LinkedIn Ads Geek Out Session

Speaker A: Let's take some of that budget and give it to where we know quality is going to come from. It's like what LinkedIn has been doing to evolve their measurement. Because for the longest time you wouldn't know actually what was working on LinkedIn. It was kind of a crapshoot, just kind of a guess. But now, like, we're getting a lot better data to know what's working.

Speaker B: This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six Sense, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. All right, people, I have a geek out episode for you today. I spoke to AJ Wilcox, who is the founder of B2Linked. They're a LinkedIn advertising agency, so all they do is manage LinkedIn advertising for their clients. We went deep on LinkedIn. What's new, what's trending, how to get the most out of it, how do you know if your marketing team is doing it right? Just a lot of really tactical, actionable tips that they say. I really want to jump into LinkedIn and I want to do it bigger and I want to do it better. Love this conversation. Sorry we got a little bit geeky, but really good stuff. So I'm excited for you to hear it. So let's jump in. Aj, thanks so much for jumping on. I have been looking forward to this conversation because we're going to geek out on LinkedIn and who doesn't want a good geek out session? But before we get started, talk a little about, like, your background and kind of where you landed, where you are today. It's super important, I think, irrelevant to what we're going to talk about. Yeah.

Speaker A: So about 14 years ago, I fell in love with LinkedIn ads. I started out as an SEO and a Google Ads guy and I stumbled onto LinkedIn and I went, why is no one talking about this? And I ran LinkedIn's largest spending ads account for two and a half years. Then just over 11 years ago, I started my ad agency, B2Linked. And we're an ad agency that we're 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. We're kind of the OGs there. Over that time, I've started a podcast with now we're like 170ish episodes, I think. Gotten a chance to manage five of LinkedIn's top 10 spending customers just from our deep specialty. We've built our own internal tools, we've got our own, like, private community. I guess that's all you need to know about me is I just am absolutely in love with LinkedIn ads and want to help people any way I

Speaker B: can, I love them myself. But why, why love LinkedIn? Why do you love them so much?

Speaker A: You know, my background was in search, especially in B2B where we have these large deal sizes and these long deal cycles. Quality is super important. So when someone types a keyword, I couldn't actually tell how qualified were they and are they a consumer, are they a student or are they an enterprise customer? And I couldn't tell. But with LinkedIn because of the targeting, I could narrow in on just, yes, we already know you represent an enterprise sized company. We already know that you're the right person. Now we're just going to show ads to you based off of like just trying to get your attention. So it's totally the opposite end of the coin here, like the opposite side. I fell in love with the quality of the leads and its applicability, especially for enterprise.

Speaker B: You talk about some of those large customers and obviously you don't name names but like what were some of the industries and the spaces that those were in? Because I think it's our audience is primarily probably sitting in B2B tech, but you know, there's some folks that are outside of that as well, but love to hear like where you spend a lot of your time, especially early on.

Speaker A: Yeah, lots early on. In recruiting, obviously LinkedIn really cut its teeth um, as like being a recruiting platform. So that still works really well. But now the vast majority of what we do is, is B2B SaaS. So lots of high tech, a little bit of everything. We've done some B2C, we've done uh, some higher education and then obviously a ton of B2B both products and services.

Speaker B: Looking at LinkedIn now, looking across your customers. Now I think one of the things that a lot of B2B marketers that I talk to is they spend a way too much money on paid search. And I think part of it is like it works to some extent. Maybe there's some fear, like I have some view of my attribution but you know, if I pull money, what's going to happen? And when you think about your customers and how they're allocating, would you say that? And I don't know if you maybe have this level of information, but is there a shift where people are moving and budgets are heading more towards LinkedIn? Because I've seen a bunch of data recently that seems to indicate yes, but are you seeing that in practice where even your clients are saying, hey, like we're pulling back here, but LinkedIn is kind of where we want to push harder.

Speaker A: Yeah, Google seems to be slowly chipping away at, uh, like our ability to optimize. And so what I'm seeing is they've chipped away at it slowly enough that people will go, okay, keep my budget. I know it's not quite as effective as it has been in the past, but let's wait and see. We've finally gotten to a point over like, the last four or five years of chipping away, taking away our ability to target, taking away our ability to, to segment and, you know, control to where now people are finally saying, okay, this just, it's past the point of where it's not as useful anymore. Let's take some of that budget and give it to where we know quality is going to come from it. And part of that I know we're going to talk about a little bit later, but it's like what LinkedIn has been doing to evolve their measurement, because for the longest time you wouldn't know actually what was working on LinkedIn. It was kind of a crapshoot. It's just kind of a guess. But now, like, we're getting a lot better data to know what's working. And so Now I think B2B companies are feeling a lot more comfort in saying, all right, let's take budget from one, give it to the other, because we have proof that it actually is doing a good job over there.

Speaker B: Again, there's sort of these, like, living in the world of a sound bite of like, oh, LinkedIn's too expensive, or it's top of funnel, or it's bottom funnel. And let's just use an example. Clients, like, I just pulled a bunch of money off Google. They're probably like, all right, it's a good idea. But, uh, maybe it's not what I do because there's like, there's a certain expectation or there's a certain, I don't want to say predictability at this point, but they know, like, especially if they're like, okay, I can look at last click attribution or last touch, and I can say, okay, like add, click, form, fill, let's say as dumb request conversion. A lot of LinkedIn, you're not going to see the direct path on some of them. So how do you make that leap so somebody, A, doesn't have a nervous breakdown and B, they're convinced they can make the budget move. But, like, how do they think about it from a full funnel? Say, like, yeah, I still have to hit performance level goals or performance marketing type of goals. How do you present that from a LinkedIn perspective how they're going to do that.

Speaker A: We've done this right and we've done it wrong. And so uh, I'll share with you what not to do. What not to do is if you've never advertised on LinkedIn before saying like, oh, let's take half of our Google budget and drop it in LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is going to be a longer term play. We know, and I've just recently run a study where uh, I figured this out. Every additional touch we have with someone is making them five times more likely to convert. So we end up building people into a three stage funnel because we know getting them into stage three is where we're going to have the highest likelihood that they will accept a uh, like uh, meet with someone in sales and have the lowest cost for that. But you could imagine if you have to build a three stage funnel where someone has to then interact with something at stage one, then interact at stage two in order to get to three. Now we're talking about considerable money spent and considerable time spent just to build the funnel structure. So what I've now started telling people is hey, build up LinkedIn separately, give it three to six months to build the funnel, to really start educating and nurturing that audience and getting to where you're top of mind. When you add additional budget to it, you can give that budget right to the warmest audiences, give it right to stage three and stage two and it's gonna be a lot smoother of a handoff.

Speaker B: We were talking about this, but from a measurement perspective I guess, sort of the from to like where things were, where it was sort of a crapshoot. Where is it headed now and where are you seeing in terms of just both from LinkedIn's own tooling, but obviously there's a lot of different ways now to even sort of use other solutions as well. And my guess is you said you've built some tools and maybe some of that's measurement. We could talk a little bit about that as well.

Speaker A: But totally the big challenge that LinkedIn has had. I mean I've been on this long enough. I remember going to one of the VPs of product at LinkedIn and trying to make a case for them to implement conversion tracking. And they turned me down. They said, oh, our advertisers don't need conversion tracking. They're already doing something on their own now. They obviously they have conversion tracking. They've got some of the best retargeting technology that has ever existed. Across any ad channel out there. But the things I'm most excited about, they have this new report called Revenue Attribution Report. They call it rar. And what it does is in your CRM, you tell it. And right now I think it's only integrated with like 3 CRMs. I think you have HubSpot, um, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. But what you can say is when a deal hits either sales qualified lead status or closed deal status, it's a different report. Like they're separate. Send the company name over to us here at LinkedIn. We will tell you from people who work at that company what sort of interactions they've had with your ads and your company posts. And so it would be very easy to say, oh, this is LinkedIn trying to take credit for the deals closed off of our other channels. But don't think about it that way. Think of it more of like, hey, this is how our multiple channels are playing together. And when you have multiple channels who are hitting the same people, what that's telling you is your targeting is right on LinkedIn and your other channels are doing a good job of reaching the same people that you chose to target on LinkedIn. And this is going to give us more faith that our ads are hitting the right people and that they are having an effect. Not just saying, yeah, LinkedIn actually gets credit for all these ads that Google said it closed.

Speaker B: No, that's a really good way to think about it too, because I think I've seen some numbers out of that report and it was like, I don't think you generated $900 million in business for me. But you know, that's a good perspective to take.

Speaker A: And you can change your definition. You can say like, oh, it has to have been not just someone received three impressions to show up on this list, but it has to be that they have to have engaged with an ad in the last 90 days. Like, it's a good report for that. And what I love so much about it is this is the report that every channel wishes that they could release. But obviously Google, because they don't know what company someone works for, they couldn't build this report if they tried. And meta, same deal. This is a report that only LinkedIn could ever come up with, just because it's the only channel that knows where you work.

Speaker B: 6 Sense we were partnered with LinkedIn. We're able to push our data to LinkedIn and use a lot of the other things that we have. There's a lot of belief that bringing third party data to inform LinkedIn is a huge way to just increase your productivity and uh, increase your effectiveness there. What are some of the strategies that you're using with your clients? You're just seeing in general on bringing additional data which again like, like you said, LinkedIn's got this. Targeting is no better. There's nothing better. But how can third party data help? What are some of the best ways to do that?

Speaker A: So you think about why LinkedIn and Google are opposite sides of the same coin. Google's able to target people by what they're looking for, but it loses control over who they are professionally. LinkedIn without any other sort of data source, they're able to target someone by who they are, but they lose that intent. And of course anyone can upload any kind of list to LinkedIn ads. This is free, it's manual. You can upload a list of companies or you can list upload a list of individuals as a contact list. And so yes, that's annoying to have to manually create lists, but anyone can do it. So now when you start talking about six Sense or any other data provider that you're plugging in, it's made easier because number one, you integrate directly with LinkedIn so you're pushing these audiences in to meaning that the advertiser doesn't have to manually upload a list anymore, which is annoying and it's prone to loss. You've made our job a lot easier that way. But now you're starting to plug in intent data, uh, into the filters that already made LinkedIn amazing. And now we're really getting best of both worlds. That's the beauty of it.

Speaker B: Is there other data sets that you've seen or outside of intent or you know, additional, even technographic firm, other types of data that helps even further?

Speaker A: Yeah, but it depends on the company. Like we had a use case where we brought in data from builtwith.com to say when someone has this tag installed on their site, we know that they are an enterprise customer of this product and that was important to them. That same targeting may not be important to another brand who doesn't care what product they're a user of. Totally is down to your business use case. But yeah, data from anywhere awesome. As long as it's applicable to the business.

Speaker B: Someone's listening now. Uh, maybe they're a marketing leader or they're, they're looking in there. Okay, maybe they're looking to make that shift or they've already made a shift and they're wondering is my team doing it right? But how do you know if your team is running LinkedIn correctly in terms of most, uh, effective way to get the most dollars in ROI out of it?

Speaker A: There are five pitfalls that I see advertisers making. I've been shouting these pitfalls from the rooftops for the last 11 years. So other LinkedIn ads pros are also doing the same thing. So I feel like if you are running into any of these pitfalls, it may be safe to assume that your team isn't paying attention to what thought leaders are sharing. So let me just run through those pitfalls. Number one is if you're targeting a geography, LinkedIn's default geographic targeting, they will call recent or permanent. And what we found was anytime we're, we're targeting, let's say, the US for a client in the summer, they will start telling us, hey, why are we getting leads from India and Pakistan and the Philippines? And we go, I don't know, we're targeting the U.S. what's happening is what LinkedIn calls recent is someone who has been in that location in the last six months. So easily one of the best things you can do is just go change your geographic targeting to, say, permanent location. They have to say they live in this area in order to start seeing our ads. So especially after the summer, for the next six months, you start tightening up your quality of leads. Number two is there's this box that they check underneath your targeting, and they will automatically check it. It's called LinkedIn audience expansion. That is poison. There's no other way to say it. I don't know why LinkedIn thinks this is valuable enough to be a default option. It, it's like a lookalike model. It uses the same algorithm as their lookalike targeting did that they shut down two years ago because it didn't work very well, but now it's still, like, inside of your campaign. I don't love that. So always uncheck that box. Number three is actually the worst offender. This is down below in your placements as you're kind of scrolling down your campaign build, there's a placement that they will auto select called the LinkedIn Audience Network. And without an allow or a block list to try to control where your ads are being shown, we have found the majority of traffic is bot or spam traffic, and that's obviously not good for us. The worst part about using this option is LinkedIn will spend 95, 98% of your budget on the audience network and leave very little of that budget for LinkedIn. So if you're running the LinkedIn Audience Network, you're pretty much just wasting all of your budget. You need to get that shut off. Numbers four and five here. This is when you get down to the bidding and budgeting section. If you can see all of your campaigns are running on maximum delivery bidding. That's LinkedIn's default bid type. And surprise, surprise, it's the most expensive way to pay for your traffic. If you're using manual bidding, this is kind of our number five. Let's say someone is smart enough to have figured out, ooh, we should probably bid manual CPC bids, great. But then LinkedIn gives you this suggestion where they say other people like you are bidding 20 to $80 per click and they're encouraging you to bid really high. Unless you have a Fortune 500 level budget for LinkedIn ads, you do not need to bid anywhere in that arena. For measure here, uh, the majority of our clients are paying 7 to $9 per landing page click. And so you can imagine like we might be bidding 13 to 15 on some campaigns, but if you look at your campaigns and they're all bidding 20 plus, chances are they probably need a little bit more education.

Speaker B: So those are the five. I guess the next question is if you are a marketing leader and you're trying to understand the value, they're not hitting these five pitfalls. It's running right. You talked about that raw report earlier and again, this is something that's going to come up when reporting upwards to your CFO or whoever else. What are some of the other and best ways to show roi? Report that data back to leadership.

Speaker A: This first one is really good, but it's also kind of hard to implement. So in the last year and a half, LinkedIn have released the, uh, Conversions API, or CAPI for short, and they have all these integrations. Probably your CRM, whatever you're using has an integration with the Conversions API. And so what you can say is as soon as someone becomes a lead, send their information back to LinkedIn, they match it up and wow, you don't even need a cookie in someone's browser to be able to measure that they converted, which is awesome. The downside is the information you're collecting. Let's say you're collecting first name, last name, work, email, maybe just those three fields. For LinkedIn to match that person up by email, they have to have given LinkedIn their work email and most haven't. So you might find that you try to implement this Conversions API because your conversion tracking is underreporting. Let's say by, by 20%. Uh, you add this piece on where it's only able to, to figure out 40 to 50% of, of conversions. It's like you're trying to carry your data around in a leaky bucket. It just falls out. So there is a really cool solution. And this cool solution is anytime someone clicks on one of your ads from LinkedIn, in their URL, LinkedIn will insert something called the LI FAT ID. This is their unique identifier for that individual on LinkedIn. So if you can capture that, if you send that back to LinkedIn, you're going to have a hundred percent match rate. LinkedIn goes, well, of course I know who that person is. I was the one who issued that id. So getting with your tech team and saying, okay, there's this parameter in the URL, how do we store this as a first party cookie so we can hopefully get 95% of the people when they fill out a form to end up passing that ID through. And now we've got more like a 95% reliability in our conversion tracking, whereas we only had 50 to 70% before.

Speaker B: All right, so then looking at LinkedIn, there's a lot of innovation going on. There's lots of new ad unit types, there's all sorts of things that are happening. But like from your perspective, like outside of measurement, because we talked about kind of the continuing to advance measurement, where do you see things going overall from LinkedIn from an average, like add new types of ads, other types of targeting, like if you were to put on your sort of like vision forward of what it would be, what do you think is happening?

Speaker A: Two big strides I see them making. Number one is in measurement, which we kind of touched on. The other one would be actually in personalization, we'll call it. About two and a half years ago, LinkedIn released a new ad format called Thought Leadership Ads. It's a funny name for something that really should be very simple. Rather than sponsoring a company's post, it's being able to sponsor an individual's post. And what we found through much testing is that if you say exactly the same thing from a company no one's ever heard of versus an individual that they've also never heard of, you're going to have three times the engagement rate and one third the cost on the one that comes from a person. So now it's like, oh, uh, how can we get our marketing message into, uh, something being shared from an individual rather than from the company? Because we're going to get attention for a Lot cheaper. And that's really the magic of these thought leader ads. What we're finding is that the highest performing ad on LinkedIn is a personal video. It would be like a talking head, me talking to you and sharing. Here's a tip trick strategy, industry update. Something that you need to know about and it's short and then shared by that person and then promoted from the ad account. And then what you can do is do like a retargeting of, hey, anyone who watched 50% or more of one of these video ads, let's then start showing them something from the company. That level of personality, it's increasing your effectiveness at less budget. It's really blowing things up. They also just released a few weeks ago the, uh, ability to put personalization fields inside of ads. So if you don't see it in your account right now, you probably will very soon. In any of your newsfeed ads, you'll have a little button that says personalize. And you can say, as long as someone's privacy options are configured to allow this, you can insert their first name or their company name or their job title into the ad copy, making it a lot more relevant to them. And so I see in this world of AI where everyone's trying to say, let's let the computers do it, the advertisers who are now saying, let's make it more, more, one on one, more personal, less AI, they're the ones who are going to be getting the majority of the attention and women, the slot

Speaker B: leadership ads have been out for a while. Then they added like, you know, a bunch of features. And so it still feels like it's early days in terms of a lot of folk, a lot of companies not using them. So definitely look into, We've seen some pretty good results, results ourselves with them. So. All right, last question. I think I'm, um, sitting there putting my, my marketing leadership hat on again. I want to make a jump to either doing LinkedIn better or doing LinkedIn bigger. What are the questions I need to ask to say, okay, you know, this is the right move for me as a marketing team or marketing leader right now for my team.

Speaker A: So many cool directions we could go on this. So I love efficiency. I'm cheap as a person. And so what I want to do is I want to nail it at small scale and then scale it from there. So that would be my recommendation, is get your account to where it's very efficient in a small and controlled way. You understand what's happening. And then there's Lots of great ways to scale from there. Increase your audience size, breaking your audience up into smaller, more functional pieces. I, uh, call them micro segments. There's even, like, increasing your budget and your bid to reach more of your audience. That would be my favorite approach. Of course, you could just jump right in and say, hey, the program's working great. Let's Frankenstein things onto it and build onto it. But then it's a lot harder to know. Like, if something doesn't work, what is it that isn't working?

Speaker B: All right, so this is completely unrelated to LinkedIn, but this is a question asked to all of our guests. What is the most ridiculous thing you've ever been asked to do in your career? And it could be ridiculous, good or bad. And good, you know, someone's like, wow, I can't believe I get to do that. Uh, or versus bad. Like, I can't believe I have to do that.

Speaker A: There's been a lot of ridiculous things. One, I'll say, every once in a while, we'll get a client who is very well funded, and they will come to us and say, we want volume and spend at any cost. So we currently have one client. I'm not going to call them out. And there's obviously good reasons for this, but I'll say, hey, we shouldn't be bidding super high. We don't want to pay LinkedIn too much. And they'll go do it if, uh, LinkedIn suggests a $60 bid. Bid 61. So, you know, me being a bootstrapped firm, I've had to shoehorn my brain into that type of approach. But I can see it. I understand the value behind. You're highly funded. You need to make a splash now. Yes. Pay too much.

Speaker B: Is there a point of, like, where you're paying too much is not having any effect?

Speaker A: Yeah, there totally is. A lot of testing goes into this, but what we'll find is, uh, let's say we're bidding $22 per click, and LinkedIn is showing our ads and filling our budget. If I reduce that budget, let's say, by 20%, and my reach does not decrease by more than 20%, then what I know is I was paying too much. And as I reduce, I'm just lowering my costs, but still reaching all the same people. So where is that line of, like, ooh, if I bid higher than this, I'm just giving LinkedIn more cash versus trying to reach new audience that I couldn't have qualified for before.

Speaker B: So that's the first time in 83 episodes of asking that question. I was able to learn something about the original content of the show after you said it. So there you go. AJ this was awesome. I appreciate it. We could do this all day. I have a lot of questions. I love LinkedIn myself. But we'll stop because we don't want to do the sort of, uh, Ben Hur edition of this. So thank you so much. Appreciate you coming on.

Speaker A: Awesome. Happy back anytime. I'll geek out.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you sir. Thanks for listening to this episode of Revenue Makers. If you're looking for more info on how to stay on top of the latest marketing trends, check out our resources in the show notes and subscribe to the Secret Sauce Monthly newsletter. You can do it at the bottom of every page at sixsense. Com. It's packed with practical tips and insights that can help you level up your marketing strategy. See you next week.