any click on your ad becomes a
chargeable click. And these tend to go unnoticed because they have
such a high conversion rate. But you really should know. And that
means that if you go and look at your cost per click metric, and
your click through rate metric, they're affected the same way as
well. So if you're looking at multiple campaigns that have more
than one objective, your metrics are definitely being skewed, it's
almost like you have to look at the metrics for each objective
separately. When I get this data to a spreadsheet, I choose one
metric to unify all of my definitions. So instead of just using the
clicks column, I like to use landing page clicks. And you can find
this under the engagement column drop down. Inside of campaign
manager, it's called clicks the landing page. And of course, it's
just another column when you do an export to Excel. But when you're
looking at the engagement drop down, you'll see that there's one
called other clicks. We don't know everything that counts as an
other click because you'll see a lot of other types of clicks there
that have their own columns. But most of the time, it's when you
have an ad that has the ...see more at the end, because your text
was truncated for being too long. Other clicks is someone extending
that. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive
into more discrepancy.
9:20
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts
9:29
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with you.
10:21
Video Views
All right, let's jump into video metrics because there's a lot
interesting here. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode,
the organic definition and the ads definition for a video view, are
very different. If you post a video either from your company page
or personally, and then you look at the views that have racked up,
a view as anyone who watched at least three seconds of that video.
But the definition for a view in Ads is two seconds with 50% of
that video on the screen. And if you're curious why the definition
for ads is shorter, realize that when you're bidding by video view,
LinkedIn only gets paid when someone counts as a view, hence why
they'd want to make it 33% shorter.
11:03
Video Completion Percentages
And then how about the definition for video completions because
this is something that has been changed very recently. If you're
looking at the formula for a 100% completion rate of your video,
that's calculated using your completes divided by your starts. This
means anytime the video started, whether it made it to two seconds
or not. So of course, it would make sense that your view rate is
going to be your views divided by starts. Well, it's definitely not
your view rate is views divided by impressions. To see how much
this is actually affecting you, go compare your impressions to your
views and your starts. And you'll see sometimes this can make a
really big difference.
11:47
Organic Stats
Another one dealing with the organic stats, you may or may not
already know this, but when you post something that's not a video,
your posts show the number of impressions that that post got, that
means the number of times it showed up in someone's newsfeed. But
anytime that you post video, it shows views which are very
different. Like I said, go compare your impressions to your views,
you might find that one video gets one view for every four
impressions, you might find another one gets one view for every one
impression. So they can be very different.
12:22
Forecasted Results Column
How about as you're actually building a campaign, you'll notice
over in the right hand column, there's a section called forecasted
results. We actually had a client recently who was upset that their
results didn't match the forecasted results. So I think this is
really important to point out some people are looking at these like
their gospel. What you need to understand about the forecasted
results column is that these numbers are not based on your
performance. They're based on your bid and your budget, your
optimization goal, and your audience size. But because they don't
actually take your performance into account, it's wildly
inaccurate. I'll give you an example. If you know that when you
launch ads, you get click through rates that are like 1.5%, you'll
look at those forecasted results and they'll say, oh, we expect
that you're gonna get a click through rate between .45% and .6%.
But if you have a click through rate, that's more than double what
they're predicting, you'll likely get cost per click way lower, and
you'll likely get served a lot more than what they're predicting.
It really needs to take into account your performance before giving
you forecasted results. Plus, as we were playing with it, we found
that it was blatantly wrong in several cases. The example that we
looked at, it was predicting that cost per click would be lower
when bidding by impression than it would have if we were bidding by
click. It showed an expected click through rate of .45% to .6%,
which is not in the range where bidding by impressions would be
cheaper. So there's some bad math going on here behind the scenes.
I do hope that someone from LinkedIn will look into that. But as a
reminder, don't bank on these figures. They're not based on your
performance, or your audience. These are simply something to let
you know what you might expect, probably for the most basic brand
new advertisers.
14:08
Rotate Ads Evenly
Alright, let's talk about rotate ads evenly. Because in theory, it
sounds really interesting. For me, I love AB tests. I love to test
things. And to get an accurate AB test, you really need to have
both test versions shown about the same amount of times. So of
course, when you're editing the campaign, and you're on the ads
page, when you see that little cog and you click it and it asks you
if you want to rotate your ads evenly or optimize for performance.
If you're like me, naturally you'll want to say oh yeah, I do want
to rotate my ads evenly. There's a major reason why you don't want
to do that. I call this the charge me more and show me less button.
Here's why it acts like that. When it says it's going to rotate
your ads evenly, it's not showing your ads evenly, it's entering
them evenly into the auction. And here's the big difference. Each
of those ads gets its own relevancy score from LinkedIn. And
LinkedIn won't tell you what the relevancy score is. The only
indication you get is at the campaign level from a campaigns
report. So let's imagine that one of your ads has a relevancy score
of four, and the other one has a relevancy score of six. If you
select the option for rotate ads evenly, you're forcing both of
those ads to go into the auction in even number of times. But the
ad that has a relevancy score of six is going to win more auctions
at a cheaper price. And when you're forcing the ad into the
auction, that only has a relevancy score of four, it's going to
lose more auctions, and when it does when it's going to have a
higher cost associated with. So the net effect here is that when
you are running this option, you'll notice your overall costs per
click will rise. And your overall impressions will fall. For years,
LinkedIn have talked about a new tool that they're going to come
out with, but I think they're going to call like the AB testing
tool or something. And I do hope this solves the issue here because
we don't want to mess with the auction. What we want to do is show
our ads evenly so that we can get accurate tests. So I do expect
that we'll be able to have some sort of a solution for this in the
future.
16:19
Senior Seniority
The next discrepancy here is in seniorities. You'll notice that
there's a seniority called senior seniority. And people tend to
think that this means like an executive, maybe in job titles like
senior vice president or senior manager. But according to LinkedIn,
that's not what senior means. It actually means individual
contributor. This is someone who manages projects and things, but
not people. And of course, LinkedIn doesn't actually know who is
managing people and who's not. But they try to deduce this from job
titles. In a past episode, we mentioned that dentists show up under
the senior seniority, which I think is crazy. I remember I spent
millions of dollars on the LinkedIn Ads platform, targeting the
senior seniority, along with VPs, and C level before I ever
realized. So take my learnings and go and save yourself some time
and headache.
17:15
Super Titles
Now, we mentioned this next one, on the job titles episode, when
you're targeting a job title, you may be targeting a lot more than
what you think you are. The way that this works is something called
super titles. Titles on LinkedIn are a free form field. So people
can go and write whatever they want. You can give yourself a cutesy
title or a really standard one. And then to make this a useful
feature for advertisers, LinkedIn then has to go and collect all of
the job titles out there and stick them into buckets of common
groupings that you might type to target a group of these people.
And then they take it a step further by aggregating similar titles
into something called super title. And the reason I think that this
happens is it might not be a great user experience, if you went
into job title, and had to select 50 or 60, similar titles to get
who it is you want. They want you to select 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever,
and then feel like you've accurately covered that audience. There
are definitely some glitches, though, and how this works. I
mentioned this back on Episode 60, all about job titles. But we
noticed that if you target the Chief Marketing Officer job title,
it's also going to include Marketing Consultant, job titles as well
aand you can't exclude it. Because if you're targeting CMOS, and
you do an exclusion of marketing consultant, job titles, your
audience size drops to zero.
18:42
Company Size Targeting
All right, next, let's talk about company size targeting. What you
need to understand is when you are targeting by company size,
you're only targeting by known company size. What that means is, if
you're targeting by company size, let's say 11 through 50, the only
people who can show up in there are those who are associated with a
company who has gone and declared that it is size 11 through 50.
And you may have noticed that there's a lot of people on LinkedIn
who either aren't associated with a company page, maybe they wrote
the company name in their company, but it's not attached to a page
so it just shows up as a little like gray building as a logo. It
means those people will not be part of this targeting. And the way
this will rear it's ugly head is if you ever tried to use company
size targeting as an exclusion, you'll be very, very surprised.
Let's say you want to exclude small companies. So you exclude
myself only through maybe 10 employees. What that's going to do,
LinkedIn is going to go out and obviously try to target those that
are 11 and higher, but it's also going to be targeting all the
unknowns. The people who represent companies that don't have a
company page, which usually tend to be smaller companies. So, you
went in thinking that you were going to exclude small companies,
and you ended up getting even smaller companies as part of your
target. So unless you have a great reason for wanting the unknowns
to be targeted, you don't want to use company size for exclusions.
They're only for inclusions. Are you aware of any discrepancies
that I might have missed here? Let us know by emailing us at
Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'll make sure to include your feedback
here in the next episode. All right, I've got the episode resources
for you coming right up, so stick around.
20:39
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
20:50
All right, if you look down in the show notes below, you'll see
links to these resources. Episode 60, where we talk about the
nuances of job titles, that episode is definitely worth listening
to. You'll also see a link to the workplace learning report that we
talked about in the news section, as well as the in demand skills
report. If you're hiring, or even trying to just improve where you
are in your career, it might be worth checking those out, making
sure you're making strides on those in demand skills. I mentioned
the analysis that we did based on Civil Rights Day, or Martin
Luther King Day here in the US to go read that on the B2Linked
blog. If you or anyone else is looking to learn about LinkedIn Ads
for the first time, go and check out the course that I did on
LinkedIn Learning. You'll notice the link down below and it's by
far the lowest cost and the highest quality course you'll find
about LinkedIn Ads. If this is your first time listening, please
hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the next episode. But
if this is not your first time listening, please do consider going
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that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on
in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.