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Stephanie Liu
Hey, what's up you guys? It's Stephanie Liu and welcome to a new episode of Lights Camera live. And I've got one of the most energetic speakers on LinkedIn ads right now for today and I can't wait wait, wait, wait wait for you to be a part of this. AJ Wilcox is like the go to expert when it comes to LinkedIn ads. And guess what his agency specifically focuses on LinkedIn ads for the most sophisticated companies that is out there. He's a certified LinkedIn partner and he's the founder of b2b leads. So without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce you to AJ Wilcox. AJ, what's up?
AJ Wilcox
So excited to be here, Stephanie. Thanks for having me.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, hey, we're actually doing this. I am beyond excited. So you guys, I had AJ on the show last week and we had a little bit of livestreaming hiccup but we're going to do this. We're going to do this and we're going to have fun. So AJ, let's talk about LinkedIn ads and why you got started with LinkedIn ads?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. So I started out life as a, as a search guy, like I did a lot of search engine optimization, Google ads, and really liked that side of digital marketing. But I went to go work for a company doing digital marketing, like managing the whole digital marketing department. And I had, you know, four and a half years of experience, I felt like I was on top of my game, I felt like I knew what I was doing. And the CMO calls me and says, Hey, you know, tell me about your strategies. And I told her and everything was great. She said, okay, all that sounds great. Go ahead and execute it. But just so you know, we started a pilot using LinkedIn ads and see what you can do. And I kind of saluted and said, Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. And then kind of walked out of our office and went, what our LinkedIn ads. I have no idea. I feel like an idiot. But I didn't want to look stupid to my new boss. So I went and dove into the platform and started trying to figure things out. And about two weeks later, I had a sales rep come up to me who said AJ, we love your leads we're fighting over. I'm like, whatever you're doing, keep it up. And I went, What are you talking about? I logged into Salesforce and started looking at these leads he was talking about, and every single one of them said source LinkedIn ads. So I went, Oh, there's something here. So I, I kept growing and growing and growing that account just as far as fast as I could. And I grew it to become LinkedIn largest account worldwide. And after running that for two and a half years, I went, Okay, there's something more to LinkedIn ads. It's not just this one company that it's good for. And so I started an agency so I could help as many people as possible.
Stephanie Liu
Oh, I love that and see you guys. When I first dipped my toe into LinkedIn ads, the same thing happened to me. I had a client that said, Hey, you know, you want to try out LinkedIn ads. And I was like, Okay, well, having a background in PPC and Facebook advertising, I thought that the experience would be similar. Boy, was I wrong, right? I was like, Okay, this is a little different. Everything from the campaign manager, how you build out your ads, how you build out your audiences, and I asked everyone else Like if I were to learn LinkedIn ads, who would be the best person to go to and of course, you, you sir came up. And so having said that, let's go ahead and get started.
Let's talk about first, what are the benefits of LinkedIn ads?
AJ Wilcox
Well, the whole reason we go to LinkedIn ads is because the targeting is amazing. People talk about LinkedIn being great for b2b. And of course, b2b is not the only fit for it. But the targeting certainly lends itself so well. We can target people by their job title, their company size, their company, industry, seniority skills, the individual group names that they're members of, you know, gender, age, years of experience, the list just goes on and on and on. And even I think more exciting to me right now is there's this whole conversation about account based marketing going on or ABM, and everyone's super excited about it. From day one on LinkedIn ads back in 2007. We've been able to target by company name, so LinkedIn ads was the original ad. IBM platform.
Stephanie Liu
And I feel like that's one of the things that most people don't realize is that Facebook no longer allows you to target specific companies. But yet, you could still do that on LinkedIn.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, and even when you could use that on Facebook, you know, we did it quite a bit, because we love that. But it was so hard to spend any money because I think it was only something like four to 6% of people would even bother to put their job title in their company name into their profile. And so when you're targeting the right company, you're like, Oh, I'm spending, you know, six bucks a day, I want to spend more and you kind of turn the knob up to eight. And then you can run out of people to target and it's hard to spend money. But LinkedIn, it's really simple to spend on those audiences because the second you create a profile, LinkedIn knows what company you're at and what your job title is. And you give it more information that allows marketers to to target so it's like, you know, LinkedIn ads is where I go when the targeting is the most valuable. I need to make sure I'm getting the right people. need them at scale?
Stephanie Liu
Yeah. And this is one of the conversations that you have you and I both had where, you know, if you wanted to target a company, CEO with, like 500 plus people in the organization, you can do that. But on Facebook, you can't filter that out to say, Well, how large is the company size, so you could have, you know, Joe Schmo in their basement, like I'm the CEO, and it's not really a business, and yet you're spending money on that.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And it's so valuable for our clients too, because company size is that one filter I use for pretty much every campaign we run, because if the client sells like a $50 a month subscription to something, then I know I can target small to medium sized businesses. And I'm going to exclude the larger which are going to be more competitive and are going to cost more. And if I'm selling a product or service that's like a $50k kind of close. I know I'm only going to launch those two people with you know, 1000 or more employees or 5000 plus employees. So company size so valuable for making sure you're getting like exactly the right quality of lead.
Stephanie Liu
That's gold because I remember when I was okay. I am a huge fan of AJ Wilcox. If there was a president of like the AJ Wilcox fan club that would, because I have been researching you I read like your I watch your SEM Rush webinar, your Social Media Examiner blog posts, I was like, This is gold. I was like, hey, AJ.
So what are what are some additional differences between Facebook and LinkedIn that you would like our viewers to know?
AJ Wilcox
Well, I think first of all, thank you like I'm turning bright red, and I'm already a pretty red person. The biggest differences I see between Facebook and LinkedIn, LinkedIn has I'm when you look at just the pure platform compared to facebook, facebook is a much more developed ad technology, the the ads manager is so much more feature rich, you can do so much more with it. It's a more advanced kind of technology. So when you're in Facebook, and then you move over to LinkedIn, it might feel a little bit like you've kind of gone back to Facebook. circa, you know, 2010 it'll feel like taking it a step back in time. So certainly there's that, like LinkedIn is a very simple version of Facebook, but they keep gaining features all the time. The other difference that I think most people will notice very quickly is that Facebook ads are very inexpensive compared to LinkedIn. You know, we might be paying one to $2 a click for business to business stuff on Facebook, but you're probably going to end up paying somewhere between about six to $10 per click on LinkedIn, so big cost difference to which is why I think it makes sense to really narrow your target your targeting, and only go after those kinds of deals where you know, this is it's the big fish this is like, you know, spear fishing, whale fishing, rather than just like throwing your your hook in the water and waiting for just whatever comes.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, because I feel like sometimes even with Facebook, when you're developing like your funnel, right, it's about like leaving the little breadcrumbs that finally go to the buffet of options. That you have available but with LinkedIn, because you're investing so much more you could you could go in with the big ask like, this is what I do. This is the problem that I could solve for you right now. And boom, let's get it done. Right?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, totally. And when you think about where someone is at in the funnel in the sales process, I like to put Facebook and LinkedIn on kind of the same level, you know, what you can get away with on Facebook, you can usually get away with about the same thing on LinkedIn, I think of them in, you know, their middle to top of funnel kinds of strategies. So this is where every time I show an ad to someone on LinkedIn, I just assume that this is the first time they've ever heard about my company. So I know the goal of my post is to get them to know like, and trust me to get them to want to follow to want to, you know, be willing to engage. So really similar to Facebook in that regard.
Stephanie Liu
And if you guys are just tuning in, we are talking about a beginner's guide to LinkedIn ads, and let me tell you, he also even has a strategy on how to increase your brand lift by 10% and I remember that from our last conversation. So stick around for that, because we have a lot more going on.
Let's talk also talk about who should be leveraging LinkedIn ads because as Nisha Collins said, you know, as a Social Media Marketing Agency, does LinkedIn ads with that makes sense for me, like who should really be jumping into this?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think LinkedIn ads has the perfect targeting, if you're in business to business, or need to target someone by their, you know, their job history or education. But the big challenge that most will face is that LinkedIn ads are expensive. You know, if you're paying six to $10, a click that it probably doesn't make sense if you have a lower lifetime value. Or if maybe it's going to take too long to close a customer and you can't float the cash there. So I think really, who should be using LinkedIn ads really comes down to the economics, you've got to know that, you know, here's the right person that I'm targeting, and I can reach them by the facets LinkedIn gives me I know, paying six to 10 bucks a click, I can still be profitable on the back end because you want close a deal. It's worth, you know, 10,000 or $15,000 or more. And I think because it's really a more bottom, sorry, top to middle of funnel kind of approach, it also means that you have to have a softer approach. You can't just say, you know, open up your wallet and buy something now or get a demo from a sales rep. Just because you're not providing enough value, you're not giving people incentive to interact. So you want to go for more of like, we'll obviously talk more about offers, but something where you're giving someone something in exchange for their email address for free.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, that was the one part that I really live from last week. Alright, so let's go ahead and dive in. Because you've already talked about like, why you should be on LinkedIn. But now let's go ahead and give you a behind the scenes look on LinkedIn ads, the campaign manager it, this might even be a good opportunity for us to also talk about the different types of LinkedIn ads and and why you prefer one over the other. Does that sound good?
AJ Wilcox
Absolutely. Yeah, I'm gonna bring up my own LinkedIn. platform here so that you guys can see what's going on. I can show you the individual ad formats what they look like, all that.
And I'm sorry, you're going to see like
Stephanie Liu
Everyone who has ever sent AJ a message you are now on Lights Camera live, welcome.
AJ Wilcox
Cool. Well, should we jump right into the different ad formats, then?
Stephanie Liu
Yes, I would love to let's do it.
AJ Wilcox
Okay, so there are four different ad formats on LinkedIn that all of us can get access to just by opening a free account. So the very first one that I want to bring your attention to, it's going to be the second item in your newsfeed and your newsfeed. It's, it's your homepage on desktop, and it's the homepage on the app. So it's what everyone sees. So you come here to the The second item in the feed, and you'll notice this says promoted so we know that this is a sponsored ad. And I'm being targeted because I'm an alumni of BYU, and so AVG funds com must be wanting to to Go after just BYU alumni. But what you get here is, in the most vanilla version, you get a static image that's pretty much the same size as Facebook, it's 1200. By 627, you get about 150 characters of intro text before it gets truncated. And then you have this text down below that we call the headline. That works really nicely. Because it's so simple. It's like, if, if this has a bad click through rate, I can troubleshoot this because I know it's either the image or the ad copy that's not resonating with my target audience. sponsored content also has a few other flavors. You can do a video ad version, you know, very similar to Facebook in that regard. But it obviously differs, it's a little bit more expensive, actually quite a bit more expensive to re target. But if I'm running a video ad, and it doesn't perform I know that there's like there's more things to test to figure out what the problem is. Is it my creative wasn't good, or my ad copy wasn't good, or maybe they didn't work well together. Whereas if you do this kind of version that's just all static, it's so easy to troubleshoot.
Stephanie Liu
And so this was the question that I had asked you last time was, are you limited by the amount of texts that you could have on your image for your sponsored content as you are with Facebook's 20% rule?
AJ Wilcox
Oh,yes, the answer is no, thank goodness, LinkedIn does not have the same 20% rule. They don't have the same type of algorithm that will kind of ghost penalize you. I guess that's what I'd call it. You know, you don't know why your ads, all of a sudden are costing more. They don't have anything like that. So feel free to put as much text on there as you want.
Stephanie Liu
Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. So this is called LinkedIn sponsored content.
AJ Wilcox
Yes. If you're building this ad, right from within the ads manager, it will, it will call this single image ad, which is a little bit confusing, but that's what it is sponsored content is anything that would appear in your newsfeed and then they have a single image version. They have video They have carousel very similar to what Facebook has. So you can include multiple images and links if you want. And then there's also another variant that I can actually show you because this one happens to happens to have it installed. There's, if you know, Facebook's lead ads, LinkedIn has something very similar. They call it lead generation form ads. And so just for fun, I'm going to delete my so you're not like, you can have my email address, that's fine. But what you saw here is as soon as I interacted with this, it pre filled all of the information that that LinkedIn had access to for my profile, it knows what my login email addresses, it knows what my phone number is. They're asking a custom question here because it's, it's kind of in the education industry so that they want to know like, if I'm, you know, loaded or not, first name, last name, what school I went to. So all that information pretty failed. And this works really well, because all of that information is pre filled. So you show this to someone on on a mobile device and they go, Oh, yeah, it's all pre filled out, I'll just hit go. versus if they got to a landing page that asked me all of this, I would get, you know, two fields in on mobile and go, my, my little fingers do not want to this margin, and I'd give out.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, I mean, that was the exact question that I was going to ask you is that is this mobile friendly? Like these LinkedIn ad units?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. When these very first came out, they were only available on mobile and and only like six months later, they rolled them out on desktop. So now desktop works the same way.
Stephanie Liu
So cool. So cool. Is this something that you use all the time with clients?
AJ Wilcox
So about 60% of our clients are currently using only lead gen forms. Wow. And in full transparency, I it's kind of a statistic that stings me a little bit, because I feel like LinkedIn ads are all about having a The best conversation making the best introduction to exactly the right people. And when you do these lead generation forms, the traffic never hits your website, so you can't track it with UTM parameters. You can't retargeting with Facebook and Google retargeting. And we've made it so easy for them to, to convert and fill out this form that if we got back to them, you know, two or three days later, they would go, I don't remember filling out a form with you like, yeah, we see the same thing on Facebook, too. But yeah, but yeah, my, my ideal is send them to a landing page where they get a full impression, they visit the site, you can, you can target them, but clients absolutely love the fact that you can get a cost per lead that is, you know, 10 to 50% lower than what you get on the landing page. So it's pretty hard to argue with that.
Stephanie Liu
That's pretty cool. And does that funnel into like a sales force on the backend or do you just get like a CSV file?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, you can do both. You can do CI But I wouldn't recommend it because you're just gonna be getting back to leads way too late. Yeah, it'll integrate into Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo live ramp Eloqua. And if you don't have any of those, and there's a few others, if you have any of those, they do integrate with Zapier. So if you're on their $20 a month plan, you can pipe these into whatever system you want.
Stephanie Liu
There you go. There you go. Awesome. Okay, cool. And what else do we have?
AJ Wilcox
Alright, so that's sponsored content. This is where I recommend probably 90% of people start, it's, it's the best kind of starter ad unit. It's not the least expensive, it's not the most expensive, and it's really good at getting a lot of engagement. This is a great place to dip your toe in the water. Love it. The next one that you probably want to look at is over here. And it's going to be a little hard to see. This is called text ads. These were the original ad format that LinkedIn launched back in 2007. And they were the only ad format until 2013. So yeah, they're kind of the OG is of the LinkedIn ad world. Yeah. There's some really interesting things about these. First of all, they are LinkedIn cheapest ad format. So it's nice to know that you can, you know, on these you're pregnant, pay six to 10 bucks a click. But on text ads, you can still pay all the way down to like maybe three to five. And there's not much to them, you get a little 100 by 100 pixel image. So you can't really tell much of a story there. There's only 25 characters of text for headline, and 75. For for the description here. So not a ton. But you don't have this this right sidebar on mobile devices. So you know that the only traffic that you'll ever get from these ads is, is desktop traffic, which is really helpful because on the other ad formats, we can't choose to target either mobile or desktop, you know by device. So this is the way that we do it. If we know we only want desktop traffic, this is the right ad format. What you should understand here about these though, is that they have a really really low click through rate the Average click through rate is point 02 5%. So put into perspective, that's two and a half clicks for every 10,000 times the ads are shown. So unless you have a really big audience, it's hard to spend a lot of money on these. But those that you do spend money on. They'll probably be very effective, usually high conversion rates and low costs.
Stephanie Liu
Oh, very cool. Alright, so basically don't discredit it. Yeah, there's still a way that you can use them.
AJ Wilcox
Exactly. And, and even though you go, oh, man, I'm only spending like $20 a week that wasn't even worth my time to set up. What's super helpful to understand is if you're running both sponsored content and text ads together, they generally provide a lift of like 10 to 30%. click through rate. Just because, you know, these sponsored content, people can only see once, sometimes twice per day. So it's really hard to saturate an audience for these text ads. Every time we refresh, like, I can't even try here. Every time we hit refresh. There's a good chance wind up seeing the same ad or the same ads over and over.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah. I'm curious.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, there we go. So I think our onboarding was one of the ads that we were saying.
Stephanie Liu
So it's nice because then it's kind of like, even if you're looking at your, your newsfeed in your peripheral, you're still getting this brand awareness of like the logo and what they offer. So it's still kind of keeps your brand top of mine and tip of town, even though you're not spending as much. So if you if you combine the two, the sponsored content, and what do you call the right hand side again, oh, text ads, text ads, then you'll still see you'll most likely see an increasing brand lift.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And then they're so cheap, and so low risk, because even if you did make a mistake and gave all of your budget to them, they wouldn't go and spend it. It would just be like, you know, obviously very low risk, but it's just a ton of free impressions that you're serving to your exact target audience. So yeah, don't discount them, even though they might not spend much. They're a great companion ad unit.
Stephanie Liu
Love it. Anything else you want to go over on text ads or do you want to jump into the next one?
You know, let me go ahead and just let me take a quick peek at the at the comments real quick. They're not coming through for the LinkedIn folks. But Mercer Kelly is asking what are your thoughts on LinkedIn remarketing?
AJ Wilcox
Oh, man, I hope no one from LinkedIn is watching this. All kind of step out on this ledge. LinkedIn has a retargeting platform very similar to what you could do with Google and Facebook. But it's cookie based only. And cookies are going away like what the California consumer Privacy Act will probably see all of the browsers blocking cookies from everyone like right out of the gate. And so in less LinkedIn fixes this and changes to a different way that they do retargeting. It will like their retargeting will probably cease to function within probably the next six months to a year. But even when it is working, like, we still have iOS browsers like anything running Safari, iPhones, iPads who haven't accepted cookies for a long time. So if I send like 1000 people to a web page and I've paid you know, six to 10 bucks a click for them, they're really valuable to me. Retargeting is probably only going to pick up half of them because half of your devices didn't even carry a cookie. So there's no problem using LinkedIn retargeting. There's some cool stuff you can do by using them. But yeah, just be aware. It's not very powerful. So my recommendation for anyone doing retargeting, use LinkedIn to send the exact right traffic to your your landing page and then use your Google and your Facebook retargeting which are much better and much cheaper technologies to stay in front of them. Stay top of mind.
Stephanie Liu
Ah, see I love that that's gold right there. I don't know if you guys heard that. But if you want to take this one right now to leave a comment and like I need to rewind that. This is at the 22 minute mark that is gold. Alright, cool. So let's go ahead and move on to the next piece of of the different LinkedIn ads.
AJ Wilcox
Okay, cool. So next one you're gonna have to see my messages for me to get through this, but I saved one for you so
Stephanie Liu This is probably like the one time in your life you're like yeah, I finally got a sponsored message.
AJ Wilcox
Exactly. I mean, I'm always excited to see what people are pitching me. But yeah, but certainly, man. I thought it was gonna be like, Oh, here we go. Haha. Alright, so there's Chengdu Hi-tech is is sending me this. And you can see I'm actually going to zoom in. I don't get to reopen this fresh. You can tell it this is called sponsored in mail because it's it's in my messaging box. And it does say sponsored. So as opposed to the other ad formats that I've just showed you. When you only pay when someone clicks on this one you pay To send it to someone with no guarantee that they'll open it or click on it. So you can see this one I haven't clicked on because I wanted you to experience this with me.
When I click on it, that's going to count as an open for them. So they they paid probably 35 to 65 cents to send it to me. And now as I click it, they'll see that that resulted in at least an open for them. This right here, like the the top piece of text, they call the, the subject line. This needs to be shorter than 25 characters, but keep it as short as possible because you can see how much my browser cut off here. Boom, your business with “aboundant” and then, that might be a misspelling.
But yeah, and then once you've opened it, now you see their ad copy, and you can have up to I think it's 1300 characters of text here. But again, this is someone's introduction to your brand. So you you want to make it very conversational short to the point And you can see they've inserted my name. So you can you can insert variables like first name, last name, company name, company industry, job title, so you can try to personalize it a little bit. Yeah. And you can get this download free now is what they're giving me the call to action. This can be a lead gen form, like we talked about with sponsored content, or you can send to a landing page. Let's see where they're sending me. Oh, it is it's a lead gen form.
Stephanie Liu
Oh, cool. but now is that is that header image in the background? Because they didn't optimize their company page. Okay
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think that's from their company page. You might also be able to customize it at the ad level, which they've just gone with. They saw it was optional and didn't decide to do so got it. Sorry if anyone from Chengdu is watching this.
Stephanie Liu
And so when you were talking about the subject line is limited to 25 characters and then it gets cut off. Is that also Different when you're looking at it on your mobile device. Do you also have like limited text?
AJ Wilcox
Mobile cuts off a little bit earlier, but I think they only allow you to put in 25. But you can see from my browser size here, like if I back this off. Yeah, it's still cutting it off at “aboundant”, which is not a word.
Stephanie Liu
I love it about you. I love it. Yeah, just like that in here. Like I hate saying this. But
AJ Wilcox
But I can take I mean, we know that this is all showing up on my desktop. And I think mobile cuts off a little earlier. We could take this, and I'm going to do do JavaScript. character count? Sorry, you're seeing all my terrible misspellings.
Stephanie Liu
But now just the fact that you only have three tabs is like round of applause.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, don't worry. There's another browser behind that one.
So they're actually using 33 characters here, which is why it's getting cut off. So if you keep it under 25, that should work no matter what device you're on.
Stephanie Liu
Got it.
AJ Wilcox
Um, I don't recommend most use this ad format. This is actually a pretty poor example that I'm showing you. Just because I have no reason I would open it, let alone click on it. Like it's just it's not speaking to me, there's spelling errors and stuff. But even if it was really good, you're going to pay 35 to probably 60 cents to send this to someone. And there's no guarantee that they'll click on it, to open it or click on your offer. And so it puts multiple steps in between you and and the click to get someone to even see your offer. So you could go sponsored content where I know I can bid a maximum of let's say, $6, and I know I'm only going to pay $6. For a click versus this there's so much more risk. Like if I have the averages of a 50% open rate and a 3% click through rate. Like you do the math and your calculated cost per click comes to something like 23 to $56. So the only reason I would recommend using this ad format is if you have a truly special offer something that if you got it cold in your inbox in your email, your, your email, you'd be excited about it like a because of who you are in the industry, we want to give you early access or a sneak peek or invite you as a VIP to this this event. Those are the kinds of things that are going to work well here. If it's just, like, sign up for this thing or pay us money. Chances are it's going to be a really expensive cost per click and probably about the worst failure you've ever had.
Stephanie Liu
That's like speaking from experience, because you've tested so many ads, right? I mean, it has to be so enticing so seductive for them to actually want to go ahead and open it up and just having those misspellings isn't going to help out at all.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, totally.
Stephanie Liu
Well, so if you guys are just tuning in, we are talking about LinkedIn ads. I've got the amazing AJ Wilcox right here. Boop boop boop There you are. So far, we've talked about all the different LinkedIn ad types. We've talked about LinkedIn sponsored content. We've talked about the text ads. We've talked about sponsored mail.
Are there any other ad units that we're going to cover before you jump into campaign manager?
AJ Wilcox
So there is one more ad format that I'd like to show you. But you don't see it all the time. And that's actually okay. Probably what I'll do is if I can't find it by refreshing a few times, I will probably just maybe pull up a deck where there's a screenshot of it. Yeah, not seeing it. Anyway, this ad format, it's called dynamic ads.
And what. Oh, here we go. I found one. It's this one right here. And what's dynamic about this, is they actually stuck my profile file picture right into the ad itself. So they've stuck probably their company logo here and my face and then they give you a call to action. What you know, we talked about text ads, how smaller click through rate is, so it's hard to drive a lot of traffic. This is also in the right rail that shares the same space. So when you use it, you end up getting a really low click through rate like text ads. But the cost per click on these is actually quite a bit higher than then just normal sponsored content. You know, if this, here we go like figure eight. If I click this, they're probably going to pay, you know, six to 10 bucks for that click. If I click this one, they'll probably pay like, like 13 to $16 for that click. So dynamic ads, if I could, like insert the poop emoji on this one, I would say like, please don't use it, like, sponsored content, probably 100% of advertisers should be using text ads, maybe I drop it down to like maybe 15% should be using for sponsored in mail, I'm like, okay, 5% you really have to have a special offer to make this work for this. I literally have a zero on this. Like, I don't think anyone should be using this ad.
Stephanie Liu
So Sorry, whoever. This is the product manager for that ads like, What? Why are you saying these things? Good, good, good?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. I'll have some hard conversations after this when LinkedIn watches it. So yeah, those are the four ad formats I think everyone should know about. And like I said, just go with, with the most simple to start out with, start with sponsored content with just a single image and test until you can figure out what's working and what isn't. And then sure, explore from there, but get started, where it's simple and easy to troubleshoot.
Stephanie Liu
Okay, cool. Now that we've got that out of the way, I'm like getting ready in my chair, because now you're going to go ahead and take a look at the LinkedIn ads campaign manager on the backend and how to set things up because that's really like what this is all about. It's, it's understanding what the landscape is like on LinkedIn, and then giving you a sneak peek on how the magic happens. And that's where AJ comes in.
AJ Wilcox
Perfect. Well, uh, I'll show you this. dashboard. So the way you get to it is I just go to LinkedIn. com slash ads. And if you're used to business manager in Facebook, it's a lot like that. You can have unlimited people give you access to their LinkedIn ads accounts. And you'll have a big list. I won't go to that page, just so I don't like divulge client information. Yeah. So I at least have it in my own personal sandbox account. And what you see is just immediately you're greeted with a list of all of your campaign names. And within the campaign itself, you go directly down to ads. So in Facebook, you have like campaign then ad, sorry, ad set, and then ads underneath. on LinkedIn, it's one layer flatter, it's your campaign dictates your audience, your your budgeting, your bidding, your, your optimization type, your ad format, all of that lives at the campaign level, and then you just go down and create ads underneath.
Stephanie Liu
Got it, you will have different ways you can see the data.
AJ Wilcox
And this will feel quite frankly, really janky I'm sure to all of you who might be used to senior being able to customize your columns, you can customize your columns on LinkedIn. So you'll probably want to start on columns performance here. And that will give you all of the basics that you care about. So things like like your impressions, clicks, and it's stalling on me. So I hope doesn't make me look down. You'll see your impressions clicks and click through rate, how much you're bidding what your average cost per click is, conversions. Leads. Leads come from when you use those lead generation form ads, conversions come from your pixel firing and saying yes, when you land on this page, that means it's a conversion.
So they'll show you both. But if you really care about conversions, when you're doing some analysis coming, change this to conversions and leads, and that'll break down all the metrics and again, exactly the way that you want to see them. So come here and you can see your your conversion rates, your cost per conversion cost per lead. When I ran these campaigns back in like 2007, they had just implemented the conversion pixel.
So you can see a conversion rate of 3.7% would be pretty embarrassing. So this was just like purely playing around. But this is where you can see all of that information. And I think what may be most valuable here in the dashboard is when you're inside of Facebook ads, it's very much a similar kind of view where you can just see your data. But LinkedIn used to have this graph top and center where you could, like, analyze your performance see it charted over time, they moved it to where it's now two clicks away. I didn't feel like that was a good move. But I guess I can't complain with a bunch of Harvard and Stanford MBAs. But if I go in, like, I'll show you an example of what this looks like, if I just go and select these camera, Hence that spent I can come up here to performance chart and then I can get access to the chart it this kind of sucks a little bit because this was like back in 2017 and you can see it just it just spikes not very helpful probably a lot more helpful to narrow down to just just like when that was so that was January of 07 January and February of 07.
So bear with me here because there's a lot of click you're not gonna do it that dashboard just sucks too bad. But if you went through that process, you could see all of that happening. And sorry I'm like opening all my crap and funny but you could see like this is just charting by clicks but you could easily come here and say okay, I want to see how my click through rates are trending over time. You know, I I obviously had one like really high click through rate month, and then it went down. I might ask myself why and quite frankly that is like I was running sponsored content. The month and then text ads that month.
So that's why, but you can analyze your performance here, like, What did my cost per conversion or cost per lead look like? How much did I spend, like, what did I spend by month? These are all things that you can see very easily on a graph on a chart that you couldn't get a good appreciation for, you know, just going through just the data and changing time periods. So check that out. Don't let the fact that LinkedIn hit it from you mean, you don't get to use it.
Something else I'd love to kind of point your attention towards LinkedIn has this thing called website demographics. It's like It's like Facebook analytics. It's free. Like you don't have to advertise. You have to pay them a dime to be able to use this. But it's so so valuable. So I'll show you an example.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, if you guys when he showed this to me last week, I was like, No freaking way. So if you're like multitasking right now looking at other tabs, stop. Pay attention right now because this is like, the boom, go for it.
AJ Wilcox
Cool. So you can break down. And this is all the traffic across your website. So you can see who's using my website who is like, who is doing business with me who's checking me out. The first thing it will drop you on is this display job function. So that's, that's like what department someone works in. So you can see, the vast majority of people who are visiting my site are people in Biz Dev, and in marketing, and, you know, education, media and communications. We're an ad agency that works in b2b and then education. So you could imagine why that is. But you can also break down by job title Who are these people like lots of founders, speakers, board members who are checking me out? And if I'm not catering very well to those audiences, maybe maybe I can start if I just looking at me.
Stephanie Liu
I love that because so so Michael to one of my good friends, he's always talking about like, on your, on your website, if you could develop some type of path for a specific persona. So if you're like, Hey, if you're a founder and You're struggling with x y&z, you know, click on this and then check out all of that content or if you're an advertising agency, and you want to get LinkedIn certified, here's this content. So this is just, this is so cool. I can't wait to dive into it like for my own site.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And I'll walk everyone through how they can do this too, because it is so cool. Some of the other things that you can break down, you can break down, like, what are the industries that are caring about me right now? Lots of marketing and advertising. That just means like, agencies, but computer software internet, like that all makes sense. Yeah. You can even see the companies that are checking you out.
So if I look at companies, there's obviously my own company. But people from LinkedIn are are on my website. Probably reps. I don't know. This is actually a board. I'm a member of the board of but I can also look at what are some of these other companies, if they're visiting my website, maybe I could, like reach out to them specific.
Stephanie Liu
That's what I was thinking because then at least you could go ahead and create your own audience and then put In those websites right to say now, like, they're already checked me out, I'm obviously checking you out. But if you wanted to like, again, make your brand top of mine tip of tongue, you could then put me in that specific category, because I've already checked you out. Now you're just kind of like pushing it out there.
AJ Wilcox
Exactly. And this is just, this is so powerful.
Where else can you see what companies are visiting you without having to pay an ABM company? You know, several thousands of dollars a month. Yeah, so cool. I love this.
So, to get this on your site, all you have to do is I'm going to actually go with you and go to linkedin.com/ads.
Stephanie Liu
Can I just say like, it's been a while since I've seen anyone use Bing
AJ Wilcox
It's awesome. So, uh, I've been a Google advertiser and Google marketer like for the last 12 years of my career, yeah, and, and I saw friends who on for like, their new year's resolutions, were doing things that were hard and different. And I was like, ah, I keep hearing how being has gotten so much better over time. For my new year's resolution, I'm going to change and search only on Bing for an entire year. That's been like four years ago. And I've just left it ever since. And now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, now I feel like I'm helping support them a little bit. So
Stephanie Liu
There you go.
AJ Wilcox
If you go to linkedin.com, slash ads, it'll open up this page. And when you click on Create ad, it will take you to your list of accounts, or where you can add an account, just create an account for your company. Like I said, you don't have to install a credit card. You can see on this one, I haven't updated my billing details since I got a new credit card. And so as long as you don't mind a big red banner across the top of your screen, you don't have to spend a dime. You just come here to account assets and insight tag. And I've already installed this, but if you if you haven't installed the tag, there will be an option to create one or generate one. But I'll show you what mine looks like.
It's just a piece of JavaScript that is, you know, really similar to that of like your Facebook pixel that you've probably already installed. Yeah, they should make it hard to see when you hover over, but it's just it's a little snippet of JavaScript that does three things. It's this, it's your your website demographics that are free. It's conversion tracking, and it's your retargeting. So if you want to use any of those three things, just install this on every page of your website. And once it accrues about 300 people who come to your website, and it recognizes, then you'll start to get these, these really detailed analytics, like I showed you. So
Stephanie Liu
How soon do you get that that analytics? Do you have to wait 72 hours for it to start pulling that in or just when people start hitting your site?
AJ Wilcox
They have to have at least 300 people hit your site. So if you're like a really big site, you can hit that within a day. But certainly for me, I probably have to wait probably a good 72 hours to start getting feedback there. But then, like I said, you have to spend anything. You just come here to this website demographics tab inside your ads account, and you can see everything I showed you.
Stephanie Liu
So do you when you have an audit with a client or you just like, oh, okay, well, like, you know, let's let's install this LinkedIn insights tag. And you're like, Oh, these are all the people you could target right now.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And I think this is like, this is the free version of what you already get when you're running ads. So if I'm running ads, I click on and I'll show you this, I can click on the ad demographics. So it's this right here. And I have to go change my, my time period to all time to get data. But I can click here to demographics. And I see the same stuff. But this is just for the audience's that I was going after. And since 2017, they've lost the data, but it's the same stuff you can look at by job function by company by all those things. So when I'm advertising for someone, I will oftentimes take a look at their demographics who they're hitting, and if I can see like, whoa, job function of sales is Bringing in like a third of your leads or a third of your traffic, but you're not going after sales people, let's go actively add them as an exclusion. So those are some of the ways I like to use the demographics is figuring out who I want to exclude.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, smart. love it love it. So any she was just saying you can use these insights to help decide what content you want to use in your ads, especially video. Very true.
AJ Wilcox
Absolutely. Yes. You know, if you have a, like a very predominant kind of person who's coming, speak to them in video, create content for them. It's, it's super valuable.
Love it. Alright, cool.
Okay, so what I'd love to do now is actually take you through the campaign creation process, because this is I think, where all the magic is I kind of showed you ancillary stuff. If you're used to Facebook, this will look really familiar. You can choose what your objective is. If you're not sure, I will almost always go to website visits. Just because it's the most simple it's one of the least expensive hmm and the first thing it will ask you to do is choose your job. So I'm going to come in here and just for ease, say North America. And you can see LinkedIn populates my estimated target audience size over here. The more stuff we add, like keep your eye on this. This is really interesting. 170 million LinkedIn members in North America. And we can come down and and pare it down. The very, very first thing I will do in every campaign, you see, this checkbox was automatically enabled called enable audience expansion. Yeah, this is like LinkedIn version of look alikes. And if I'm paying six to 10 bucks a click, I want to be really explicit about who I'm showing ads to. And this allows LinkedIn to put people into the audience that it thinks are relevant. So I'm going to say No thanks.
Stephanie Liu
No to audience expansion. If there's just like one thing you walk away with today, that is it.
AJ Wilcox
Yes. And you can do look alikes on LinkedIn, just like on Facebook, but if you check this box You want to do that in a separate campaign, because if you check this box, you have your target audience you've gone after. And this muddied audience that LinkedIn thought was relevant, kind of stuck together, and you can't report on them differently. You can't tell which one was effective, which one wasn't. So just disable it. Go ahead and run a look like somewhere else. Yeah.
Now you can further narrow your audience. So we're adding and targeting. So they have to be in this location. And they have to have this job title. So what I want to show you here is kind of where everyone usually goes. They'll go to job experience and job titles. And if we do something like sales manager, yeah. If I choose this job title, watch what happens this audience size we go from 170 million down to 980,000. So that is it's the first place everyone goes it's, I know job titles. Well, what you don't know is that LinkedIn only understands about third of all job titles. And so you're excluding usually about two thirds of the audience that you could be targeting. And because it's where everyone else goes, it's more competitive and you're going to pay more for it.
So instead, and maybe I won't say instead of, because I really liked job title targeting still, I would say in addition, check out like, get rid of job titles, huh? And instead, go job experience job function. This is their department. Go to sales. And then later on, we'll go narrow further, will also narrow on their seniority.
Stephanie Liu
Oh, good. Yeah. Because you want someone that's like more senior? Exactly, depending on what it is that you want, right? Yeah.
AJ Wilcox
If your job title you're going after is sales manager. You can go and find like the job function of sales and seniority of manager and layer them on top of each other. You're getting the same person. But look at this. LinkedIn said that there were 900 An 80,000 by job title, but I narrow down by exactly the same stuff. And now I get 1.9 million. So we've over doubled the size of this audience, just because, you know, we found it another way to do this. They're the right people. And they're also going to be less competitive than job title targeting. So we'll probably pay less per click for these, it's really helpful to understand that there are multiple ways of going after an audience on LinkedIn, because they have so much data.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I love that.
Something else you could do and I like four different kinds of targeting. I like job title, job function with seniority, like we just built. Yeah, I like skills with seniority. And I like groups with seniority. And the way that this would play out, I could go and you know, get rid of job function and seniority, and instead go and target. I'd actually leave seniority but go and target sales skills, like maybe some deeper sales skills that you'd only have if you are in sales. layer manager seniority on top. And lo and behold, I have sales managers, again, in a little bit of a different way that might end up being less expensive. Or give me access to more volume. If I'm trying to scale.
Stephanie Liu
Smart. I hope one of you guys were taking notes. Otherwise, we are at the 40 minute mark. Rewind on that, because that was the go right there. Even Amanda Robinson says that you are dropping huge knowledge bombs right here today. So yay, thank you, AJ.
AJ Wilcox
Awesome. And I could do the same thing with with groups, I can go and target just sales groups, like you wouldn't be a member of this group unless you were in sales. And you target just the managers there. And groups will probably give you a little bit smaller of an audience, but it's probably the most active audience because they went way out of their way to go join a group. So I be doing more clicking, maybe more converting, and it's worth testing. So that's how I go about targeting a persona.
But then you have this whole other side to how we target which is like I got the right persona, but am I getting the right company? We talked about how you can target by company name. Like with ABM, that's pretty exciting. We can target by company size, which we talked about with like, you know how many employees they have, and also industry. And so we will do the same kind of thing. Like, if we're going after companies with only 1000 and above employees or 5000. And above employees, we would build out all four of these, these targeting types and layer on the same company size or the same industry, or the same company names. And now you have a really systematic approach where everything else is held constant, it's the same persona, it's just four different ways of targeting. So when we see one costing more, one costing less, one having a higher conversion rate, or higher lead quality, we can start pushing the budget towards what is working and starve the things that aren't working.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, I love that. Okay, because like even in my head, I'm thinking of the different LinkedIn ad types that we talked about before. The four ways that we would target it via the audiences and then you would see which one is is moving the needle pretty much, and then starve with the ones that aren't really helping. I felt I don't know why I feel bad saying starving.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, we can change our metaphor to less of that. And we can even take this a step further where we say, you know, right here we're targeting sales managers. But what if we made exactly the same copies of these campaigns? And we did one targeting directors, and one targeting VP, and another targeting C level, which would be like chief sales officers. Yeah. Now if we launched even the same two ads, like the same AB test within all of those, now we're able to roll this up and find out which level of seniority costs more costs, less converts more is of higher quality. And if we find out that VP is our true target audience, we can start tailoring all of our content to VP or come up with our own content just for them.
Stephanie Liu
So this is amazing. This is I was telling AJ I was like AJ, everyone has been asking for this episode. And I know that you're going to bring it so you guys, like if you're loving this, by all means give him some love from some hearts because he is going all out and I love it.
AJ Wilcox
Thanks so much for that. So anyway, this is just so so exciting to me. I think that because LinkedIn has all of this data about you professionally, that we can find all kinds of ways to slice and dice. It just makes you super powered as a marketer, especially because I guarantee your competitors are not going through all this work. They're too lazy, but you're not lazy. You are listening to Stephanie Liu.
Stephanie Liu
So yes. Oh my god.
AJ Wilcox
So anyway, that was the way that I that I do. I'm targeting from the beginning. And then if you want to go and layer on those things, like we talked about, like company size, will do that here. And one little hack, I want to teach you that not very many people know and maybe just don't share it a whole ton because I kind of want this to keep working but What most people do when they come to company size is they go, Ah, I'm targeting, you know, companies with with 200 to 1000 employees. So they're going to come and check these two boxes. Actually, I'm gonna use a different example.
Let's say I'm targeting just small to medium sized businesses. So maybe I care about these, like myself, only two through 1011 to 50 kinds of guys. Look at this audience size here 270,000. You know, that's fairly large, but watch how this changes, rather than including just the smaller. What I want to do is I want to get rid of this. And I want to exclude just the larger and I want to show you what happens. So if I come down here to exclude audiences, come again to company size. Mm hmm. I'm going to exclude just the ones that are larger than was it was one through 50 that we're doing.
Stephanie Liu
Yeah. 11 through 50 is where you stopped? Yep. Okay.
AJ Wilcox
I'm going to go 51 and above we're going to exclude. And I think we had somewhere around 280,000. Before, look where we're at now 530,000 Oh, wow. The reason for this is that there's a whole bunch of companies out there who haven't gone and specifically created a company page on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn doesn't know what size they are. But you can figure if someone's running a company or managing a very small company, they probably don't have a marketing resource who thought to go and create that page. So now, you know, if we do this kind of targeting, we're left with not only those who have declared to be between one and 50 employees, we're also left with all the undeclared, which are probably in that range anyway, and we just doubled our audience with people who are quite frankly probably a lot cheaper. I bet like our cost per click would be a lot lower on this audience than if we were just going after the ones who had claimed what they were.
Stephanie Liu
Gold. Love this. I wish I had like the same defects into the livestream, because you would just hear this like “aahh”.
AJ Wilcox
And maybe one more thing I'll show you because I know we're kind of getting to the end here. This is how we do our targeting natively. But using LinkedIn, you can also bring in your own data. And oftentimes, it's a lot less expensive. Oh, man. Okay, sorry, I'm going to just search for just my own company name. Yep. I can come here to account assets and do matched audiences.
So matched audiences is where I get to do retargeting. It's where I get to do email list upload, which everyone's used to, if you're if you're used to Facebook like that. Nothing's new there. You get company name upload, which is hot. I love this. You can go in and upload a list of up to 300,000 company names to add on to things. So if you're We're doing like account based marketing, where you have a list of here's the top, you know, 3000 accounts that we care about. Or maybe we just want to target like the CEOs of the Fortune 500 I could go find a list of the Fortune 500 upload it, and then just overlay like a see CEO job title on top. And, like, now I have ultimate access to just showing my ads to the only company that my my sales team may care about.
Stephanie Liu
See, that was my because they even when you had mentioned this to me last time I was like so basically I can hire someone on Fiverr or like up where I can say like, if there's this conference, if someone is sponsoring this conference, and they're like the Platinum sponsors, they obviously have budget. Let's go ahead and get a list of those names uploaded into here and then boom.
AJ Wilcox
Yes, I love it. That's exactly the way you should be using this. Like if you go in, let's say you're the sponsor of an event, but you have to pay like 20,000 extra dollars to get a list of the email addresses of attendees. How about just stick with where you're at where they give you a list of the companies who are attending upload that into this list and target just those who are, you know, the right kind of decision makers for what you do. And you're still getting ahead of them and you're actually hitting them and their co workers. It's so much more powerful.
Stephanie Liu
Mike Alton says, Oh.my.gosh. Told you, this show is fire. Good. All right, what else you got.
AJ Wilcox
The last piece you have here is we have website which is you know, your retargeting, which isn't quite as powerful, but I think it will be in the future. You have list upload, which is company name or email address. And then you have look alikes just like Facebook where you can take any list like I've got the Inc 5000 from 2016. I can click this create a look alike from it. And it's, it's actually probably too old. Now because this is back from 2016. But the way that it works is like you just create look alike, and LinkedIn will go and process it. I will warn you it's not nearly as sexy as Facebook's look like where you drag from one to 10% look alikes and craft it. It's just you kind of get what it is that you get. But certainly it's nice to have any feature that LinkedIn will build for us.
Stephanie Liu
I love it. I love it. So I know that's already 11:57. And I think if I recall correctly, you have a meeting that's coming right up after this. Is that right?
AJ Wilcox
I actually have a few minutes so I can
Stephanie Liu
Okay, cool, because I would love to show a couple of the comments. And I think you could see the comments on your end, too. So I'm just going to throw a couple on here. And I have your LinkedIn if you guys want to check him out, check them out. One of the questions that we have so far is Anesha Collins was asking remind us again, why our LinkedIn ads more expensive than Facebook.
AJ Wilcox
Facebook has people narrow down by so many different aspects, like what their levels of interest are. And each person is probably interested in two or 300 different topics in LinkedIn data. So it's just this ability to separate the population by so many different ways. It keeps competition much lower, whereas there really aren't only so many job titles out there only so many companies only so many industries. And so I think we have less, less choices where people tend to stack on those few categories. And then also people go and spend like hours a day on Facebook, they're checking in, you know, 510 times a day. They don't spend as much time they're creating ad inventory. So the more people come and spend time on LinkedIn, which we're seeing happen a lot right now, the more ad inventory it creates, and kind of the lower it keeps prices. Yeah, it probably will never bring prices down. But it can sure keep them at bay so that they don't spike and go up. Like like Facebook ads, right?
Stephanie Liu
Yeah, I mean, that totally makes sense. Because I feel like when you're on Facebook, you're either there because you have a purpose or you're there to go ahead and you know, just watch viral videos. Whereas LinkedIn, you're pretty much there for a purpose. It's either to get connected with someone be introduced to someone or, you know, get glean more insights about what's happening in your industry?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Stephanie Liu
Cool. So Jim is asking, Can you set up multiple website tags if you're managing multiple customers?
AJ Wilcox
Absolutely. What you do is, each of those accounts, all of your client accounts, they will grant your personal LinkedIn profile access to the ads account. And then when you log in, just through your own personal, there's no like trying to share credentials across your team and make sure that when someone leaves, you have to change the password and all that it's just everyone manages it through their own account that you just manage your own password. And then you will just very similar to to Facebook's business manager, just click into the individual account you want to manage, you can get access to all of their different insight tags there and work with all of their their different data. Got it?
Stephanie Liu Yeah. And so James is asking this question and it deals with targeting again, I feel like we've covered off on LinkedIn and Facebook, pretty much in terms of the differences and the similarities, but is do you know much about YouTube targeting as well?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, YouTube is going to be very contextual, much more related to search. So YouTube will give us the ability to target by keyword, whether someone is searching for it or whether they're just viewing content about it, which is great. Like if you have a, a business category, that there's already keywords around it. YouTube is a great way of just being in front of people while they're searching for what they're interested in a given topic. Where social media is so good is introducing people to subjects that they've never heard of before, or that they don't know. So if you have this like a new disruptive kind of product or service, something that there isn't an established keyword for, then social media becomes so important. So that's why you'd go to Facebook or, or, sorry, LinkedIn or Facebook as opposed to YouTube or vice versa.
Stephanie Liu
Got it. Good, good, good. And then I also want to give a give some love to the LinkedIn audit, and sorry, we don't get comments just yet. On stringer for LinkedIn comments, but you are definitely getting some love Jim says mind blown, Damien Donaldson, customer acquisition cost Oh my god, I love it so launches that you are a fountain of knowledge. Dan Holloway, the fella that I was telling you about earlier how he wanted to get in front of more speaking engagements, told him this was the episode to watch. So yeah, he's here. And then our good father, good friend, Anton from SEM Rush. He's in the house. Yeah. So he's saying, hey, it's the both of us together, Which reminds me, you guys, global marketing day is happening on October 30. So that is globalmarketingday.com. And it's going to be like, gosh, are you going to be there? Are you are you speaking or you?
AJ Wilcox
Are not speaking on this one, but they do have at least one speaker from LinkedIn. So that'll be exciting. If you want to learn more about LinkedIn, check out Alexander rims presentation. It should be good. This is 24 hours of straight content. I hope you're taking your caffeine pills.
Stephanie Liu
Oh, I know, right. I'm just like, people have been messaging me on LinkedIn. They're like, I am booking this, this this and that. So yeah. 24 hours of content of like in house marketing. b2b b2c GlobalMarketingDay.com Awesome. All right, let's see what other comments that we have here. Oh mercy Kelly is asking you need to have the LinkedIn pixel on your website before you get this data. Is that correct?
AJ Wilcox
Correct? Yeah, it's it's a, the pixel has to be on the website. And you have to have an audience defined first before it can start collecting data. If you're using Facebook, you're probably used to the fact that like, you can install the pixel and then later you can go and define an audience. And it will go, Oh, I recognize people like this, and it will go into the past, and it will kind of group people. LinkedIn isn't quite so sophisticated. So do you have to set this up first, and then it will start tracking all the traffic from then on out?
Stephanie Liu
And is this are these things that you actually outlined in your LinkedIn ads checklist?
AJ Wilcox
So the LinkedIn ads checklist is actually how to get started. So it's like, it's things like how to install that pixel. So yes, that's covered, how to get access to an account how you get access to the LinkedIn company page. So certainly if you go to b2blinks.com/checklist, you download that sucker, you'll have the best leg out to get started.
Stephanie Liu
Cool. And then Tim is asking, do LinkedIn ads make sense for certain types of types or sizes of businesses?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, LinkedIn ads are really good for lead generation, which is the majority of I think what we've talked about today, but there's also a few different areas where they also perform quite well. One is in hiring. So if you're trying to target anyone for for like a white collar kind of job, then LinkedIn has makes a lot of sense because if you show an ad to someone, let's say you want to target you want to bring on a new sales manager into your organization, you can target people who already have the job title of sales manager in your area and say we're interested in you do you want to apply and you end up getting these like passive candidates that recruiters love so much, and and yet, they're already qualified. So that works really well. Financial Services and and Education also do quite well on LinkedIn ads. And those are technically b2c. So lots of different areas that you can have success in.
Stephanie Liu
And then our last and final question for you. I know this is like, this is like the the fire round thoughts on cost per conversion comparatively, I think Dan is saying across platforms.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. on, we generally see because LinkedIn is cost per click is going to be about probably two to three times more expensive, will oftentimes see the cost per conversion being two to three times more expensive on LinkedIn. So the real value though, is when you look at the quality of the lead, LinkedIn let you be so specific about who you're showing your ads to. So you can make sure you can kind of pre qualify that traffic and make sure that this is exactly the right person. Versus on Facebook where the targeting is a little bit more broad, you'll probably have to cherry pick a little bit and try to get like target the gold out of that audience. So if you can run a test on Both and find out that Yeah, I'm paying three times more for my my conversions on LinkedIn, but the quality of the leads has increased by 40% then you know that it's actually cheaper to advertise on LinkedIn than it would be on Facebook in that regard.
Stephanie Liu
Got it. Okay. I love this. I feel like I'm gonna have like the most epic blog recap. LinkedIn ads effort, but in no way well, that blog recap actually actually do justice because my good friend AJ Wilcox has a book coming out. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, so this was probably going to be out in about two months. So don't worry, your blog recap will be out first, and it will get all the glory. My book can come out a little bit later. But this is pretty much all of the same strategies that I've learned over the last, you know, eight years of advertising packaged into written form and I will be doing an audio version because I love audiobooks and I love when the author reads them and yeah, goes off on tangents. So I think Anyway, you can expect that for me,
Stephanie Liu
Love it, love it, love it. Okay, so if you guys absolutely love the show, please go ahead and give AJ Wilcock some love. Go ahead and find him on LinkedIn, write him an amazing review and saying, Hey, you know what I love so much all of the knowledge bombs and I look forward to your upcoming book. Is there anything else that you're working on that you want to go ahead and share the Lights Camera Live Crew.
AJ Wilcox
So I do have a podcast coming out. I don't have a page to send you to so just be on the lookout for the LinkedIn ads podcast within about the next one month. So yeah, if I did okay, speaking live, then I'll probably sound a little bit better being pre recorded, edited.
Stephanie Liu
You did and more than okay, in fact, Amanda Robinson says Great job. She absolutely love this. So everyone, if you miss this live, if you're just catching this on the tail end, do not worry. Once the broadcast ends, you could go ahead and hit rewind and watch it from the very beginning.
All right, AJ, thank you so much. This was amazing. This was brilliant and I had such a great time again If you guys want to get in touch with AJ go find AJ.
AJ Wilcox
Thanks so much and Stephanie Liu Ladies and gentlemen, give her a hand.
Stephanie Liu
I told you guys this would be good. All right, you guys, thank you very much. Bye for now. Bye
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Psstt… What channels will you be focusing on in 2020?
If your plan is to invest more time on Facebook, publish more videos on YouTube, or search for the next great Instagram hashtag, then you’re missing a huge piece of the online marketing puzzle:
LinkedIn.
Listen… Did you know that LinkedIn is a B2B goldmine?
It’s where you can find:
▸ 630M Professionals
▸ 90M Senior Level Influencers
▸ 63M Key Decision Makers
▸ 10M C-Level Executives
▸ You get the idea!
In this week’s episode, AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, joins Lights, Camera, Live to share how you can amplify your message on LinkedIn using ads.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN
Why LinkedIn Ads Should Be In Your 2020 Strategy
Which Industries Can Succeed With LinkedIn Ads
Proven Strategies to See Results
Insider Tips to Avoid Costly Mistakes
ABOUT AJ WILCOX
AJ Wilcox is a LinkedIn Ads pro who founded B2Linked.com, a LinkedIn Ads-specific ad agency, in 2014. As official LinkedIn partners, they manage among the world’s most sophisticated advertising accounts worldwide. He's a ginger and triathlete. He and his wife live in Utah, with their 4 kids, and his company car is a wicked-fast gokart.
What are the benefits of LinkedIn ads?
“The targeting is amazing,” expressed AJ Wilcox.
Wilcox explained advertisers can target people “by their job title, their company size, their company, industry, seniority skills, the individual group names that they're members of, you know, gender, age, years of experience, the list just goes on and on and on.”
Company size is a must for Wilcox’s campaigns to make sure his clients are getting the highest quality lead.
“LinkedIn ads allow you to target professionals based on their title, company size, industry, seniority, and so much more.”
What are the main differences between Facebook and LinkedIn advertising?
Wilcox acknowledged the more developed technology and has richer features of Facebook Ads Manager and the low cost. LinkedIn in comparison is a more costly per click which is why narrowing your targeting is so important.
“Their middle to top-funnel kinds of strategies,” Wilcox explained about both platforms.
Wilcox’s goal of each post is to “get them to know, like, trust me, and be willing to engage.”
What and where are the LinkedIn Ads?
There are four different ad formats that any profile will see on their home page or inbox via desktop or mobile.
Wilcox gave a deep dive into how to spot the ads and how to make them work for your company.
The four ad types and where to find them:
Sponsored newsfeed - the second item in your newsfeed is always a promoted post. Wilcox noted you can add a lead generation form with these ads, similar to Facebook.
Text ads in the sidebar - the cheapest ad format and only available on desktop. These ads have the lowest click-through rate but the competition for space is low cautions, Wilcox.
Inbox - ads that are received in your target audience inbox. Wilcox stressed that his example wasn’t something he’d open otherwise.
Dynamic ads - are personalized ads that appear in the newsfeed. Advertisers have the ability to get creative such as including the face of their target stated Wilcox.
What is the best way to use each of the different ad formats?
“Not all companies need to use ads but all advertisers should know how to use each ad”, Wilcox on best practices for using LinkedIn Ads. Wilcox took us on a step-by-step layout of the ads manager explaining the best way to use each ad format.
Sponsored Content - “I’d recommend about 90% of people to start here,” said Wilcox, these ads can be graphic or video ads with a 150 character limit on the headline. Wilcox stated they are easy to troubleshoot because you’ll know if it’s the copy or the creative that isn’t performing. These ads don’t have a 20% text rule, they work on mobile, and can include lead generation forms. Wilcox shared that approximately 60% of his clients use lead generation forms because of the cost per lead feature. "
Text Ads - Wilcox cautions against them as they only have about 100 x 100-pixel image size, 25 characters for the headline, 75 for the description, and has a really low click-through rate. These ads are good for really large audiences with large budgets to spend. Text ads are available only on desktop and Wilcox encourages advertisers to consider if their audience is on desktop. However, run in conjunction with sponsored newsfeed they can play off each other increasing click-through rates.
Sponsored InMail - These ads are great for offering a VIP service, free tickets to an event, or something more specific to your warm audience instead of cold leads asking for downloads or paid products. Wilcox shared that if you use these ads as an introduction to your brand to “keep it very conversational short to the point.” These ads can have a call-to-action to send to a landing page, download something, or a lead generation form. Wilcox encourages advertisers to check their spelling and keep the headline under 25 characters so it doesn’t get cut off.
Dynamic Ads - Ideal for advertisers with large budgets as the click-through rates can cost $13-16 per click. Wilcox shared that they are customizable and have a special offer really makes them work. While they are customizable to include profile photos don’t go too crazy with options, keep it professional and personalized.
Can you share how the ads manager platform works?
Wilcox showed viewers how to create their own ads manager by going to LinkedIn.com/Ads and setting it up. In contrast to Facebook Ads Manager, you can have all your ad accounts linked through your personal account.
“You’ll see your impressions, clicks, and click-through rate, how much you're bidding, what your average cost per click is, conversions and leads,” shared Wilcox. He stated that your leads from generation forms will show here as well as conversions of landing pages.
Similar to Facebook’s platform, you have all your data right in the dashboard to really analyze your ads performance.
Is retargeting an option with LinkedIn ads?
“Website demographics, it’s free and you don’t have to advertise to use it,” shared Wilcox, “it’s all the traffic of your website, so you can see who is using my website, who is doing business with me, and who’s checking me out.”
Wilcox stated that retargeting isn’t available in the same manner as Facebook, the website demographics on LinkedIn ads are the best. You can see who is visiting your website by job title, company, industry, and more, “where else can you see this, for FREE?” exclaimed Wilcox.
To track your website demographics you’ll need to go to LinkedIn.com/ads and grab the code, just like your Facebook pixel. Wilcox shared that it takes about 300 views or a couple of days to start seeing results.
“The website demographics are free and easy to use once you add the code to your website. You can see which companies, job titles, etc are looking at your website. ”
What are your favorite targeting tricks?
“Excluding audiences instead of including specific categories”, shared Wilcox on his favorite technique
Wilcox shared an example of targeting companies with under 50 employees by excluding companies with over 50 employees. His reasoning was that not all companies have the marketing resources to fill out all the fields, thus this targeting technique allows you to include companies who leave the field blank.
Another trick is to “find the job function of sales and then seniority of manager” instead of only targeting the sales manager title. Wilcox played this out in real-time and the target pool increased by 1 million.
Advertisers can target different pools to test which ones are working the best, such as skills and seniority or groups with seniority. Wilcox recommends split testing a few to determine what works best for your budget and needs.
Wilcox’s best trick is account-based marketing, such as targeting the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or the names of companies attending an event you sponsor.
Loved this episode?
Then you’ll also love the episode with Judi Fox on LinkedIn for Leads - how to generate new business organically!
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