LinkedIn Ads Show

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Use cases for both excluding and targeting your current customers Demographics Episode Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 117

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Creativity needed in marketing Who should and shouldn't advertise on LI Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 116

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Ads Library Spying on competitors' ads Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 115

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Forrester B2B Buying Insights Website Demographics Episode Frequency Caps Episode Retargeting LinkedIn Traffic on Google and Meta Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 114

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Excel Reporting Walkthroughs on Youtube Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 113

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Market Research Episode Benchmarks GA4 Product Market Fit Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 112

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 111

Show Transcript Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Chris Lavigne on LinkedIn CMO Scorecard Report Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 110

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Blog Post On Improving Lead Quality on LinkedIn Ads Virality on LinkedIn Demographics Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 109

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Bidding/Budgeting Relevancy Score & Auction Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 108

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Product Market Fit How to scale your LI Ads Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript So you want to scale your LinkedIn Ads? Well, beware of the blocks and hurdles on your way. We're discussing what's keeping you from scaling your performance on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've certainly heard the phrase, nail it, then scale it. It's referring to when you find something that works, and you want to take full advantage of it well, because of course in business and digital marketing, where things are moving so fast, something that worked well yesterday may not work at all tomorrow. This is almost always the goal that we have with LinkedIn Ads. Nail it at first, and then scale it up in the 1000s of advertising accounts that we've run and consulted on, we've seen about every possible combination of situations where a team is wanting to scale their successful efforts, we've seen about every possible combination of situations where a team is wanting to scale their successful efforts up, but there's some blocker or hurdle in the way. So today, we're gonna go through all the possible things that can hinder your ability to scale. First in the news, one of our awesome B2Linked teammates, Landon Thorne noticed something new called group objectives on one of his accounts. And essentially what this is, when you go to create a new campaign group, LinkedIn says, if you're willing to attach an objective to that campaign group, and have every single campaign under that campaign group share the same objective, then LinkedIn can do this dynamic budget optimization thing. And this is taken directly from meta over there. It's called campaign budget optimization, or CBO. But essentially, you say, I have a whole bunch of different campaigns here, LinkedIn, I'm going to let you decide which campaign you give more budget to and which ones you give less to just optimize for whichever is performing best. Now, I'm imagining that this is something that's going to be rolling out over the next several weeks, and we'll start to see it in more accounts. Personally, I'm not in a huge hurry to try to use it simply because choosing an objective for a campaign is one of the levers that we have to test and get better performance. And so I feel like if I'm forced to choose the same objective within a campaign group, it's constraining and could hold back my performance. But for those of you listening, I'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. If you've got a great use case for this, and especially if you find it to work especially well. Alright, quickly highlighting a review, Exclusive8 on Apple podcasts from the UK says, "Thank you, I'm following you for nearly a year and all the tips and tricks that you and your team shares help, and they work 100% of the time. It gives me confidence and motivation to improve strategy regularly." And the heading of that review was LinkedIn Ads Bible. Exclusive8 , I don't know who you are, but I really appreciate you leaving a review. As that is the biggest compliment you can pay us. And I'm so glad that we've been helpful to you in your LinkedIn ads journey. And you, yes you, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. So if you haven't already, if you're a regular listener, please do go and leave a review, especially on Apple podcasts. All right onto the topic at hand, let's hit it. First off the hurdles that keep us from scale. There are a whole bunch of different hurdles that you'll come across at different times and in different ways. So these will be a no certain order, for sure. But we'll go pretty deep into each of them. The first is audience size. So when you're trying to scale your campaigns, and you want to turn the budget up and start getting more, if you don't have a large enough audience size, you may realize that you try to turn that knob up, and nothing happens. Or what's worse is when you turn that knob up, you start increasing your budgets, and you do start spending more, but it's just your costs to increase. And it's not actually your performance, you're not reaching more people. And this is something you can test actually very easily with your current audiences. Try increasing your bids by 20%. And just see did your level of impressions and did your reach increase over that amount of time? If so, it means you probably haven't hit that level of diminishing returns, which is great. That means you have some more ability to scale if you want it. But let'

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google Analytics 4 Events Episode Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are your landing pages leaving something to be desired? If so, your LinkedIn Ads aren't performing as well as they could be. We're teaching you how to make your landing pages super powered on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, your landing pages dictates so much of your performance that you can get from your LinkedIn Ads. But it's really complex, because a lot of marketers who are responsible for paid social are not responsible for the landing pages or the website. But with landing pages that are inefficient, it makes everything you do look worse. Never fear, I'm about to give you a framework for landing pages that perform on LinkedIn. And let's be honest, every other channel too, because that's kind of how it works. But first in the news thought leader ads now support video. We've shared in the past how thought leader ads could only boost a post that was single image or text only. So now thought leader ads can boost video posts, which I'm really excited about. The more power we can get from thought leader ads in my book, the better. Eric Jones brought up the LinkedIn ads fanatics community that document ads now have their own version of retargeting, which is amazing. The more ways that we can retarget also the better. So now when you run a document ad, you can now retarget anyone who interacts with the ad in any way or just people who performed chargeable clicks on your ad, or those who downloaded the content of the ad. This is awesome! LinkedIn, keep it up. I really hope this means that dynamic ads retargeting, text ads retargeting, and the messaging ad formats, event ads even, I hope all of these are going to get their own retargeting very soon, I want to highlight a review that we got on the podcast Vaanee Goel says, "Such a fantastic LinkedIn Ads podcast. I've been following AJ on LinkedIn for a while. And about a week back, I subscribed to the podcast and started listening to it. When I heard the first two episodes, my mind was blown. It's been just about a week and I've listened to almost 10 episodes. They're incredible, so much content, such great explanations, and very articulate and coherent. I see these helping me a lot. I'm gonna listen to them all over the course of time. Now, thanks for sharing your knowledge with people including me. This is an abundance mindset in its truest sense. And it really helps." Vaanee, a LinkedIn Ads consultant out of India. Vaanee, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Thank you so much for sharing that review. That means a ton to me. And as you guessed, I am big on an abundance mindset. So I'm really excited that you're getting a lot of value out of it, as well as everyone else, too. I'm not trying to keep this all for myself. And neither are any of us here in the B2Linked team. We're constantly looking to see how we can share better. And everyone else, I want to invite you to leave a review on the podcast. I would love to shout you out live like this as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. Our topic here is on landing pages. And it's a really complex topic, because there's so many different elements of a landing page. And I want you to consider the landing pages that you're currently using. And think about ways that you can use these tips to make your landing pages even stronger, or fix them if they're not performing very well. I'm gonna list a lot of different kinds of elements, I want you to know that these are really in no particular order, unless I say this one is really important. And I will say that. Consistency in Messaging The very first one is consistency in messaging. Now one of the big challenges that we run into is that oftentimes, we say something different in the ad than what we say on the landing page itself. It may seem like a small thing that in your ad copy, maybe you're talking about this free content. And then when they go to the landing page, they don't see you talking about the content in the same way. But this can be a real source of confusion for your visitors. So what I recommend is make sure that whatever way that you're referring to the content in your ad, make sure that the landing page itself reflects that. Use the same words, use the same title of content, any way that you can connect that original thought so that when the visitor gets there, they're not left confused or wondering if they made it to the right place. Meeting Expectations And this leads u

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google Analytics Login Scroll Depth Tracking Time On Site Tracking Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Does the mention of Google Analytics 4 send shivers through your bones as a LinkedIn advertiser? Never fear. I'm walking you through everything you need to know about GA4 on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, Universal Analytics is now gone. And Google Analytics, or GA4 as we'll call it, is the new reality for us marketers, I don't want you to miss a beat during this transition. So we're going to go through everything that you need to set up and use in the new GA4 that will help you analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic. So this isn't going to be a resource for setting it up. You should already have GA4 setup. So I'm not going to go through any of that. But my aim here is to give you all the tools to analyze your LinkedIn Ads specific traffic. We're gonna go over which reports to use to actually analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic plus specific events that you'll create to show engagement from your ad audiences and how to create conversions from them. First, I want to highlight a review here, Vadim Aizenshtein left a review that says, "One of the most awesome professional marketing knowledge sources out there. As a performance marketer, I quite often find myself looking for inspiration and knowledge. The problem is the mass of bs and fluff, "experts" out there that help fill the airwaves with irrelevant and misleading content. AJ's blog and podcast is an oasis of amazing insights and guides for marketers who actually want actual results, and not just show that they're making noise out there. Thanks, AJ." Hey, Vadim, I really appreciate such an awesome review for us, we try extremely hard to make sure that there's no bs here. And that the information we're putting out is exactly what we wish someone would be able to share with us as we were learning. And please, everyone who's listening, do go leave us a review, it is by far the best way that you can say thank you, for us coming out with this content every week. And of course, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. As an advertiser on LinkedIn, you're likely not just sending all of your traffic to a form asking for a conversion, or at least I hope you're not. So in this case, you're paying high LinkedIn prices for traffic, but you won't have conversions to show for it, at least not yet. But how nice would it be if you have some proof that the traffic was actually working, they were engaged with your content, they were liking what you were putting out, I've got two great ways for you to do exactly that. The first is called a scroll depth event. We've linked down in the show notes to an article by datarivenu.com. And it walks you through exactly how to do this through Google's Tag Manager. Essentially, what you're doing is you're telling Google Tag Manager to watch and see what the user is doing. Once they scroll past a certain depth of the page, it can fire an event that then gets logged into Google Analytics. Now, it's important to know that by default, Google Analytics 4 has an event that is called scroll event, but it has some serious disadvantages. So I'm going to help show you how to customize yours so you can get past all these. The default Google Analytics for scroll event, it triggers only when visitors get to 90% of the web page. So almost the bottom, this is actually pretty good practice because many websites have footers that take up a little bit of room. So you don't actually expect people to make it to a full 100% Scroll if they have consumed all the content. So 90% is a good rule of thumb. But relying solely on a 90% scroll depth is pretty weak in my book. I would like to go and add another couple scroll depths that would help us understand how intensely people are engaging with our website. So go read the article on datadrivenu that will walk you exactly through how to do this, my recommendation would probably be to create one event that's at 50% scroll, and another one that's 70% scroll, and then the default GA for one is going to trigger at 90%. So now you have three ways of finding out how many people are scrolling past 50%. One little correction that I have for the data driven you article, as you're following it through, we tried to follow it. So about halfway down the article where it actually starts teaching you how to set this up. The headline here says how to set up scroll depth in Google

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Do you want to guarantee that your LinkedIn Ads will be successful? This is the episode for you. Buckle up and let's go. We're talking about everything you need for success on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've talked to and worked with many 1000s of marketers all about LinkedIn Ads. And there is one common thread if I can draw this. And that's everyone wants a guarantee that their LinkedIn Ads are going to work. Although it's impossible to guarantee success. We put this episode together to give you the highest chance of success. And I brought a special guest today that I know you're going to love. AJ Wilcox First highlighting a review Detayil from Turkey says, "Great podcast for LinkedIn Ads. This is my go to podcast for LinkedIn Ads. AJ Wilcox has insights and thoughts on different subject matter are super helpful." And then Detayil left the shooting star or shining star emoji. Now I hope I'm pronouncing your name, right. So please reach out and correct me. But I love your name. And thank you so much for the kind review. I'm so grateful that our content can be helpful to you. AJ Wilcox Alright, I'm stoked to bring Parker Williams on as a guest. He has been working with B2Linked for years, first as an account manager, then he was our head consultant. And we've also given him in charge of sales. Parker talks to advertisers and marketers every day. And he knows the process all the way through. I'm bringing him on to share his insights for what brings success. All right, let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Hey, everyone, I'm super excited to have Parker Williams here. For those of you who don't know, Parker is our head consultant. He's our head of sales. And I'm bringing him in on this conversation to talk about what it is that you need when you're starting LinkedIn Ads. I wanted to bring him in for this conversation to discuss are you ready for LinkedIn Ads. So Parker, thank you so much for joining me today. Parker Williams You're welcome. I'm excited. This is gonna be awesome. AJ Wilcox So Parker, I've got to ask you, because you're the one who was the first person to talk to all of our clients. Why should you even care about LinkedIn? What does it have that other channels don't? Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I don't believe that there's any other platform out there that allows you to target a specific company and the job title and be able to pair that with intent triggers or data that signifies that they might be in market for a service that you're selling. That's just extremely deadly to me. And that's for just companies that are wanting to add business to their pipeline. If you're using LinkedIn for other objectives, which we're going to go into that don't deal with sales, maybe it's with recruiting, or just brand equity, and employee or employer value proposition and building your brand equity. There's no other way to do that than on LinkedIn. AJ Wilcox And I especially love the scale, because there are platforms out there that will let you target by things like job title, and company name and company size and all that. But LinkedIn, because the vast majority of white collar professionals out there have LinkedIn profiles, the scale is near endless. I don't know if you feel the same way. But it's so rare when someone comes to us with a larger budget than they can effectively spend on LinkedIn. Parker Williams Yeah, so true. AJ Wilcox Alright, so who should be considering advertising on LinkedIn? Parker Williams Yeah, I get asked this question a lot. And it really depends on your purpose. And, of course, the size of your company. And if you have the budget, it is an expensive platform. We always tell people that. But it's only as expensive as you make it. So I do think it's important to always consider your purpose or the objective for advertising on the platform. So we usually break it up into three categories. The first category is if you're wanting to generate leads or sells utilizing LinkedIn Ads, you want to make sure that you have a lifetime value between 10 and 15k, or an average deal size of 10 and 15k or, or more. And then the next thing is making sure that you know that your buyer is on the platform. So we work with a lot of B2B SaaS companies. And if I told you, if you're a B2b SaaS company, and you were wanting to and I told you this platform was perfect for you, but you sold software to dentist, this probably wouldn't be the best

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Jae Oh's LinkedIn Profile Jim Habig's LinkedIn Profile Link to help doc for setting up Revenue Attribution Report B2Believe Episode Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Revenue Attribution Reporting just launched in your LinkedIn Ads account. What is it? I'm glad you asked. We're diving into the new functionality on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! As of July 1 of 2023, LinkedIn launched the Revenue Attribution Reporting tool within LinkedIn Ads. You can access it now, it just requires that you have business manager set up for your account. What the report does is it connects your LinkedIn Ads to your CRM, so you can get reporting further down in your sales process, which is super valuable. You've heard me talk about this before. This is a rare public beta. So there will continue to be further developments and new features added. This is just the beginning. To teach you about the revenue attribution report. I have not one guest, but two guests to drop hardcore knowledge bombs on you. The first is Jae Oh, you've heard me mentioned him on the podcast before. He's been with LinkedIn for five and a half years. And he's a director over product management. Jae and I go way back to 2018, where we met at a LinkedIn hosted customer advisory board event. And he's been over so many products that we've all worked with on LinkedIn Ads, he's awesome. The next heavy hitter I have for you is Jim Habig. You may remember him from Episode 79, when I highlighted his presentation at the B2Believe event in San Francisco. It was a fantastic presentation. I got to sit front row. Jim Habig is the Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn, which I know, is really awesome. Now make sure to stick around to the very end, because I have some thoughts on this. Plus, I'll tell you exactly how to get it set up. First in the news. If you listen to episode 100, you'll already know about this, but we just launched the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. And if you join before the end of July in 2023, you'll be grandfathered in to the lowest price that it will ever be. That's $59 a month. Inside the community, you'll have access to our four brand new courses taking you from the very beginnings of campaign manager all the way through our expert training. You'll also have access to our whole community of like minded LinkedIn Ads professionals that you can bounce ideas off of, ask questions, and of course, I'm in there, my whole team's in there, nd you can ask us anything. Go to fanatics.B2linked.com for more information there. I wanted to highlight a review that the podcast got. This one came from Sean Possemato. He's the head of operations at Cameron Digital Consulting out of Boston. And he said, "Great guy and a trusted resource. Fivestars. I've had the pleasure to get to know AJ professionally and a little bit on the personal side. He went out of his way when I was helping build out the next steps in my career five years ago. I'm competent in LinkedIn Ads, but always refer my network to AJ because I can trust that he will treat anyone I refer with the utmost respect and deliver quality results. Oh, yeah, amazing show. There aren't many, or any marketing podcasts that walk through actual data to learn from." Well, Shawn, a huge thank you for me, I really appreciate you leaving the review. So grateful, the contents helpful and so grateful, I could have been a helpful mentor to you in your career. And also thanks for the ride to and from the airport and getting to hang out with you whenever I'm in Boston. And to all you listeners, I want to feature you and shout you out here as well. So please do go leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Alright, with that being said, it's time to hop into the interview. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Alright, everyone. I'm so excited to have these interviews for you today. First off, Jae Oh, he's the director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, leading teams, building the audiences and measurement capabilities of the LinkedIn Ads platform. So Jae, super excited to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Anything I didn't cover in the intro? Jae Oh Hey, great to be here, AJ, thanks for having us on. Not covered in the intro is the fact that I'm probably getting less sleep than I ever did before with a two year old running around. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. AJ Wilcox Congratulations. Jae Oh Thank you. And of course, you know, there's always som

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Pixel Helper for LinkedIn AI for writing ad copy Thomas Veraar on LinkedIn Free LinkedIn Ads Startup Guide Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Everything you need to set up and begin optimization of a LinkedIn Ads account in one podcast episode. That's right, you best buckle up, because it's gonna be a wild ride. We're covering the complete startup checklist for LinkedIn Ads on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Years ago, we launched the LinkedIn Ads startup checklist. At the time, it was a one pager with nine checklist items that we created for the community and we gated it. It was helpful for those that were just getting started advertising on LinkedIn, and just needed a simple resource to get moving. We've kept improving it over time and it's now become an 11 page guide with not just checklist items, but detailed instructions on how to do the things that we recommend. Plus, we went beyond the nine necessary items and scaled it up to 14 that included the non-essentials, but highly recommended steps to getting success on the LinkedIn Ads platform. This guide is currently free and totally ungated. If you go to B2Linked.com/checklist. I think there's a ton of value there and I highly recommend it. So this episode kind of acts like an audio companion to that free guide. But I'll also get to expound quite a bit here and audio in ways that it wouldn't have made sense in the guide, it would have made it too verbose. First in the news, I have a whole bunch of things that have built up over time, so we're gonna cover all of them very quickly. The first is that Thomas Veraar, who's a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, you've heard me mention him on the show before. He reached out after the recruiting episode, and gave our listeners a little bit of a tip. I mentioned that job title plus geography is one of the ways that we like to target for recruiting. And he chimed in and said, especially for recruiters, he loves the fields of study targeting facet. He said that fields of study are far more aligned worldwide than job titles are. And they are pretty general. He said, job titles for the same position can differ by region, which is especially important where he's from in Europe, because regions aren't very large. He said, another reason why I like the field of study for recruiting is because fields of study are added more to LinkedIn profiles than job titles. So even if someone didn't ever update their job, they're usually going to update their field of study. Sometimes he suggests using this as an option, because sometimes people end up working in areas that they didn't study in. But lots of times it lines up and make sense. Of course, it depends on the ICP, but for example, architects, lawyers, engineers, etc, are much easier to target with fields of study. Now, I really like this idea of using fields of study. But I do think we can layer on job function on top as a way of getting the best of both worlds. So we get field of study to make sure we're getting someone who studied what it is we're looking for, but then a job function on top that tells us whether they're doing it right now. So Thomas, thank you again, for taking me up on what I always suggest, which is, let us know give us feedback on the podcast episode. And I'd love to shout you out and share your advice as well. Thomas also mentioned something that I've actually been wondering about for a long time, the concept is when we install the LinkedIn pixel, sometimes it's really complex to know whether or not it was installed properly. And we pretty much have to just wait for retargeting audiences to build or some conversion starting to come through for us to tell whether or not it was set up properly. Sometimes it's pasted right into the code of a website and you can miss some pages. Sometimes it's dropped into a Tag Manager like Google Tag Manager, which is very convenient, but then it's hard to check, because then all of that JavaScript is running at the event layer. And because I'm not a JavaScript programmer, I don't understand where it is. So I found a really cool resource. It's actually a Chrome plugin, and it's called Pixel Helper for LinkedIn. You can see the link in the show notes that will take you right there. But it's basically a Chrome plugin, but it is really basic. It's a Chrome plugin that just tells you whether or not you have the pixel installed properly on any page that you visit. It works only for Li

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: April Dunford on LinkedIn Conversation Ad Changes Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox We ran LinkedIn Video Ads under three different objectives and compare the results, we show you exactly how to get the best performance for your video ads on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Speaker Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I've got a guest for you that I'm super excited about today. It's Eric Jones, who is B2linked head of marketing. He brought the results of a killer AB test to me and I just had to have him on as a guest to share with you the results. Eric is one of my favorite people on the planet. You'll appreciate the depth that he thinks about LinkedIn ads in his responses, I know you will. First in the news. When I logged into the platform today, I saw a pop up announcement that says, "We've added new metrics". While we make improvements on conversation ads, we'll start tracking and reporting on headline impressions and headline CTR. And then you can click learn more. So I did. As I clicked this, it took me to a help article, all about the new conversation ad format. And I was actually really shocked to see this because I knew at some point that conversation ads are going to become conversation starter ads. But this seems like an evolution even before that. So there's this table in the bottom that shows you the difference between legacy conversation ads, and the new and improved ones. And what really caught my attention, were a couple of the things. First is in frequency caps, you probably already know that legacy conversation ads, they've only been sent to a LinkedIn member once every 30 days. So once you've sent one, your competitor can't send one for 30 days. But in the new and improved one, it says it will generate up to three impressions every seven days. So this is really interesting to me. Now our conversation ads are going to have more impressions rather than just that initial one. Now, you probably already know that the only way to pay for conversation ads before was on a cost per send. And that was usually anywhere between about 50 cents to $1 per send if you were sending in North America. But the new and improved conversation ads have a cost per click price. It says advertisers pay only for the initial click that opens the message. The last call out I'll mention here is that with the legacy conversation ads, it was right at the top of either the focused or the unfocused version of your inbox. But in the new and improved version, it opens in the focus tab. And if someone clicks on the ad and then clicks on a call to action button, the ad will stay in the focus tab. But if they click to open the ad, but don't engage with any of the calls to action, then it automatically gets moved to the other the unfocused inbox. So this actually sounds really cool. And now that I'm reading through this, this really could become conversation starter ads. So maybe that's what this is. They're just not putting a name to it yet. But everything I'm reading so far, I'm a fan of. I wanted to highlight one review here from Apple podcasts, the user FancyNancyPansty, which is the greatest username in the whole world. Nancy, reach out to me, let me know that this is your review. I'd love to tell you how impressive that name is. But she says, "Makes me better at my job five stars. It's pretty nerdy to look forward to a podcast about paid media buying, but I do. Really great actionable content here. Fun and lighthearted and not dry. Give it a listen." Nancy, I really appreciate that review. I try really hard not to make this dry. Alright, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. AJ Wilcox I'm so excited to have Eric Jones on the podcast for the first time. Eric is very much what I would consider my partner in crime. I'll give you kind of his background here. He's been in digital marketing for six plus years now, plenty of experience, obviously with LinkedIn, but also with Google and Facebook. He's managed ad campaigns in many different industries, many of which were also B2B, SaaS, healthcare, finance, entertainment, and more. He's currently our Director of Content Marketing here at B2Linked. Eric, welcome to the show. Eric Jones AJ, I'm so stoked to be here. Thank you so much for having me. AJ Wilcox Absolutely. Eric, is the reason that we put these podcast episodes together so efficiently. He works together with me on almost every single one. So having him actually be intervie

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Campaign Setup Bidding/Budgeting Audience Segmentation Offers that Drive Conversion LinkedIn Insight Tag Conversion Tracking Retargeting LinkedIn Ads Performance Benchmarks Excel Reporting Playlist AB Testing B2Linked's Blog Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community and Get Access to Our Beginner-Expert Courses Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you a LinkedIn Ads 1%er? I'm going to show you exactly what it takes to close the gap and become a LinkedIn Ads expert on this week's episode, the 100th episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I'm so excited to tell you that this is the 100th episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. You longtime listeners, thank you for sticking around and spending so much time with me. It's absolutely an honor to know that I get to join you when you're commuting, exercising, walking your dog, washing your dog, exercising your dog, anything you choose to do while listening to podcasts. If you're new to the show, thank you forgiving me your ear as well. My mission with everything B2Linked does is to empower 20,000 companies advertising on LinkedIn to give them the best tips, tricks, strategies to get lower costs, better scale, and higher performance. And you are all part of this mission. Now I know many of you are already advanced advertisers. Some of you are primed and ready to go from zero to LinkedIn Ads hero. No matter where your starting point, this episode is what you'll need to get you into the top 1%. In researching for this episode, we went back over the last three years, and we hand picked the topics that we're going to be the most valuable to you. Of course, we would invite you to go back and listen to each of these episodes individually if you want to deep dive. But I'm going to touch on the top principles and topics that will really help you get the most traction. In the news, I have an announcement that I'm absolutely bursting at the seams to tell you. Because you are loyal listeners of the LinkedIn Ads Show, I wanted to give you an exclusive benefit here. For years I've been asked to put out courses. I've even partnered with LinkedIn Learning, and a couple others to create training content, but we never had our own. Candidly, this was 100% my fault that we didn't put these courses out. It felt to me like an absolutely insurmountable task to build courses that I was proud of. And then to keep them updated over time, and to promote them along the way. I've talked to many course creators in my close network just to get their ideas and experiences and advice. When I do courses, I don't want them to be like many of the useless courses I've taken over the years, I want them to be something special. Special to me doesn't say paying a high price for one course or a package of courses that you never actually get around to taking. And real success comes from not only watching course content, but implementing it and taking part in the community. So for me courses from B2Linked would have to be so much more than this. Well, I'm actually shaking right now, as I'm telling you this, I am so excited to announce that this dream is finally a reality. Because as of today, the courses are live. We created a community for you LinkedIn Ads fanatics, where for not a huge one time fee, but for a low monthly fee, you get access to all four courses that range from beginner to expert presented specifically and designed by me. But that's not all, you'll get access to the whole community. My highly specialized and highly trained to be to link staff are in this community answering questions and sharing valuable platform updates. I'm in there answering questions as well. You'll then have access to the combined knowledge and experience from all the other LinkedIn Ads fanatics in the community to bounce ideas off of and learn what's been successful for them. We are calling this community the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics. I feel so strongly that the value has to be there for you learners, especially here at launch for you founding members who will be some of the first in the community. So we priced it specifically low. $79/month gets you access to all the courses, as well as the future courses and additional content, all updates, plus unlimited access to the community. Then we have a higher tier for you A plus students out there, we're calling you super fanatics, you get access to everything that I've already talked about. Plus you get access to a weekly group workshop with me. And that's for a total of $279/month. These are all month to month no contract cancel whenever you need or if you stop getting value out of it. But as a bonus for ou

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Dashboard Lashay's Visual Framework Lashay on LinkedIn Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox What kinds of blog content reliably turns prospects into customers through your LinkedIn ads, you'll get the whole framework on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you've been a listener for a while, you know, I don't do interviews very often, especially outside of LinkedIn employees and partners. But Parker on my team heard today's guest on the Exit Five podcast, and she dropped so much gold, we had to have her on here. She's a content creation master. And she's going to share how us marketers can use blog content, along with our ads to result in closed business. She's really opening the curtain and sharing her full strategy on how you can do it too. So get ready to take some serious notes. Today's guest is Lashay Lewis. She lives near Washington, DC, and has plenty of stellar case studies on how her approach works. First off, I have to tell you that Lashay is so my people. She's a hardcore lover of B2B SaaS, she's got lots of kids like I do, she's an entrepreneur at heart, you're absolutely going to love her. Before we get into the interview, I have to tell you, this is episode number 99, which I am so stoked about. But get ready because we're going to have a full on celebration for episode 100 next week. We've got a big announcement coming. And I don't want to spoil it now, but you're not going to want to miss it. The review we want to highlight this week is from user Daniel356. And sorry, Daniel, I don't know who you are from your username. So I don't know how to thank you personally. But Daniel left this review, he said, "Best LinkedIn Ads resource on the interwebs. The LinkedIn Ads Show is by far the most insightful and comprehensive resource to stay up to date on LinkedIn Ads. You also get cool ideas and strategies you can try right away. I can't think of another podcast or piece of content on the interwebs that provides so much actionable information to run LinkedIn Ads properly. You can tell AJ and his team spend a lot of hours preparing each episode. I love the structure, because you can always come back to any episode in case you need a refresher." Daniel, thank you so much. I absolutely love this review, because you shared specifics about what you love about the show. And I'm absolutely honored that you'd leave it. As an aside, I don't always know when I'm reviewing a podcast what to say or how to share it. So I have to say that your review is an absolute masterclass in giving feedback. Ahuge sincere thanks for doing it for our show. And you if you're a loyal listener, I would absolutely love to have you go and leave a review on the show. The best place I found to do that is on Apple podcasts. And if you leave us a review, I'd love to shout you out live like this. All right, with that being said, let's hit it and jump right into the interview with Lashay Lewis. All right, Lashay Lewis, I'm so excited to have you here on the podcast. For those of you who don't know, Lashay Lewis is the founder of AuthorityPlug. Lashay tell us like give us your intro, brag a little bit. Lashay Lewis Yes. So thank you so much for having me. First of all, like you said, my name is Lashay and I am founder of authority plug. So what I do is I teach B2B SaaS companies how to create profit driven content marketing strategies. And a little bit about my background like I've been doing this stuff since I was 16 years old. I started off building Amazon affiliate sites for all my people out there that remember those? Started off doing that. That's where I first really gotten to the methodology of different parts of the funnel, top, mid and bottom. And the funny thing is, ever since I started doing that, I kind of have ingrained this methodology in me, but as I grew in my career, I realize you know what, SaaS companies would pay me a lot more to do this than just me going off and creating these small microsites and you know, a really low percentage commission. I'm like, Saas companies will pay me a whole lot to do this. Fun fact, I did not like working with SaaS companies. In the beginning, I actually did ecomm in the beginning. But I feel like that experience in ecomm actually transcended to B2B. And I feel like it makes me bring a different angle to the B2B marketing space. It's not as boring and you know, things as kind of like the stigma that's out there, like, oh, B2B has to be B2B does not have to be boring. And I think my time and ecomm kind of helped me bring that direct to consumer experience to the B2B space. AJ Wilcox I totall

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Demographics & Analytics Episode Bidding Episode Relevancy Score Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you having trouble spending your budgets on LinkedIn? It's a common problem. And we're talking about how to spend your daily budgets without getting gouged on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of the challenges that we regularly face with LinkedIn Ads is difficulty actually spending our defined budget, it's actually really easy to spend your full budget if you don't mind paying too much for your ad traffic. But we're operating on the assumption that you're a sophisticated marketer that doesn't want to overpay. So on today's show, we're going to talk about all the aspects of spending your budget and how to do it efficiently. First, in the news, Shae on our team, she is winning every award right now for finding new stuff, she noticed that some of the accounts she's working on have a new UI change, where when you hover over a campaign group name, or a campaign name, the edit button appears right underneath. And this has been really confusing to advertisers for a long time. Because if you know, if you click on the actual campaign name or the campaign group name, it assumes you want to see the performance underneath that and the ads underneath it and not access the settings. So how many confused clicks have happened over the years where someone clicks on the campaign name, because they want to get to the settings just to realize that they are now in the wrong place. And they have to hit the back button. I bet that there have been collectively 10s of years wasted on that particular oddity in the user experience here. So the fact that we have a nice easy edit button, right, as soon as you hover over, you don't have to hit the three dots over to the right, I think is actually going to save a lot of time and a lot of headaches. Like I mentioned, this is only in some of our accounts so it's probably on a rollout. I would imagine that everyone listening will probably have it within two, three weeks. Corey on our team also noticed something and honestly, he actually noticed this month's back, and I made a note and I just forgot to tell you guys, so here we go being transparent. It used to be that we could get ads approved that had up to three emojis in the ad. But now he realized that we're limited to two emojis, unless it's a video ad. We don't know how many more emojis that we can stick in a video ad. But we know that it's more than two. So Cory, thanks so much for pointing that out. I wanted to quickly highlight a review that's been left here on the show, Mony Chhim, who's a LinkedIn Ads specialist out of Toulouse, France. He left the review, "Best podcast for LinkedIn Ads. Great podcast. Thank you, AJ." Hey, Mony, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Thanks so much for taking me up on my invitation to leave the show review. I really appreciate it. You rock. All right, anyone who's a regular listener, I want to invite you please do leave us a review, I want to shout you out live as well. All right on to the subject at hand. Let's hit it. First, I think we need to define what budget means because there are so many different definitions to be aware of the first meaning of budget is your actual budget. This is the money that you have set aside as a company to spend on LinkedIn Ads. So for instance, if your boss comes to you, or your VP of marketing or whatever, and says you have $15,000 a month to spend on LinkedIn Ads, that's your actual budget. Now that actual budget is going to be dispersed among several different campaigns most likely, then we have a campaigns daily budget. This is the daily budget that set on the campaign level. And this is mostly what we're going to be talking about today. LinkedIn allows itself to overspend your campaigns daily budget by I think 50%. So this isn't really a hard and fast rule. But we rely mostly on these campaign daily budgets, then there's also a lifetime campaign budget. Now this is where you can kind of just give money to a campaign and set it and forget it walk away. As soon as it's spent all of your lifetime budget, then it will pause the campaign. Now, I will admit we don't use lifetime budgets very often because I see it as being very much a lazy way to manage LinkedIn. And of course, we're not lazy and how we manage. But this is a tool that you actually have in your tool belt. Alright, so with spending full budget, like I mentioned in the intro, it's really easy to spend your entire daily budget on LinkedIn, but I guarantee you that you will pay too much in the process. What

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Top Rank Marketing's Site Lee Odden's LinkedIn Lee Odden's Instagram Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Are you using influencer marketing community and thought leadership as part of your LinkedIn Ads strategy? We dive into these topics and more on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Today I have a special treat for you. Lee Odden has specialized in B2B marketing for his almost entire career. And I'm grateful to call him a friend. He and I have spoken at many of the same B2B events. Although I have to admit he's oftentimes the keynote, while I'm one of the breakout speakers. But, I've always looked up to him as a mentor and a thought leader and a friend. Today, we have a wide ranging conversation covering everywhere from thought leadership to influencer marketing and building communities in B2B, and I promise as a B2B marketer, you'll get a lot out of this. I wanted to highlight a review here by Alessia Negro. She's a senior sales and marketing executive in the hospitality industry out of Dublin, Ireland. Alessia says, "Absolutely great podcast. I have learned a lot about LinkedIn from this podcast. I think whoever wants to learn LinkedIn ads should follow it." Alessia, thanks so much for the kind words. And I do agree. Although I realized I'm a bit biased. And if you're a regular listener, I want to feature you so make sure to leave a review. And I'll shout you out live here. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it. Alright, we've got Lee Odden, co founder of TopRank Marketing. Lee, thanks so much for joining us. We're super excited to have you here. Lee Odden It's great to be here, AJ. Good to see you. AJ Wilcox Alright, so first off, tell us a little bit more about yourself. Anything that I didn't cover in that rather short and sweet intro. Lee Odden I started in marketing, and basically the late 90s. I was actually got into the website sales game selling websites over the phone to small businesses, believe it or not, people would fax us their brochures and we'd make a website out of that. And then of course, people started asking how are we going to get traffic to these websites that you're making us? And that's where I learned about SEO, you know, about creating doorway pages and, you know, creating different web pages for different search engines AltaVista excite Lycos hotpot, you know, no one has heard of those. But then Google came on the scene and linking, and content became more important blogging, social media, and really, over the last 10 years really leaned into the whole idea of CO creating content with influencers. So ultimately, what we tried to do is help customers be the best answer help our clients, b2b tech companies mostly be the best answer for their customers. And it's worked out really well. And, you know, it's kind of funny, on the path from being a really small agency to serving small customers to now serving large enterprise brands. I took that advice myself, right. So I started blogging, and I started doing the kinds of things to make myself known in the industry as a magnet to the agency. You know what I mean by speaking at events and being active on social and connecting with people who were influential to make myself influential, you know, and it's been a fun ride. And when I'm not doing marketing stuff, I'm usually running running is kind of been my thing during COVID. Basically, when I'm actually training for my first marathon, which is going to happen in four weeks. So I'm pretty excited about that. Oh, that's so AJ Wilcox Exciting! Alright, so what's your preparation for the marathon look like right now? I know, you start to do a lot more mileage as you go. Are you doing like low high mileage right now? Lee Odden Yeah, my highest mileage will be tomorrow. But I did 23 miles last Saturday. And I'll probably do 23.5 or something like that tomorrow. I don't need to do much more. Because the whole race is 26. Yes. So yeah, I've been running more than 13 miles for the last seven weeks or so. I've even run a couple of half marathon races just as a workout, which is kind of a crazy idea. Because a year ago, I was wondering whether I could even run 13 miles, let alone run one quickly. And quickly is subjective quickly to me. Not quickly, compared to a lot of friends of mine that I have out there that are runners that are just smoking it, but it's a great way to get out. It's a disciplined thing. It's a lifestyle thing. Now for me, I feel odd if I haven't run that day. And so it's good for your health. And it's great to have goals, right? Yes, it's great to work towards a goal an

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Reporting Episode Bidding Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Have you used LinkedIn Ads to recruit employees? You mean it's not just for B2B marketing? Yeah, we're talking about white collar recruitment on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Thomas Veraar, who is one of our loyal listeners, he's also a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, he reached out and suggested we talk about this topic. And it's a really important topic, because it's one that gets overlooked regularly. LinkedIn themselves in their marketing have gone all in on B2B. So these alternate cases where it's technically B2C, they don't really get much attention. Well, that changes today. We're gonna go over recruiting and hiring. We'll cover why it's great to do on LinkedIn Ads, and exactly how to execute campaigns like this. First up, we have the news. Our last episode was all about the ad rotation settings and we had a listener, Laura Seery​, who's the Senior Social Media Strategist out of the Marketing Practice in Seattle, Washington, she reached out and said, "I use rotate ads evenly for a week or so when adding new creatives to an existing campaign to give them a fair shake up against the top performing ads that were already there and let the algorithm learn about these new ads. Not sure how effective the strategy is, but it's what I've always done." And, Laura, I want to thank you, that's a really cool use of even ad rotation. As you know, one of the biggest problems with the LinkedIn ad auction is that existing ad creatives are weighted much heavier in the auction, because their performance is already known to LinkedIn. And it's less risky to keep showing ads that you've already shown before. So your usage here is actually really smart. It allows you to keep running existing creatives that have performed well and test something new into them. That said, I generally recommend against this, because when you launch new ad creatives, if there's anything detracting from them, you won't get data as fast. So my personal recommendation would always be to pause previous creatives when you launch new ones. But if you don't want to do that, yours is actually the perfect approach. And as a reminder to everyone, please reach out to us I share the email address [email protected] all the time on here, and I want you to use it. Reach out, let us know what you're thinking about episodes. Let me know if there's anything I missed. I also want to congratulate LinkedIn and their employees. Many of you may not know but May 5th this year, LinkedIn celebrated 20 years in business. So so cool. And Eric from our team, noticed that there was a layout change in the campaign creation process. As you go to select an objective, there are prettier buttons and icons that kind of draw your attention to what objective you're going to care about most. And then when you get down to the ad formats, where you get to choose those, the buttons and icons are prettier there, too. So very cool, doesn't change the functionality at all. But hopefully, it's going to be a lot easier to draw our attention to the objective and the ad format that we want. drewva left a review on Apple podcast that says, "New to B2B marketing. I run a services firm that's beginning our journey into the B2B Digital Marketing. AJs podcast has been a great source of learning and ideas. My entire marketing team is listening and using his techniques. We really appreciate the knowledge and value he is sharing. Thank you, AJ." Well, Drew, I absolutely appreciate you sharing it with your team, the tips and tricks and secrets that I'm sharing. I absolutely love it when you share it with others. So thank you for the awesome review. And thanks for sharing it with your team and getting everyone listening. And everyone else I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. So leave us a review on Apple podcasts and I'd love to shout you out. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it. We're talking about why LinkedIn Ads is actually good for recruiting? Well, first of all, LinkedIn really is at the core, a hiring platform. And I tend to fight against this concept a bit, because it's a great platform to spend time and to learn and to grow professionally. But I can't argue that it really started out as a job platform. In fact, up until 2013, when the newsfeed rolled out, it was only then that in my mind it legitimately became a place that you could actually spend time and interact socially. That was really when it actually became a social media platform in my mind. I recently had a friend reach out who was part of a reduction in fo

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: AJ's post describing how AB testing tool works Episode on AB testing Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Ad rotation settings on LinkedIn Ads. Should you rotate your ads evenly to get better data for your AB tests or leave on optimized for performance? It's a trick question. And we'll cover exactly why on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! As most modern ad platforms do, LinkedIn has an ad rotation setting that at first glance appears very intelligent to use, but it's not. And we're going to talk today about why. I'll even share with you why I call this the "charge me more and show me less button". In ad rotation, there are two different options. There's the default called optimized for performance. And then there's one called rotate ads evenly. I want to love rotate evenly because we're always testing. But it is rarely the best option to use and we'll cover why. First off in the news, Shae on our team brought to my attention a new rollout called comparison metrics. And I've noticed this in many of my accounts, since what it is, is when you choose your time range, you can choose the comparison range as well. So if you're looking at the last week, it'll automatically show you the changes from the previous week, along with percent changes next to each metric. So in the screenshot that Shae took for us, I can see that spend was up 37%, and visits were up 23.9% and costs were up 18%. So in this screenshot that Shae gave us, I can see that in the past seven days for this client, our spend is down 37% visits are only down 23%, which shows cost savings. Cost per click was down 18% and number of impressions were only down 11 and a half percent. It's hardly what I would call a game changer, but this kind of data can be really helpful just for understanding what's my performance doing over time. And being able to see that right within the platform. I applaud LinkedIn for coming out with changes like this. I wanted to highlight a couple reviews. We have DenisefromCumbria, and Denise I'm sorry, I can't figure out who you are on LinkedIn, just searching for Denise and Cumbria. But she said, "At last LinkedIn ads takes the floor. AJ is an expert in the space and then sharing some detailed information here. Episode One is packed with detail". Denise, thank you so much. I sincerely try to pack every episode with detail. So I do hope you're still a listener, we'd love to give you a shout out there. And if I can find out who you are, I'll shout you out by your full name and title and all that. Then we have username CGProverb, CG says, "A fantastic source of information five stars. I recently found this podcast when AJ was interviewed on another marketing podcast I follow. I have to say, after only listening to a few episodes, the content is invaluable. I am hooked. Thanks, AJ, for sharing this with us." CG, I'm so glad to have you hooked. Thanks for listening. Same goes to you. If you want to reach out to me and let me know who you are, I'd love to shout you out full name and title and company on all that. Okay, back to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. So we get asked a lot about the rotate ads evenly option versus the optimized for performance option. And I first started playing with this feature back in 2011. And like I mentioned in the intro, I really wanted to love it because I'm always running an AB test. So of course, I would want both of my ads, or maybe even all four of my ads to be shown evenly. So I can tell which one is getting a better click through rate. As we know with the way that LinkedIn ads works, when you launch, let's say two ads in a campaign, one is probably going to get a significant amount of impressions more than the other. So I wanted to even that out. So I started testing this and I actually started out testing it at a large scale. And I'm really glad that I was spending hundreds of 1000s on this test, because it allowed me to see the impact very quickly. And now I'm sharing this impact with you. Every single time I turned on this option, I noticed the same thing happened, impressions would drop. And this is significant. And my effective cost per click, no matter how I was bidding, would increase significantly. At the time, I had to go to my LinkedIn reps and ask what is going on here? Why would this be happening? But then LinkedIn and later years have come out and actually changed the definition of what this option is. So if you open up campaign manager, you have to actually go into editing one of your campaigns, and then get to the ad step. And right at the top of the page as you're seeing your ads. It'll say ads in th

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Click to Message Ads early sneak peek Vidmob Study by Cooper Nefsky Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you prepared for the LinkedIn Adspocalypse come down into my prepper shelter. And let's talk about the end times. I promise I have enough mashed potatoes and root beer to get us through the turbulence on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, my apologies for skipping a week of recording recently. I went on a much needed vacation with my wife over spring break. We ended up going on a cruise down to Honduras and Mexico. And it was absolutely amazing. But now I need to work on losing those four pounds that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Pesky pounds. Like I shared in the teaser, we're talking today about changes to the platform that may come. And I'm super geeking out in this episode, so I'll leave it at that for now. Let's jump into the news for this week. First off Vidmob, who has an official LinkedIn partner, they released a study recently all about how people are interacting with video ads. And it's a really solid study, lots of good data. I couldn't even begin to plan a test like what they've done. They analyzed all different types of things that video ads might include. They might be length, or color contrast, or whether a logo was present, or who the subject of the video was all of this stuff that is very subjective with video, but they have incredible data for it. I've linked you to an article on LinkedIn by Cooper Nefsky, who's head of partnerships at Vidmob. And he wrote it up really well. Here were some of the quick points that I pulled out. For all objectives. videos that are shorter than 30 seconds tended to have the best engagement. So that's a great reminder, we should keep video ads short. Make sure your logo is burned into the video. There is quite a bit of advice out there saying like don't dwell on your logo and don't try to make it a big branding piece. But honestly, I totally agree with what they said, because they noticed an average 17% lift in click through rate when the brand logo was present during the first few seconds opening. Another great tip here was to make sure you include a human storyline when possible. They said especially in the consideration phases of advertising in those objectives, that human storylines tended to play much better. This one's not a big surprise. But I'm really glad to see the data around it. Brighter colors and high contrast works really well in the awareness objectives. And this makes perfect sense, because it makes it a thumb stopper. This is what we've always recommended with static ads in having bright and high contrast and colors to what else is on LinkedIn. So this was really cool to see. I was also really impressed, they had three different reports. One that was industry agnostic, they had one specifically for financial services, and another one where all of their examples are tech. So I highly recommend go check out those reports. I was really impressed. I also got an email recently. And the subject line was credit available for paused LinkedIn ads that were launched in error. As I read into it, LinkedIn realized that there was a glitch that happened back in December of 2022, where some paused creatives went through a review and actually went live despite being paused. So this may or may not apply to you, it actually only applied to like four of the accounts that we manage. And I don't know how big that credit is that we're going to get. But I do just want to take this chance to commend LinkedIn for going back after the fact and letting us know when they've caught an error and refunding us. This is something I haven't seen on any other platform, at least doing it this actively. And I have high praise for LinkedIn to reach out with these types of things. I had two reviews I want to highlight this week, a user by the name of India9076 Sorry, if your name is India, I don't know how to figure out who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But they said, "Great podcast. I've learned a lot from listening to this podcast, great for those who are looking to scale up their LinkedIn activity." India, thanks so much for leaving that. We also have a review left by BillyGubby. He's the Pps Director at pink sheep out of the UK. He left a review that says, "Great as always consistently great, useful info from AJ." Billy, I really appreciate you saying that we work hard on consistency. So with that being said, I want to feature you. So if you're listening and you have not left us a review yet, please do go leave us a review. And I want to give you a shout out live here. Okay, on t

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Illiana Acosta on LinkedIn Partner Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox LinkedIn 's official marketing partner program. Who are these partners? And how do you become one? What are the requirements? We cover the LinkedIn partner program on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ads show. Illiana Acosta Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've heard us talk about how we're an official LinkedIn partner. And you've probably used the tools of other partners to manage or report on your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. I met Illiana Acosta , who's one of the senior managers of the LinkedIn partner team at the B2Believe event that was in November. We talked all about that event on episode 79. And I thought it would be really interesting to bring her on and talk to her all about the program. Many of you have asked me what it takes to become a partner. So this episode is for you. First in the news, Jae Oh, who's head of ads measurement and audiences at LinkedIn. He wrote an article this month, called What's New With the Company Engagement report on LinkedIn. For those of you who don't know, there's this report that if you go and click on any of your audiences that our company list uploads, or sometimes we call them our ABM lists, if you click on that Companies list, it now takes you to this report called the company engagement report. And this is so cool. If you're advertising to a list of companies, now you can get all of this analytics and demographics information about who is actually engaging with your ads. It's way cool. Well, Jae talked about all the new updates that have happened to it. And I wanted to point out the things that I thought were really cool. First off, there's this company segmentation feature. So now you can dynamically prioritize the accounts that you're going after in certain campaigns, you can actually create a static list of here are the companies I want to go into which segment. But what's so exciting to me is the dynamic segmentation, where now you can say every day, I want LinkedIn to go to my list and go just for the companies that have the highest engagement. And let's show ads specifically to them. And you can have another segment, that's all about low engagement. So now with your campaigns, you can show different messages to companies that maybe aren't as engaged so we can try something new. The static segment is actually just a snapshot of the lowest engaged companies. And it's not going to change. We've linked to that article down in the show notes. So go give it a read and check it out. If that's interesting to you. I wanted to highlight a review left by Craig Sea. And that's the last name is S E. A. Craig says, "Very insightful and educational. I'm so happy I came across this podcast, I've learned a lot from it. Myself, being a beginner, started listening to this podcast. I've also started AJ's course, which is giving me a lot of confidence to get started running my own ads. Great podcast five stars from me." Craig, thanks so much for heeding the call and leaving that review. I'm so glad that couple of our resources could give you the confidence to begin advertising. You get five stars for me as well. Thanks, Craig. As a reminder, I want to feature you as well. If you haven't already left us a review, please do. And I'd love to give you a shout out. All right. Without further ado, we'll go ahead and jump right into the interview. Let's hit it. Illiana, I'm so excited to have you here. For those who don't know, Illiana is a senior manager on the LinkedIn ads business. She supports the LinkedIn Marketing Partners. She's also the Global Co Chair of the Latino ERG at LinkedIn. Illiana, thanks so much for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm and welcoming me on your show. AJ Wilcox You and I actually just met at the B2Believe event not too long ago back in November. Yes. It was awesome to get to hang out with you get to know you a little bit. I was excited to have you on the show because obviously you know so much about this. So give us an introduction to yourself. Tell us about yourself anything that I may not have covered in the intro. Yeah. Well, I was Illiana Acosta Well, I was born on a Monday. Oh, wait, no, I won't go back that far. I have been with LinkedIn for about four and a half years and I have been supporting our channel sales business which is our LinkedIn marketing partners program since day one. So I've seen it since its let's call it infancy stages to now its teenage years where we are operating almost like a mid level startup, if you will, right. It's like this crazy, awe

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Certified Marketing Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you a LinkedIn certified marketing expert yet? It's time to get on that. This is your study guide to get certified on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! After announcing that I was one of the first six certified marketing experts with LinkedIn, lots of you reached out to ask how you could get the same certification. So this episode is a walkthrough of the certified LinkedIn Marketing Program. So you can get certified as well. We'll cover what it takes to achieve all the levels of certification, as well as how to stay certified once you get there. First in the news, we had a little scare happened last week, where some advertisers suddenly found that several features of the LinkedIn Ads platform we're missing. Hat tip to JD Garcia for pointing this out in a post he put out. We found that on some accounts, text ads were gone as an ad format, website visits campaigns could no longer bid by max delivery, message ads were gone, which is not totally unexpected from what we talked about in the news last week. So all of us advertisers were totally up in arms, trying to figure out what are we doing without these features. Luckily, LinkedIn confirmed later that day that it was just a bug, but we still got some fears around it. So we're planning an episode soon that will go into depth on all of these things, what it means the future, and what we can do to work around things like this, if they ever do change permanently. So stay tuned for that. I wanted to highlight a review here, the username, thecrusher1263 said, Great podcast. This is easily the best resource on LinkedIn ads that I've ever found." So the crusher, I don't know who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But I certainly appreciate the shout out there. Me and my team all work super hard to make sure that this stays the best resource on LinkedIn Ads out there. So thanks for that. And you listener, if you agree that this is the best resource out there on LinkedIn Ads, please follow the incredible example of thecrusher1263 and go and leave us a review. Honestly, it's the best way that you can say thanks for all the work that me and my team put together for the show. And of course, I will give you a shout out. So go leave a review, Apple podcast is usually the best place to do that. But anywhere you can leave a review, I would love it. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it. So we're talking about LinkedIn certified marketing program. And for those of you who want me just to read you the address, you can go to training.marketing.linkedin.com. And of course, that URL is in the show notes below so you can just get easy access. Just scroll down look at the show notes. This program has been a long time coming. For years and years, I've been talking to LinkedIn about having a certification program. Five years ago, I was even working with the team to create a certification exam. And then that project kind of got shelved and it got pushed off. But now that it's out, it actually turned out to be a much bigger deal than I originally thought. I remember the early days of Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications. I believe Google Ads was always free., but the certification exam has been kind of difficult. But I definitely remember Google Analytics. remember paying $50, and you only get one chance. And if you don't pass, you have to go pay another 50 bucks. But it was a really complete training course. And the end exam was something I really had to study for. $50 is obviously not a ton to invest into your career, but it definitely shows if you're willing to pay 50 bucks, you're in and you're invested. And that was also a low enough amount that companies would sponsor their employees. We'd be willing to pay 50 bucks to get an employee certified. Then Facebook blueprint came along and to become Facebook certified, it was actually kind of expensive. I don't remember the cost, I want to say it was like $2,000 or something like that. But you had to really want it. So going into this LinkedIn have some great models to follow. And here's how the program ended up being structured. First of all, it's free, anyone can do this, which I really appreciate. It's also a very complex program with lots of requirements that goes way beyond just passing a test. And actually, there are multiple tests in a variety of different areas of marketing. When you go to get signed up for the first time, you'll sign in with your LinkedIn credentials. And the instructions are pretty clear how to work your way through the program. I'll also say t

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Microsegmentation Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript What standing in the way of your prospect buying your B2B product or service. It's the buyers committee. Today on the LinkedIn Ads Show, I'm going to teach you how to turn these into advocates instead of roadblocks. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! In B2B, we can reach the end user, but most often, someone else needs to sign off on the purchase. We call these individuals, the buyers committee. And although our end user really can campaign internally to try to get the deal done, it can be very profitable to help them along. On today's episode, we're going into detail about who the buying committee is and what we say to them. And make sure to stick around to the very end, as I'm going to share the exact methods of targeting that I use to reach the buyers committees. Let's go ahead and get started. First in the news, we got an email back on March 15, from Romina Bin Mac Donnell from LinkedIn. And she said that on May 22, message ads will begin to sunset. And you may experience slower campaign delivery. As I'm reading into this, it's probably something like a quarter of the profiles on LinkedIn are going to be sunsetted each week. I think many of us are used to LinkedIn having things roll out on Tuesdays, it looks actually like things are starting to get rolled out on Mondays instead. Because May 22 is a Monday. She said as of June 19, advertisers won't be able to create new message ad campaigns. And then by July 31, message ad delivery totally ends. So there's going to be that gap between June 19 and July 31, where you can't create new message ad campaigns, but they will still deliver to that last few people who still have access. In the past, we've talked about the new ad format that's replacing them being called click to message ads. It looks like they now have a new name. They're called conversation starter ads. And she says, "Conversation starter ads are a new messaging ad format that appears as a rotation of ads in a fixed placement in the inbox. They encourage members to click to initiate conversations in the focus tab. And they will replace today's sponsored messages. As with message ads, conversation, starter ads will not be available in the EU." Now this is AJ again, I was really hoping that this new ad format would allow us to start advertising in the EU that maybe somehow they made it around the GDPR regulations, but it doesn't look like that's the case. She goes back on to say, what action should I take? To minimize disruption to your message ad campaigns, we encourage you to switch from message ads to conversation ads by June 19. And this is all 2023, obviously. Conversation ads will automatically evolve into conversation starter ads, starting on May 22, with availability increasing over time. Conversation ad campaigns require no attention at this time. I'll definitely have more to share on these because we are in the beta for conversation starter ads. So I'll have more info to share on that in the next few weeks. On March 20, we noticed several of our client accounts had access to the new AB testing tool. If you've been listening for a while you may have heard us talk about this. This is a tool that we've heard LinkedIn talk about for years now. Well, it looks like it's actually just been rolled out. If you don't have access to it yet, just wait because it's probably being rolled out a quarter or a sixth at a time. And again, launching on Mondays. So check your account. If you don't have access check next Monday. The way you can check to see if you have access to this tool is you go under test in campaign manager and then when you go to click on create test, we used to only have brand lift test, but now we have AB test. The call out inside of campaign manager says test different variables like your ad format, your creative content, your audience, or ad placement to see what performs best. As we dove into it to see what kinds of tests we could create, I was actually really disappointed. And that's because you can choose to test an ad or an audience against each other or a placement against each other. But even if you do ads testing against each other, the test says it will automatically create two campaigns to test the two versions of your chosen variable. So that means you can't just AB test your current creative inside of a single campaign. It's going to arbitrarily create two brand new campaigns that after the test is over, these are just cluttering your account. We are very much proponents of an evergreen account strategy, trying to reuse campaigns whenever possible. Because those campaigns you're

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Drew Boyd's LinkedIn Profile Positioning interview with April Dunford April Dunford LinkedIn Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Over the hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts we've managed, we've seen a lot of companies fail. Today we're talking about what you can do to make sure that your approach is built for success on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I don't like to admit defeat, but after managing hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts, unfortunately, we've seen many companies fail at LinkedIn Ads. My definition for fail here is this is client churn for us where after they work with us, they stop advertising on LinkedIn completely. Analyzing these failures, as well as many, many successes, thank goodness, we found the common denominators, the essential components to this success. We'll go through each one of these in a lot more detail. But here are the essential components. Number one, the client needs to be clear on their ICP or their ideal customer profile. This means they understand their pain and who they are. It's our targeting in LinkedIn. Number two, they clearly understand the value they offer to that audience. They have product market fit. And number three, they know how they're competitively positioned in the market. So today, we're gonna dive into ways that you can research and develop your ideal target audience, and figure out what messaging will work in your ads. We're addressing your go to market strategy as it relates to LinkedIn Ads, but this is also going to relate to your entire business, your whole marketing approach. In the news, we've heard some really great feedback from our last episode, and I'm so glad that you all enjoyed it so much. It was the one on bidding and budgeting. And afterwards, I got a great question from Steven Owen, who manages demand generation at a company called Getac. He smartly asked about manual CPM bidding, since we didn't cover it in the episode. And I didn't cover it because when I want to do CPM bidding, 99% of the time, I'm already using maximum delivery. There are times though, when you might want to use a manual bid, when you're bidding CPM. So because we didn't cover this in last week's, I wanted to quickly answer it here for you. So when I want to use CPM bidding, I tend to use maximum delivery, like I said, 99% of the time, because when you're bidding CPM, it's just the easiest way to do it. The trick with CPM bidding is that your bid needs to be high enough to secure you in the top placement in the first ad slot. But not any higher because then you'll be overpaying. And that requirement of being in the first slot is really important, because that's where CTRs are the highest. And when we have high CTRs is exactly why we're bidding CPM anyway. So this is absolutely crucial. But when you do manual CPM bidding, you get more control. You may remember from our holiday traffic study that those who are still using maximum delivery over holidays, their costs spiked way up. And that's because on maximum delivery, the platform is going to bid as high as it needs to on CPM to spend your daily budget. So if you want to be insulated from those market forces, you can bid manually, that's just one of the few ways that I can think of where you'd want to do this. Another reason could be that you can get better pricing manually bidding than you can with maximum delivery. So if you do want to do manual CPM bidding, I like to do some variation of this. So I'm going to look at the suggested bid range. And I'm going to set my initial bid at kind of mid to high in that range. Because like I said, I want to make sure that we always show up in the top slot, then I'm going to run ads. And the next day, I want to look at my effective cost per click. And remember, your effective cost per click is what you paid for your clicks, regardless of if you were bidding by cost per click. So if I'm bidding a CPM of $90, for instance, and I go and look at my effective cost per click the next day, and I see that it was $16. But I realized I could have been paying $15 If I was bidding by manual CPC, then I'll try lowering my CPM bid by five ish dollars, I kind of tend to move in $5 increments, then I look at my effective CPC the next day to compare it to the previous, if your effective cost per click went down, then you can try bidding even less and see if you can get a cheaper cost. So in this case, I would lower my CPM bid from 90 down to 85 and see. And if my effective cost per click is now at $15, I could say well, let me see what happens if I drop this down to an $80 CPM bid. You probably also want to try incre

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: New Interests for Interest Targeting Explanation of CPC vs CPM bidding on LinkedIn Relevancy Score and Auction Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript You're paying way too much for your LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to fix that. We're talking about bidding on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! For those of you diehards who've been around long enough to have listened to Episode Six, it was all about bidding and budgeting, and it was our most listened to episode of the entire series. Well, things have changed with bidding a good bit since we recorded that episode back in early 2020. So I definitely think it's time to refresh ourselves on the topic. Not to mention, I'm a very different podcaster after 89 episodes. And so I'm excited to have one of the most important topics covered in an episode where I don't sound nearly as awkward Bidding is the number one reason that advertisers are paying too much for their ads on LinkedIn. And this is incredibly important to master because this is something that really affects your bottom line. The strategies and principles that I'm sharing with you today came after I'd spent over $30 million on the platform. So these learnings are well earned, and I'm excited to share them with you. We've now spent over 150 million on the platform. And we just continue to fine tune these. So make sure to listen to the very end of this episode. Because at the very end, I'm going to give you my framework for how to get the lowest costs from LinkedIn ads every time. In the news, you may remember back in episode 87, we mentioned that the new feature called website actions was seen out in the wild, and that it might be part of a beta. Well, I got confirmation from Mark Gustafson this week that it is indeed in beta. So if this is something that you're dying to get access to, then reach out to your rep. And Mark, thanks for that correction. There was a new post on the LinkedIn ads blog this week by Jae Oh, and Jay is definitely someone that I'd love to have on the podcast. So we'll see if I can get him on in a future episode. But he posted all about the new release of interests for LinkedIn targeting, we've linked to the whole article down below in the show notes. But he basically explained the interest targeting on LinkedIn in three different categories. He talked about general interests, service interests, and the newest product interest attributes. They launched over 20 new service interests, and over 120 new product interests. He said, you can now fine tune your campaign targeting with over 400 professional interest categories. For product interests, he mentioned that there are 18 categories to choose from. And the initial focus is software, which makes a lot of sense, because when they rolled out product pages, they were exclusively for SAS software,. Makes sense that that's where they would be getting the data from. And they go down to subcategories that zero in on specifics, like you mentioned, data visualization software, revenue management, software, sales, analytic software, etc. Under the new service interests, it's all about engaging with services pages, they launched with their initial set of about 20 categories that includes services such as real estate, environmental consulting, and app development. So if this is interesting to you, definitely go check out that article, I want to highlight one of the reviews, Patrick Alessi who's the Head of Customer Success at ProfitMetrics.io in Denmark. He left this review. He said, "AJ is clearly an expert in his field. Listening to this podcast has already given me a lot of tips and insights that I didn't have before". Patrick, thanks for that, I'm turning a little bit red. I'll move on here. If you're a lover and a listener of the show, and you haven't left a review for us yet, please go and do that, especially on Apple podcasts. I know I say it every episode. But it really helps with the algorithms of getting the show mentioned and shown to new people who haven't discovered it yet. The biggest compliment that you can pay us is by leaving a review and help other advertisers find the show. And of course, if I can figure out who you are, when you leave your review, sometimes you can't tell from the username, I'll give you a shout out. So I want to feature you. Alright, let's go ahead and get to the topic. Let's hit it. First, we need to talk about the different bid types that are available the ways that you can bid. The default is called maximum delivery. And it used to be called auto bidding back years ago, and I actually liked the term auto bidding better

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Job Title Targeting Nuances Workplace Learning Report In-Demand Skills Civil Rights Day (MLK Day) Ads Analysis Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Did you know that the LinkedIn Ads definition for a video view is different from LinkedIn organic definition, or that a senior seniority isn't very senior at all? We're covering 11 things on LinkedIn Ads that don't mean what you think they mean, on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! The LinkedIn Ads platform continues to evolve. It's really coming into its own as a tier one channel, truly ungrateful. That being said, there are still several areas of the platform where LinkedIn's definition of something is not going to match up with your likely definition of that same something. In today's episode, we're going through the 11 areas to be on the lookout for so you can make sure that metrics and campaign manager don't lead you astray. First in the news, LinkedIn recently came out with their workplace learning report. And it's actually based on LinkedIn Learning. And you'll find the link below in the show notes. It was actually a really complete report. And I read through it, and the one conclusion I came to is surprise, we're in a fast paced industry, and we need to keep learning and growing to stay ahead. The good news is, if you're listening to this podcast right now, which you obviously are, it means you likely already understand this. So I congratulate you for being in the top 1%. LinkedIn also released their 2023 most in demand skills. And this is based on skills that people are looking for in their job postings, and probably also based off of the skills that people have in their profiles that only LinkedIn has access to. And again, really no surprise here, they mentioned that things like social media as a skill are in demand. The problem with the skills on LinkedIn is that so many of them are so broad, that I don't even find them valuable to draw trends from, let me know if I'm off base and you disagree. But check out the report, as I've linked to it in the show notes as well. Also continuing from the popularity of our analysis around the holidays here in the US, we just published an analysis of ad performance around Civil Rights Day, or Martin Luther King Day here in the US. And that's live on the blog right now. Go check it out if you want to see the trends. And as a sneak peak, Superbowl and Valentine's Day are also coming up. So stay tuned. I want to highlight one of the reviews. It was left by the user name Giugiugiu. And they say, "AJ is probably the best LinkedIn Ads expert on the market. I attended one of his workshops in Boston a couple of years ago and I was in aw. I finally found someone who knows how this tool works. He's funny and very good in explaining all the functionalities. Absolutely the go to resource if you're starting with LinkedIn Ads. Thanks, AJ for sharing your knowledge." Well Giugiugiu. I wish I knew who you were. So I can thank you specifically. But I really appreciate the super kind review here, me and my whole team, we try so hard to explain the functionality very simply, and so grateful we can be a resource to you. A huge thank you to everyone who's been reviewing the podcast lately. It's really picked up aand I really, really appreciate. And if you haven't left a review yet, please do it. I want to feature you live here on the podcast. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. 3:20 Like we talked about in the intro, we're talking about the discrepancies that you might find in the platform today. So let's say that there's a discrepancy in the platform. Why does this actually matter? Why do you actually need to know about these discrepancies? I think it's really important to know what you're actually reporting on. You obviously want to make decisions with accurate data so that they're the right decision. You also want to have confidence in your data. That way you can defend it if you're challenged. An example that I come across really often in digital marketing is the bounce rate in Google Analytics, because it doesn't mean what you think it means, unless you've actually done like the Google Analytics training courses. I don't know if the definition has changed for Google Analytics 4 that's rollout. But with Universal Analytics, a bounce just meant that they didn't go to another page. So if you're sending someone to a landing page where the whole goal is to get them to convert, then it actually makes a lot of sense that you have a 95% bounce rate. I want you to be able to digest accurate information, because you're actually using this data to go make d

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Follow Andrew Harder on LinkedIn Awesome viral post about LinkedIn document ads from Andrew Another excellent viral post from Andrew about this video strategy Certified Marketing Experts Certification Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Are you interested to hear how LinkedIn Video Ads drive actual opportunities, not just leads? Well, you'll love this case study with Cisco on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked so often about video ads on LinkedIn. And the truth is that it's so hard to answer what works and what doesn't with video, because it's so very different from static. There are infinite ways to deliver a message through video. It sure makes it difficult to narrow down and find a set of best practices that we can then present to other marketers as a recipe for success. When a friend reached out and told me that he'd had extreme success with video ads, I was listening. Then he shared how video ads weren't just getting high click through rates or low cost per view, but they're getting him low costs per opportunity. Well, he then had my full attention. He's got gold to share. And of course, I wanted to share that gold with you LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Andrew Harder, and I have crossed paths lots of times in the past. He started out his career at Hanapin Marketing, the agency that puts on the advanced PPC conference called Heroconf, and also do the blog, PPCHero. I absolutely love this conference in this blog and I've been blessed to speak at hero comp for the last like six years. It's by far one of my favorite shows that I attend every year. I've also been blessed to be named one of PPC Heroes, top 25 PPC professionals for lots of years running. And Andrew wasn't behind any of those decisions. So don't worry, this is not a conflict of interest. But Hanapin got acquired by Brain Labs and they're a mega agency. He moved on and now he works for Cisco under WebEx events. I'm really excited to interview Andrew about his results at Cisco. So we'll dive into the interview. AJ Wilcox But first in the news, one cool feature. So one of our loyal listeners, Joshua Stout, from the Impactable agency, who consequently I actually got to meet last night when he and his team were in town for a team building exercise, and we got to go to dinner. But he posted this week that he got access to a new feature on one of his accounts and it's called Website Actions. If you remember from the B2Believe event, this was one of the features that was announced would be coming, but didn't let us know when it would be coming. So I was so excited to see it out in the wild. To check to see if you have it in your account, navigate in the left hand navigation bar, under analyze, and then look and see if you have a heading there for website actions. I have to tell you, this feature is going to be so cool. And the reason why, I have to ask you, have you ever tried to set up a conversion action as an event, not just as a thank you page that people land on and it triggers the conversion? To do it as an event, you have to put a bit of JavaScript on the button that you want to track. And if you're like me, you don't happen to know JavaScript, it's a whole lot of troubleshooting, and wasted time, and no way to tell whether it's implemented correctly. What this feature does is it scans your landing pages to find buttons on the page, and then allows you to create any of those buttons as a conversion event just by selecting it. It works by having your insight tag installed on the page. There's no custom JavaScript, no wondering if it's set up properly, you just click an action and call it a conversion. This is one of those rare acts of brilliance by LinkedIn. I love the concept of this feature. I'm excited to get to use it. And it's also one of those features that I totally would have expected someone like Meta or Google to come up with. And yet we have it here on LinkedIn. Hurray. Justin Rowe from Impactable suggested that this feature may have been a result of the marketing analytics company called Oribi that LinkedIn acquired back in February of 2022. And that sounds totally plausible to me. Another awesome listener, Jay Rathell mentioned that he thought this was part of a beta so it might not actually be out yet. Your rep may have had to register you in the beta to get access. And I'm not sure what the truth is there. So just watch out in your accounts for when you get it. I wanted to give a shout out to Dig Altamiranda. Dig left us a review here on the podcast that says, "Best LinkedIn paid podcast ever. I love how AJ is unbiased and ungu

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ep 43 about Gen Z Market Research on LinkedIn Sarah Weise LinkedIn Ep 65 about Microsegmentation Sarah Weise's LinkedIn Learning Course on Market Research Certified Marketing Experts Certification Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript LinkedIn Ads is a market research tool. Yeah, you know it. We're talking about market research on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! For a long time, I've treated LinkedIn Ads as much of a market research tool, as an ad platform. You've probably gotten a little bit of a taste of this, if you've been listening for a while. Especially episodes like 65, where we talked about micro segmentation. So if you haven't listened to that episode, definitely go back and add it to your queue. But today, I wanted to cover market research and let you into these additional uses of LinkedIn's fantastic ad platform. Of course, all of this is made possible by LinkedIn's incredible targeting. 0:53 First in the news, LinkedIn first cohort of certified marketing experts just graduated this week. During episode 76, n the news section, I announced the opening of LinkedIn's Certified Marketing Experts Program. And it's basically an ad certification exam that you can take to show your prowess on LinkedIn Ads. It's actually really complex. It has four levels, and it's its own learning management system all baked in with tons of different lessons. If you haven't checked it out yet, first you become a certified marketer, then you fulfill some requirements to become a certified insider, then you can rise up to being a certified expert in training. And then once you've met the requirements there, you can graduate to a LinkedIn certified marketing expert. All of these levels, you can then add to your LinkedIn profile as a certification, which is really cool. I was lucky enough to be selected for their first cohort. So LinkedIn flew six of us out to their offices in New York City, inside the Empire State Building, for a few days. And as of recording, I just got back in yesterday, I have to say it was awesome to get to hang out with the other six graduates in New York, we had great food, great collaboration opportunities, and learning together, I'll be posting a synopsis of the event and some of my learnings and takeaways, and they're probably already out by the time you're hearing this. But if you want those details, make sure you're following me on LinkedIn and go find that post. You'll also find a link in the show notes to that certified marketing program. So if you haven't already, I'd highly recommend you go and get signed up and get certified. Seriously, if you're hardcore enough to listen to a podcast all about LinkedIn ads, you really deserve the credentials to prove your geekiness. Okay, I'll get off that pedestal. The next news item really got me excited and then let me down on January 24 of 2023. LinkedIn rolled out the ability to break down performance by device type. We were so excited when we noticed it. And we posted about it. The way it worked is within campaign manager, you go to break down, and then in that drop down, you'll see either impression, device type, or conversion device type. And then it would break out your actual ad performance by desktop web, mobile app, and mobile web. Well, we posted about it got excited about it started playing with it. And then within hours, it was gone completely. Not sure what happened. But while we had it, we did notice some discrepancies. If you go under impression device type, it displays all metrics broken down by device type. Where if you go into conversion device type, it only displays conversion metrics. But the conversion metrics between the two are a bit off. So maybe it was a rollout that LinkedIn didn't intend to roll out yet. Maybe someone accidentally hit the button. I don't know. But we're highly anticipating its return. And I know I am reaching a bit on this, but it feels to me like exposing the metrics around devices and how they're interacting is the first step to allowing us to target by device, which is a feature I've been pleading for since 2013. All right, let's jump into the market research topic on hand. Let's hit it. 4:02 First, I think it helps to define what market research is. The definition I got when I just binged it. That's a thing, right? Binging it? Anyway, is that the action or activity of gathering information about consumers needs and preferences. And if you listened at all to Episode 43, where I had Sarah Weise on the program. She is a market researcher. This is what she does for a living. So in that episode, we did talk a little bit about marke

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Have you thoroughly tested the LinkedIn Audience Network yet? Some big changes have been made to it recently. And there's a lot to appreciate. Today on the LinkedIn Ads Show, we're diving into the LinkedIn Audience Network. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. If you're like me, you've seen the option for enabling LinkedIn Audience Network and sponsored content campaigns for years. Maybe it's something that you've occasionally used, or in some cases, maybe you've always excluded it. Well, LinkedIn recently made big changes to the audience network. And I wanted to bring LinkedIn's product team in to come and talk to us about it. Now we as marketers, we seem to always be shortening things to acronyms. I've called the LinkedIn Audience Network LAN for lots of years. And in this episode, we mostly refer to it by its full name, but don't be confused. It's the same option that I've talked about in the past. Now, Peter Turner was one of the product people at LinkedIn for lots of years. And I've gotten to interface with him for a long time, as he's worked on many different projects. And as I wanted to have an episode all about the LinkedIn Audience Network, of course, I knew he was all over it. And I wanted to make sure we brought him on. And he introduced me to Lipika Gimmler, who's also over it. And so we're trying to kind of dual interview approach. So I hope you like hearing from both Peter and Lipika. AJ Wilcox I wanted to give a shout out to Rob Baijens from the Netherlands. And Rob I'm sorry if I butchered your last name. But he left a review on the podcast and he said, "100% the LinkedIn go to podcast five stars love AJs podcast, he gives so much insights, updates, and inspiration when it comes to LinkedIn advertising and more. What I especially like is not only his guru level expertise, although he is a LinkedIn guru, but the AJ also tells the audience when he simply doesn't know yet asking the audience to share their thoughts. This makes his podcast 100% authentic. I want to apologize to AJ for not taking the time until now to give him the five star review he deserves", with a little smiley face. "AJ, please keep up the good work as you bring so much value to the LinkedIn community. All the best Rob Baijens, the Netherlands." Rob, I don't care how long you waited. I'm so grateful that you left this review. I do try really hard to be truthful when there is something I just don't know or don't have enough data on. So I'm glad you picked up on that. I do have an ego. I don't like to admit when I don't know something, but I try really hard for you guys. Thanks so much for heeding the call when I asked for reviews. So thank you. And of course everyone else, please do follow Rob's lead here and go and leave a review as well. As a reminder, make sure you go back and listen to episode 83. It was the holiday ad Performance Report. We've had about 35 man hours go into producing that episode and the report. If you skip that episode, do go back and listen to it. Okay, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into the interview. AJ Wilcox All right, Lipika and Peter, I'm so excited to have you guys here. Lipika, let's start with you. Tell us about yourself and what you do at LinkedIn. Lipika Gimmler Hey, AJ, my name is Lipika. And I'm a product marketing manager at LinkedIn. And I work on the LinkedIn Audience Network. And I typically sit at the intersection of our product build and our go to market teams, really helping in the formulation of product value propositions as well as partnering with our product teams in continuing to build meaningful solutions for our customers. AJ Wilcox Fantastic. And, Peter, same question to you. Peter Turner Hey AJ, great to be here. I've been at LinkedIn for a little over six years now. I've had a variety of roles focused on different partnership programs. Throughout this time, one of those programs has been the LinkedIn Audience Network. And I've been a part of the growth of LinkedIn Audience Network from its founding. And now my team looks after the partnerships and ecosystem strategy necessary to keep growing the value we create for marketers. AJ Wilcox That's awesome, Peter, as long as I can remember you and I've been talking about the LinkedIn Audience Network. The impetus for this whole interview was I haven't had an episode about the LinkedIn Audience Network. And I've always been telling myself as soon as I can have Peter on that's when we're going to have an episode. So this is the culmination of that. Really excited to have both you and Lipika here. Well, I think we need to start out with just a general de

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Ads Group on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript On LinkedIn Ads, you can target members by specific groups that they're in. By name! I know right? We're talking about targeting LinkedIn groups on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! The ability to target the members of specific groups on LinkedIn has been a blessing to advertisers since LinkedIn came out back in 2008. I can hear you Facebook advertisers out there salivating, because Facebook has never allowed us to do this. And it really would be incredible. Groups on LinkedIn had been through quite the journey over the years. But on today's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show, I'll walk you through the pros and cons, as well as some tips on how to use it and make it work even better. Make sure to stick around until the end of the episode, as I'm going to share a little known hack to targeting groups. Let's hit it. First off, what are LinkedIn groups? When I very first joined LinkedIn, groups were one of the things that were most widely publicized as it being a great place to interact with others. So I went and joined a bunch of marketing groups, a bunch of technology groups, and a bunch of automotive groups even. Being a new marketer. and being really into cars, I went and joined one of these automotive groups, and ended up having a conversation with a marketer from Ferrari, I thought that was so cool back in the day. Over time, those LinkedIn groups have kind of turned into a bit of a dumping ground due to a wide variety of factors that have made LinkedIn groups less attractive than, let's say meta groups. People stopped actually coming to interact in groups and the ones who did were usually just going to help promote something of themselves. So they became kind of a spammy link dumping ground. If you go look at your groups that you're a member of just look through and see, I would say every once in a while you find a group where there's real conversation going on people actually helping each other and making suggestions, but for the most part, I just see link after link after link with very little explanation as to why someone is even putting a link there. And when you're in a group, and all you see is basically a bunch of bots that are dumping content and leaving, you're not going to stick around either. But anyone can go and start a group on the platform, and it's free. If you're a marketer, which you probably are if you're listening to this, you can go and join a group called marketing executives group, or digital marketing optimization, or digital marketing manager and agency owners. What's really cool about these groups is you get a bunch of people who are like minded in the group together. And because it's on LinkedIn, it's really easy to tell who is who, what companies they represent. And because of the lack of anonymity, I think people tend to be a lot kinder, and a lot more helpful. Also, being part of a group is really cool when you go to actually make a connection with someone because now you have something more in common with them than just, I saw your posts show up in my newsfeed, you can say something like we're in a common group together, we've had a conversation. So common groups membership can be a really good way of getting the attention of someone and getting a connection request accepted. So we talked about how LinkedIn groups have kind of devolved over time. But something that I really appreciated about it is that most of the time, you're not going to leave a group, you're just going to stop going to visit very often. So what that means is someone goes and joins a group around a topic that's really important to them. And even if they're not spending time in that group, LinkedIn still knows that they're a member of this and then we can target that trait using LinkedIn Ads. And it's an important distinction to note that, when we're targeting using groups names on LinkedIn, it doesn't mean that we're targeting them with ads only when they're in the group. Rather, we're targeting them wherever they are on LinkedIn, because we know that they are a member of this group. So even if they never come back, we can still use it for targeting. And you can join up to 50 groups last time I checked. And in the show notes below, there's a link to the LinkedIn Ads group on LinkedIn. And it's one of the good examples I can think of. They're doing a really good job of curating it, keeping the spam out, and there are a lot of people, they're asking really sincere questions about the platform. 4:21 So when should you use groups targeting? I think it's really important to compare the ot

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Covid19's Effect on LinkedIn Ads Bidding and Budgeting Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Follower Ads (Red call-out boxes) Follower Ads impressions were decimated on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Since these are only served on Desktop, it shows how few people were on LinkedIn on their desktops. The other ad formats didn't see such large decreases, telling us that members largely switched over to mobile during the holidays. Follower Ads costs skyrocketed on holidays. An indication of what happens to prices when to the audience vacates the platform while advertisers are still bidding. Single Image Sponsored Content (Purple call-out boxes) Single Image Sponsored Content impressions were above average the day before Thanksgiving but dropped to 80% and 68% during and after. Signals many people taking time off work and not spending as much time on LinkedIn. The day before and day of Christmas was interesting to see an increase in impressions, although these were weekend days which are traditionally lower anyway and wouldn't be hard to beat. The day after New Years (January 2 nd ) saw 17% higher-than-average usage, which is what we expect to see. Costs around Thanksgiving skyrocketed to 35%, 52%, and 69% above average, making for very expensive traffic. Around Christmas, costs were elevated 3-16%, which is up, but not egregious. New Years costs were really surprising though. They actually dropped from 1-33% of average, which is what we usually see after the New Year, but to see the diminished costs during the holiday was interesting. We would guess this is due to advertisers pulling back; although I don't understand why advertisers would pull back en masse for New Years but not at Christmas just a week before, unless it had something to do with running out of budgets by the end of the month and needing to pull back. Video Ads (Blue call-out boxes) The day before Thanksgiving was pretty much business as usual, but we definitely saw fewer impressions the day of and the day after Thanksgiving. Christmas Eve was up 6% but the day of and the day after were down to 81% and 54% of average. New Years Eve had lower impressions which we'd expect given the holiday, but similar to Sponsored Content (since they share the same inventory) were up 11% and 7% respectively. Thanksgiving CPMs were elevated 3-31%, but Christmas did not follow suit, strangely. Christmas CPMs actually dropped 11-32%, which I don't have an explanation for. New Years CPMs also dropped significantly, but we expect that for the same reasons we see decreased costs around New Years every year. But a drop between 50%-71% is huge! After New Years Analysis Unsurprisingly, impressions and clicks increased after the New Year (1/3-1/5) since we're back to work and all rested up from time off for the holidays. What is surprising is that costs on Follower Ads were still elevated by 11% even after the holidays. Show Transcript What happens to your LinkedIn Ads on holidays and vacation? Well, it's a total pain to calculate. So I went ahead and did it. I can do hard things. We're talking a holiday ad performance on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I'm sure you've wondered if you should pause your ads on holidays, or just let them ride? Well, I'm a total data junkie so I took it upon myself to crunch the data and find out and it gets juicy. We're gonna walk through it and analysis that I did over a lot of data to tell you conclusively whether or not you should be advertising on LinkedIn over holidays. And make sure to stick around until the end for an extra bonus analysis that I did about ad performance after the new year. All right, let's hit it. If you've been listening for a while, you may remember Episode 32, where I did a whole analysis of what happened to LinkedIn Ads availability, and pricing during the COVID 19 pandemic. And I really enjoyed doing that study. It was a ton of data crunching, but a lot of fun. Well, and we get asked all the time by clients whether or not we should be pausing over the holidays, especially in November and December here in the US, where we have Thanksgiving and Christmas, followed closely by New Years. In the past, we've oftentimes given the advice to pause entirely over those holidays. And there are a lot of reasons why. The first is that it's towards the end of a quarter and a month so these larger companies are bidding more aggressively to try to finish strong. And this is going to lead to increased competition, which means you're going to pay more at these times. It also happens to be the end of a year. So budgets that are use it or lose it, they have to be spent. So advertisers ar

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: AdSearch LinkedIn Ads Library Sander's LinkedIn Profile Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Have you ever wanted a library of all the LinkedIn Ads out there that you could look through for inspiration? We've got just the thing for you coming up on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I would bet that most of us have wished that we could go somewhere to look at the highest performing ads on the LinkedIn Ads platform, maybe for inspiration as we're writing new ad copy, or maybe even to look at competitors ads side by side and check out what they're doing. Today, I'm interviewing Sander de Lange, from AdSearch.io, which is a very affordable LinkedIn Ads library to do just that. We talked through what it's capable of pricing, and especially the actionable ways that you as the LinkedIn Ads marketer can go and use these tools to your advantage. Sander is an agency owner out of the Netherlands, and he's the founder of AdSearch.io. Let's bring him on. AJ Wilcox Hey Sander. So excited to have you here on the podcast. Sander de Lange Hey, AJ, great to be here! AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me a little bit about the company ad search. Love to hear all that background? Sander de Lange Yeah, sure. So about myself. I'm from the Netherlands. I'm married. And we just got our first daughter. AJ Wilcox Congratulations. Sander de Lange Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, me and my wife, we really love to travel. So currently, I'm working remote from Thailand, which is our favorite country in the whole world. AJ Wilcox Oh, I have not been but I want to. Sander de Lange Yes. AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, tell us about the background of AdSearch.io Sander de Lange Yeah, sure. Sure. 10 years ago, together with my business partner Ozlem, we launched a marketing agency called Team Digital.nl. In the Netherlands. We're focused on getting B2B customers. And we do a lot of LinkedIn Ads for our clients. We really love the platform because of the great targeting and great way to reach ideal customers. But we were really missing a LinkedIn Ads library. So yeah, this year in 2022, we launched AdSearch.io, which is the world's biggest LinkedIn Ads library to help you find great LinkedIn Ad examples to mobile in seconds. AJ Wilcox Love that. So tell us about why you were looking for a library. Obviously, that was a problem you were looking to solve for yourself. What is that problem that we LinkedIn advertisers should be thinking about whether we're feeling this or not? Sander de Lange Yeah, exactly. So the idea actually started because of a few few challenges we kept running into because if you advertise on LinkedIn, you probably know that LinkedIn Ads has a higher cost per click than other ad platforms, which can be a bit scary for people if they start launching their first campaign because every new campaign can be a risk. Some people also might notice that ads with low engagement actually pay more per click. So you know, the LinkedIn algorithm works with the ad relevancy score. And that's based on factors like click through rate, comments, likes and shares. And the more relevant the ad, the lower the price you pay. So this also means that if you have ads with low engagement, you pay more per click. So creating relevant, engaging ads is very important. And on top of that, we kept running into that you need also enough fresh new ad creative to prevent audience fatigue. And that's actually when your target audience sees the same ads over and over and your ads can lose their impact. We figured that you don't want to be wasting ad budget on the wrong boring ads, because that can get expensive. And we wanted to find a way to decrease that risk. And that's actually where you had something to do with this. Because I'm a frequent listener of your podcast and you actually quoted you, you said, like, when you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, it's inherently high risk, because the costs are higher. So any research you can do ahead of time to find out what your audience will like is going to be very useful. So that inspired us to create AdSearch.io. AJ Wilcox Oh, so cool. I'm glad I can be of any help there. So you obviously felt this pain, you realize that we need some sort of an ad library? How did you go about solving? Sander de Lange Yeah, so we believe that it was missing. And as librarian and it's a great way to get inspiration for new campaigns, you need to study ads that are performing well to generate ideas. And we didn't just want to create the ads library where we just put a few ads in there. And that's it, we really wanted to go the extra mile and add all kinds of

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Jonloomer.com Jon's TikTok Jon's Podcast Jon Loomer on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Today we're diving heavily into Facebook Ads. Have I gone crazy? No, but I have Jon Loomer, and that's 1000 times better on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Very early days when I was starting B2Linked, I came across Jon Loomer, who was the first Facebook Aads expert that I ever found. He provided the model and inspiration around a lot of what I built B2Linked into. Since then, he's built a veritable empire. Podcast, coaching, courses, joint venture partnerships, and he did it all with a focus on being able to spend time with his family. If it feels like I'm fanboying a little bit, it's definitely because I am. I've talked to a lot of you listeners who are also responsible for Facebook Ads. And so I invited John on the show. Generally, whatever we see as being successful in Facebook Ads eventually makes its way into LinkedIn Ads within about fourish years, so I thought the info he shares could be precious for us. He also shares strategies on how we can combine efforts between LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as shares valuable info for us on TikTok Ads. I'm very pleased to share this interview with you with Jon Loomer. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Everyone, I'm so excited to have Jon Loomer here with us. Jon, thanks so much for coming. Jon's a Facebook Ads educator, business owner, and just generally a great guy. Jon, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. Jon Loomer Oh, man, I'm excited to be here, AJ. Thanks so much. AJ Wilcox Oh, you bet. Let's start right into the questions because I know we're gonna have a lot. First, tell me about your story. Tell me where you came from. business wise, I'm really interested in what you've done with your personal brand, how you decided, like, where and how to focus on Facebook Ads in digital marketing, tell us all that stuff. Jon Loomer There's really a long story and not quite as long story. It's difficult not to be long either way. But I've had this this business for 11 years now. And prior to that I had no experience starting a business. I didn't really even consider myself a marketer, even though the last job I was laid off from was VP of strategic marketing. It's a whole other story of like, I didn't think I was even qualified when I applied, but I worked for the NBA originally back 2005-2008. And that's a whole other episode, we could talk about that probably because there's a lot of fun stories from that. I mean, I oversaw fantasy games, which is the most ridiculous job ever. It was the greatest. But we lived in New Jersey, we had to move from Colorado to New Jersey. So I did make some concessions with my wife, they're like, okay, this will be a temporary thing. Back then you couldn't really work remotely. And I begged and begged and begged. And then that was it. So after that I was laid off a couple of times. Lots of nice things about the NBA job, one of the things was I was exposed to Facebook for the first time in 2007. That's when there are 50 million people on the platform, they were just opening it up to the older folks. So anyone who was in high school and college. We partnered with Facebook to create an app before you could create your own app. And that was a first admin of the official NBA Facebook group before there were pages. That's just how long ago that was. But I fell in love with the platform at the time. As a kid I moved around a lot, so to be able to reconnect with people that I thought I would never see hear from again was like so amazing. But I was also using it from a business perspective very, very early. I got laid off for a second time in 2011. One thing I knew was I couldn't move my family again, because we just went through that whole madness. I was also very spoiled in terms of the jobs I had just had. It's funny because I think everyone should do something that they do not enjoy as well. So I was an insurance underwriter for five years prior to the NBA job, and it provided some really good perspective. If you're an underwriter, I'm sure you love it. It's great. I didn't enjoy it. But that's part of why I got into the whole fantasy game stuff in the first place. And why ended up working for the NBA. Anyway. So the experience I had though, specifically around Facebook was really important. I started using that when I was at American Cancer Society after the NBA job. So once I was laid off, okay, one of the first things I did was I started a website. And again, one of the tools I kind of learned at really American Cancer Society during that time, was to create a WordPress websi

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Low Budget Strategies Episode Offers Episode Who Should and Shouldn't Advertise on LinkedIn Episode Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Should small businesses run LinkedIn Ads? We're digging into why or why not on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We all know that LinkedIn Ads are expensive. So should small businesses even invest in them? It's not a straightforward question. So let's discuss what the requirements are for success on LinkedIn Ads, as well as the limitations that are present for small businesses, especially compared to large ones. If you remember all the way back to Episode One, we talked quite a bit about who should and shouldn't invest in LinkedIn Ads. We mentioned how the targeting is exquisite. Because when you need the targeting that LinkedIn has, there just is no substitute out there. But boy, do we pay dearly for that targeting. The cost per click, and the cost per impression on LinkedIn ads are quite high compared to the other platforms. So because the costs are high, you need to make sure that your company has a large enough lifetime value when you close a deal so that you can still realize a return on your investment. So for instance, if you have a really low cost product, say it's a SAS software, that you charge, maybe $50 or $100 per month, just the fact that your lifetime value is lower, is probably not going to allow you to get a return on your investment unless you have incredible customer retention. So I tell people, if you have a lifetime value of $10,000, or $15,000, or even higher, it's pretty much a no brainer to run LinkedIn Ads. But also because those costs per click and per impression are high. That also means that you need a higher budget for advertising. Higher budgets mean that you can get more clicks and more leads. And more volume is usually good for growth. Higher budgets also mean that you can learn faster from your tests and your experiments. So assuming you have the budget and the lifetime value, there are three things that are requirements for advertising on a social platform. I call this acronym amo, A-M-O, and it stands for your audience, your message and your offer. The audience is who you're targeting. And this is why we pay a premium to LinkedIn is this access to a very specific audience, the M you for your message, this is what your customer sees. And this is a combination of the ad copy you choose and the visuals, either imagery or video. Even the ad format that you choose. That's all part of the message. And then the O this is by far the most important part. This is what are you offering your prospect in exchange for their attention? Offers can be anything from come read this blog post to buy something now or everything in between? And this is funny, I just realized that the requirements for running LinkedIn Ads, spells blammo budget, lifetime value, audience message and offer. All right, so if you need help remembering this blammo, it's like one of those old 60s Batman blurbs that pops up when someone gets hit in the face - blammo! So when I get the question about whether small businesses should be advertising on LinkedIn, I think the inherent question inside of that is really should small budgets be spending on LinkedIn? I think there's this misconception that a small business automatically has a small budget, which is certainly not the case. We've worked with many clients who are very small companies with very large budgets. But I will admit, oftentimes these go together, we actually have a whole episode, it was back to Episode 14, all about how to advertise on really insanely small budgets. So go listen to that one if you haven't already. But what you should realize on LinkedIn is that with a smaller budget, you're either gonna have to sacrifice volume of your campaign by having a small budget, or you might sacrifice being able to segment your audiences or reach as many people from the audience that you want. So this could make you lose out on some audience insights, but it's definitely still doable. You'll also sacrifice speed, speed to learning. So if you're running an experiment to find out, is my audience going to care about this new topic or this new offer? The more budget you have, the faster you're going to learn. Another misconception is that small businesses automatically have small lifetime values. What I want you to understand is the size of the company doesn't dictate the stuff that really matters. A small company could have good budget, good offers and a high lifetime value. So as you're asking yourself this question, be specific about what elements of a small business make you

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: B2Believe Event Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript LinkedIn's B2Believe event happened last week in San Francisco and shared some groundbreaking stuff for LinkedIn Ads. Just in case you missed it, I'm recapping all the highlights on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. For my US listeners, I hope you had an amazing Thanksgiving holiday. I sure did. I ate way too much. I brought my VR headset and watched all the kids play a game called Richie's Plank Experience. I don't know if any of you know this game. But it basically takes you to the top of a building and you can stand out on a plank, and basically feel what it feels like to step off a building. I watched one of my nephews totally like sprint right into a wall. It didn't hurt my VR headset, thank goodness. But definitely one of the best things I've ever gotten to watch. I also got to geek out with my father in law about home automation, and new advances in ham radio communication. So like I mentioned in the teaser, LinkedIn hosted an in person event live in San Francisco. Tt was right on the pier. It was beautiful. It was well organized. And honestly one of the most impressive events I've ever seen Many of the sessions were recorded for being able to watch remotely. So you'll see a link down in the show notes below to go and watch for yourself if you'd like to get caught up. But I especially wanted to highlight some of the best parts, just in case you didn't have time to attend, or even watch the recaps. So also, the day following was a day just for partners called Partner Connect. And there was a bunch more content, but most of it was just for partners under NDA. So I'll share as much as I can, but I won't be able to give you much by way of recap there. But I do want to say a huge thanks to my friends at LinkedIn for the great conversations and the fun times we got to have. A special shout out to Purna Virji, who is a great friend. She's making huge waves at LinkedIn. She used to be a Microsoft Ads evangelist. She is absolutely magic on stage and her session did not disappoint. I love getting to meet and hang out with your team Purna. Thanks so much for letting me hang with you. And also a special shout out to Dan Philippi. Always great getting to catch up with you. Dan was the manager of a team that used to have the most elite ad reps. So when I very first got started advertising on LinkedIn, he and his team who I owe a great deal of gratitude for everything they taught me and showed me all about LinkedIn Ads. Okay, before we get into a recap of the event, there is some huge news out there to share. So the first one, I want to give a hat tip to Alisa Gammon, a great friend of mine. She shared with me that Facebook released their B2B targeting globally. There are five segments that we now get to use. So number one, business decision maker titles and interests. And this is people who are business decision makers based on their job titles that Facebook has, as well as interests. Number two, there's IT decision makers, and this is people who are IT decision makers based on their job titles. Number three is business decision makers. And meta creates this by using a combination of job titles and interests. And it's looking for decision makers in Engineering, IT, Operations, HR, Strategy, or Marketing. And make note this is not necessarily just the C suite or chief, although it does include them. Number four, we have new active businesses with buckets of less than six months old, less than a year old, and less than two years old. And this is based on company pages on Meta being set up in that time period. So if a new page gets set up, then Meta is assuming that it's a new business. And then number five, the fifth targeting facet that we get on Facebook is company size. They have small being 10 to 200 employees, medium being 200 to 500. And then large enterprises, which is 500 plus employees. And I'm telling you about this because I'm imagining that most of you listening are in B2B. And most of you are probably also responsible for the Facebook Ads channel. If you want to take advantage of this, you can find the B2B segments in ads manager under detailed targeting, you'll click on demographics, then work, then industries. Although if you're looking for the new active businesses, that's under behaviors, and then digital activities, I'd love to hear about your experience. If you're also using these segments to test especially against the same types of segments that you're using in LinkedIn Ads. Obviously, the targeting isn't nearly as good. It's not nearly as precise. It's not nearly as accurate or even up

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Should you bid CPC or CPM? Episode on saturation Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Today, you're going to learn way more about frequency caps on LinkedIn Ads than you ever thought you wanted to know. We're talking about frequency on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, there's a lot of confusion around the frequency caps on LinkedIn. If you talk to your LinkedIn rep, they'll tell you, but it's not published anywhere in the LinkedIn Help section, at least that I've found. Plus, many of you advertisers won't have a dedicated rep. So I wanted to create a resource where we could clear up some of the questions about it, and make sure you stick around to the end, because I'm going to be sharing a hack that you can use to break the LinkedIn frequency caps, you won't want to miss that. In the news, make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel, because we published this week, a video walkthrough all about whether you should bid by cost per click or cost per impression. And we showed all of the math behind it. So if you're a total math nerd, or really want to understand LinkedIn's auction, you won't want to miss that it's about a 10 minute video. I want to thank those of you who have been leaving reviews on the show. A huge thank you because as you know, reviews are a huge part about what gets the show picked up and shared and featured a shout out to "Mad" Matt N. Who said, "Highly recommended if you're advertising on LinkedIn. AJ drops tons of knowledge in every episode, I was very fortunate to discover his show before I actually started advertising on LinkedIn. He really helped set expectations regarding what to expect from a management standpoint, and saved me countless hours of banging my head against the wall asking questions like, Why doesn't the platform do insert missing feature we take for granted after advertising on Facebook. Because of his show, I was able to set up my tracking properly out of the gate and have a very low stress launch with no surprises." Matt, that makes me extremely happy to hear that you found out about the show before you started advertising and that we were able to help you iron out some of the kinks before they even got introduced to your accounts. So great work on your part. We also had sweet.tvb. And she mentioned, "Great resource for marketers. I've been running LinkedIn Ads for the past three years and this show gives a wealth of in depth information to push performance further. Love the helpful insight presented." Thanks so much sweet. And for everyone else out there, make sure you leave a review. I'd love to shout you out. So let's go ahead and jump into frequency. Let's hit it. First, I think we need to understand what frequency actually is. Frequency is basically the number of times that an ad is served to an entity of some kind. It's measured as the total number of impressions divided by the unique people who saw those ads. The unique users or unique visitors, those are called reach as well. So if your ad gets 10 impressions, but it was only served to five unique people, that means the, on average, each member of your audience saw that ad two times. And of course, it's not total science, it's totally possible that one of those five people saw your ad three times, while another one of them only saw it once. It is after all an average. And frequency can be measured by the individual ad, meaning how many times has that audience member seen this one ad, or you can measure at the campaign level, how many times each audience member has been exposed to any of the ads in this campaign. You can view your frequency numbers inside of campaign manager. You first go to columns that are right above your list of campaigns, and select the drop down called Delivery. That's going to show you your frequency and reach and all of the numbers that deal with that. If you remember, LinkedIn kind of took these numbers away or averaged them together for a certain amount of time. It appears that this has been reverted, but I think in the future, we can expect some of these numbers to be a little bit obscured for privacy reasons, which I do not get. But hey, make hay while the sun shines. So that's frequency. But then let's talk about frequency caps. The lack of frequency caps is what makes live TV so annoying. Because TV advertisers don't get feedback on which households have seen which ad, they have to make sure that everyone in that audience has been exposed to their ad a certain number of times. So they showed over multiple ad breaks of the same show. And then you find yourself hating a brand because you've already seen these ads 1000

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: How to Analyze Your LinkedIn Ads in Excel How to Evaluate Your LinkedIn Ads AB Tests in Excel Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Get ready for some killer LinkedIn Ads strategies, because we asked the community for their favorite LinkedIn Ads plays, and you delivered on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We reached out to you, the LinkedIn Ads community, to ask you about your favorite LinkedIn ads plays. We're looking for those strategies that you're using daily to build and optimize for the best performance. In the news, I want to let you know about a couple of YouTube videos that we published. One is a full walkthrough within Excel on how to analyze your individual LinkedIn Ads, how your creative performance is. Another is all about how to evaluate your LinkedIn Ads AB tests within Excel. If you're not already following our YouTube channel, go subscribe there. I put the links down below in the show notes. Because those are something that you can follow along with, right as you're building the reports yourselves, and do better reporting better analysis for your company for your clients. They're directly actionable, and I think you're gonna love them. I've been asking, pleading for you marketers to leave reviews for the show, because I'm sure you know, the reviews are a big part about how people find out about the podcast. I wanted to give a huge thanks to several of you who stepped up and did it recently. I sincerely appreciate it. It makes the effort to design and create these episodes totally worthwhile. It's pretty hard for me to look at someone's Apple podcasts username, and try to figure out who they are. So feel free to reach out to me if I'm calling you out and you want me to let everyone know who you are. Okay, so Marketer Martina, she says, "Concrete actionable insights. I had been responsible for audience strategy and segmentation for years, but only recently started owning LinkedIn as a channel. When our results took a nosedive. I knew I needed to get more in depth insights into best practices than what LinkedIn is training courses offer. I found this podcast and it has been a lifesaver, offering easy to digest information with concrete actionable insights that can be immediately put into action. Thank you, AJ, for sharing all of your knowledge with us." Martina, I really appreciate the kind words that's exactly what we're going for here. We also had Brandon Chesnutt from Identity. He left a review that said, "One of the best resources for b2b marketers. If you're a B2B marketer looking to tap into the power of LinkedIn ads, don't waste any more time and subscribe to the LinkedIn ad show right now. I have a regular rotation of awesome marketing and communication podcasts in my feed. And I'm always excited when a new episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show pops up. AJ does a fantastic job of taking important LinkedIn ad topics from the very broad to the very niche and breaking down digestible and actionable takeaways. I'm regularly sharing links to episodes in our agency Slack channels, and utilizing many of the best practices highlighted with our clients." Thanks so much, Brandon, I really appreciate that. If this show is able to offer you up direct takeaways that you can go and put into action today. That's my goal. Makes me very happy. 3:05 So back to LinkedIn Ads plays. Here's the play that I shared to open up the conversation. I said, when launching ads start by manually bidding for clicks, then if your ads proved to consistently generate a click through rate that's two to two and a half times the average then switch to bidding by impressions. The reason this works is because you've proven to the platform that you can generate clicks at a healthy rate. Switching to impressions bidding mass distributes your ads to maximize reach and click volume at your consistent click through rate, which can help decrease costs. Now I have a really cool YouTube video to share with all of you that's going to be popping up here in the next couple of weeks. So again, make sure you're following our YouTube channel. But in it, I actually go into the math whether it's going to be cheaper to bid by cost per click or by the impression and how to figure out how competitive an audience really is. I also share the secrets to why it's the click through rate that's two to two and a half times the average. So you're definitely not going to want to miss that. So then I finished up this post with what's your favorite LinkedIn ads play? What's worked well for you and what were the results. I'd love to feature you on an upcoming episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show to drop a com

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: New Audiences Menu Document Ads Media Library Certified LinkedIn Marketing Experts program Reporting on LinkedIn Ads ROI Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Six LinkedIn Ads myths debunked on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Over the year, we've heard a lot of myths about LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to bust them like Jamie and Adam, if you get the MythBusters reference. First off, we've got some really cool stuff in the news. Matched and saved audiences are now under one page called audiences. And this is gradually being rolled out, so if you don't see it already in your account, you may notice it soon. And I think this is a great change. Anytime that we can get more information on one page, more compactly, I'm usually a fan of it. And it does make sense to have all different kinds of audiences, all in one location. Document ads are also out and in full force. You can attach PDFs, PowerPoints, really any kind of media that has multiple pages, and then you can get them with a lead gen form. So for instance, you can say, for the first three pages of this ebook, I want someone to be able to scroll through it. But then once they reach page four, it displays the lead gen form and they need to fill it out in order to progress. It sounds really cool in theory, and it worked so well, during the initial beta that didn't have lead gen forms, I thought this was going to be an amazing ad format. But we've tested it quite a bit and we haven't yet found better performance than before, just with single image ads and a lead gen form. But I'd love to hear about any of your experience if you're experiencing anything differently. There's also a new feature called Media Library. And it allows you to upload multiple images at a time, and then use all those multiple images, up to five, to create multiple ads at a time. And this is just creating image tests, because all of these ads are going to have the same intro and the same headline, but just with a different image. So pretty cool, if you're testing your images. If it's rolled out to your account, you should be able to access it within campaign manager by clicking inside of a campaign that's either for single image or video ads, and clicking on create ad, then when you click on upload for images, it'll bring up the media library. The certified marketing experts program is live. You've heard me before talk about getting LinkedIn certified. And this is how you do it. There are quite a few different levels, and they take time to graduate through them. So if you haven't already go get started now. The link is in the show notes. We've also noticed that the floor bids are gone in many of the accounts we have access to. The way it used to work is that you would enter a bid that was below the floor. And it used to pop up a message telling you what the minimum bid is for that audience. And it wouldn't let you run unless you put in a number that was greater than that. But now on many of our accounts, I'd say at least half, it pops up a message that says your bid of x may be too low to reach your target audience, increase your bid for better results. Now, initially, I expected that this change was because the LinkedIn Audience Network clicks are significantly cheaper than the floor bid to reach a LinkedIn audience. So if someone bids below the floor, they would just be getting mostly traffic from the LinkedIn Audience Network. But I kind of proved myself wrong on this, because I went to go create a campaign, even with LAN turned off and the same message still appears. I do think this is good because I've always hated that there is a floor bid in order to advertise on LinkedIn. That's never made sense to me. So I do like this. But I haven't heard from LinkedIn why they did it. And it's truthfully uncharacteristic of them. All right, without further ado, let's hit it. We're gonna jump into six different myths that we've heard about LinkedIn Ads, and we're going to debunk them give you the truth. 3:49 Myth Number One Myth number one, LinkedIn Ads are too expensive. We have to start out by saying that the word expensive, it's relative. If you look at just the costs on LinkedIn compared to other platforms, those front end costs, we see averages of $8 to $14 cost per click in North America. And certainly that's going to be significantly higher than other platforms, you might be paying $3 to $5 per click on Facebook friends, but you do have to put this into perspective. Because with other media, you're casting a really wide net in hopes that your ideal target audience may represent part of where that net lands. But with LinkedIn,

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Calculating ROI on your LinkedIn Ads Post from AJ about square images Revenue.io Ads Examples Optimizely Ads Examples Accenture Ads Examples Nancy Harhut - Speaks a lot about marketing psychology Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Youtube Channel Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript What imagery performs best on LinkedIn Ads? We're diving deep on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of the topics I get the most questions about on LinkedIn Ads is about creative, specifically the imagery. What kind of imagery works? What sizes do you include? What about the subject of the imagery itself? These are all fantastic questions. And again, we're diving deep. You're about to become a master of LinkedIn Ads creative. First in the news, if you're not already subscribed to our YouTube channel, we just released an example analysis from Episode 71 that was all about how to use your CRM for reporting. And it's beefy, it walks you through all the way from the beginning using real data and showing you every step of the way within Excel. So I would highly recommend go check that out and make sure that you can do that sort of reporting in your sleep. Okay, now on to the topic at hand, let's hit it. What makes great LinkedIn Ads creative. Let's talk first about the sizes. When LinkedIn sponsored content first came out back in 2013, the size of imagery, it was all horizontal, and it was 1200 pixels wide by 627 pixels tall. And what's funny about that number is because Facebook was always 1200 by 628, so one pixel taller. And this wasn't that bad, because we could always use Facebook imagery interchangeably because that difference of one pixel didn't make any difference really at all. But now LinkedIn has finally standardized on 1200 by 628. So it's the same size as Facebook's horizontal, although I'm guessing not many people are using Facebook's horizontal images anymore. And then fairly recently, LinkedIn started supporting square and vertical imagery. So if you want to use square, which we highly recommend, and I'll explain why here in a moment, you want to use 1200 by 1200 pixel, at least. You may also want to run vertical, and vertical is just the inverse of your horizontal, it's 628 pixels wide by 1200 pixels tall. And one really interesting thing about running vertical creative is it's only eligible to be shown on mobile devices. So if your goal is to be shown only on mobile and not on desktop, run vertical creative, it works. If you want to run carousel imagery, each of those panes in your carousel, you want to make 1080 by 1080. Text ads back in the day, back in like 2008, they used to be 50 pixels by 50 pixels. They ran a little while with 75 by 75. But now they've standardized on 100 by 100 pixels. And then for message ads or conversation ads. And this is optional, but if you want to use that ad space, the banner imagery in the upper right hand corner, which again, I highly recommend you might as well use it. It's 300 pixels wide by 250 tall, which happens to be the same size as the optional background on spotlight ads. These are one of LinkedIn's dynamic ads. Again, this is optional. So on the subject of square imagery, we just recently put a post out on our company page about square imagery. And it was really fun. We used a meme from Malcolm in the Middle, and it's called the future is now old man, I love that meme. Thank you to Eric Jones on our team for pointing that out. And we pointed out how in all of our tests, square imagery tends to perform better than horizontal. Then Paul Fairbrother, who's one of my connections, he commented and said, I ran a test on square versus landscape images for a lead gen campaign using square images, doubled the CTR and caused the cost per lead to literally get cut in half. I hate the one quick tip doubled your results type of headlines. But in this case, one simple change to the image format really did double the results. By the way, I had been running the landscape images for a while before switching to square so this was based on 1000s of dollars of ad spend. So should be statistically significant. Then Bram Pullens, whose Social Lead at Heineken said, "Square image all day every day." And Praveen Vadla, he commented and said, "Yes, it works, you will increase your CTR for these ads." In one of these tests we found and this is with statistical significance, that square performed 15% better to the click through rate. And if you haven't listened to Episode 59 all about click through rate, go back and listen to that, you'll immediately understand why it's such a boon to be able to just pull higher click through rates out of nowhere, it helps your cost and helps your delivera

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Collective Introducing the LinkedIn Collective: A New Community for B2B Marketers Growth on LinkedIn isn't slowing down Building an iconic brand Alex Rynne on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript AJ Wilcox 0:00 The LinkedIn Collective, it's a new community that you need to be part of. Here to introduce it as a friend of mine at LinkedIn, Alex Rynne, on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Speaker 4 0:15 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox 0:24 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I'm excited to share this interview with you. Alex Rynne from LinkedIn came onto the show to talk about what she's working on, and what she's building inside of LinkedIn's marketing solutions. She has been so instrumental for so many years creating content to help us marketers there internally. And we're going to cover this new community that she's working on, the LinkedIn Collective, as well as insights that she has from internal about which B2B brands are doing the best job of creativity, which I get asked about a lot, as well as tons of insights into LinkedIn's platform growth. So without further ado, let's jump into the interview. AJ Wilcox 1:00 I'm so excited to have Alex Rynne here on the show. Alex is a senior Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn. I think Alex, you and I go way back. We've gotten to hang out a couple times in San Francisco back when that was a thing, hanging out in person. And I've loved watching your progression there in LinkedIn. I don't know what the structure there looks like for evangelist, but I would call you like the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Evangelist if I got to give you a title. But, welcome so much to the show. Thanks so much for being on and great to have you here. Alex Rynne 1:29 Thank you so much, AJ, appreciate you having me on. And I appreciate the evangelist title. I'm going to put that on my next review. AJ Wilcox 1:37 You definitely should. Alex Rynne 1:39 So yeah, I've been with LinkedIn for eight years now, all on marketing solutions the entire time. So I've been creating content for marketers, who are reading marketers, B2B marketers, of how best to use our products. And we started create, like back in the Jason Miller days when we were creating content around how to market on LinkedIn. And these books had never been created before ebooks. These are the days of like 100 page ebooks. We don't do that anymore, because no one has time to sit down and read any book that long. But anyway, my career path has kind of grown in a way that now I'm creating a lot of thought leadership content. So we're at top of the funnel unless it like the super tactical stuff. AJ Wilcox 2:20 Oh, that's socool. I love that being your role of being your focus. I do remember the old Jason Miller days where it was create one giant pillar of content. And it was great. I loved downloading those reports. But I have to imagine the 1000s of dollars that went into creating each of those reports. Alex Rynne 2:34 Oh, think about the the lowly editor me having to edit through all of those hundreds of pages. That's who you should really be thinking about. Those were really good days, his whole like big rock concept of creating one really large piece of content and picking off little pieces and keeping the drumbeat going, which is still something that we use in part today. AJ Wilcox 2:53 Do you still think there's a lot of value in that strategy, but maybe not the same way that the editor has to go through and edit 70 pages of the content? Alex Rynne 3:01 Yeah, there's definitely still value in that concept today. It's something that we do right now. Because if you put out one piece of content, you kind of naive to think that your entire audience has seen it like you should be spending, you know, like 20% of your time creating content, 80% of your time distributing content, because if no one sees it, then what's the point? So yeah, I do think there's a lot of value in picking what like category entry points you want to own as a brand. And then keeping the drumbeat going on those and trying not to like over saturate on one topic in particular. AJ Wilcox 3:32 Yeah, makes perfect sense. So when we were talking before about an episode, you told me about something really cool that you're working on right now the LinkedIn Collective? First of all, I'd love to know what the LinkedIn Collective is how US B2B marketers, or how any marketer is going to get value out of it. And I'd love to hear the backstory. I don't want to overload you with too many questions, but love to hear the backstory of how it all came about, and what the overall vision for it is. So tell us all about your baby here. That's so amazing. Alex Rynne 3:57 Absolutely. Thanks for asking. Yeah, the LinkedIn Collecti

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Detailed explanation of policies Ad Guidelines Ad Disapprovals Episode 72 - Quality Scores Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript Have you ever had your LinkedIn Ads get disapproved for any reason? We're talking about ad guidelines and disapproval process on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Every ad platform needs to protect itself legally from allowing the bad actors to advertise in a harmful way. They do this by having your ads go through some sort of an approval process. This helps the platform to prevent any harmful ads from running on its platform. And of course, the platform being held accountable for that. LinkedIn is certainly no different. All of its ads go through some sort of a review process. And review processes are understandably complex, they kind of have to be, and this is for every platform. So today, we're going to talk specifically about LinkedIn's. In the news, I wanted to let you know that a bunch of the members of my team were trying to run campaign reports inside of campaign manager to find the campaign quality score. And like we talked about in episode 72, there are a few reasons why your campaign might not be eligible to show its campaign quality score. But from what we could see, our campaigns weren't being held back by any of those reasons that would keep them from showing the quality score. So we reached out to LinkedIn and got a good response back. They said, "Our technical escalations and engineering teams have confirmed the issue. It's currently an issue that other advertisers are seeing as well. At this time, there's no estimate as to how long it might take to resolve, we'll do our best to provide progress updates as they become available." So I will do the same thing for you. When we hear back from LinkedIn. I'll let you know. Other news here. I actually got married, which is why you haven't heard from me in about the last three weeks. The wedding went amazing. We took a honeymoon cruise, we went down the Western Caribbean. And it was right during hurricane Ian the cruise was supposed to stop in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, both I was really excited to see. But we didn't end up going we had to veer back towards Mexico and stay there while the hurricane was passing. So we did a couple stops in Mexico, it was still wonderful. I've got no complaints. Certainly happy to avoid any hurricanes while I'm on a floating petri dish. And a sincere thank you to everyone who messaged or emailed to say congratulations on the wedding. All right on to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. So back in 2011, when I first started using LinkedIn Ads, the ad review process used to be 100% manual. That means every single ad that was published a human it would go into a queue and a human would look at it and decide whether the ad needed to be approved or disapproved and they'd hit the button. And there were all kinds of mistakes, too. If you tried enough times, you could get to a reviewer who would either mistakenly hit the approve button when it should have been disapproved or vice versa. It was a little crazy. And because it was all human reviewed, the process would sometimes take up to three days to get an ad approve. Then probably five or six years ago, LinkedIn shifted some of the burden of the review team by allowing some ads to be conditionally approved, or, as we might say, automatically approved. And this is something they did and probably still do for what they call trusted accounts. And I'm not sure what signals to LinkedIn trust. Maybe a certain amount of history of the account, or a spend level, or a lack of complaints about your ads, or your credit card not ever going down. I don't know what the signals are, they could be any thing like that or other combinations. And if LinkedIn ever went back and found they didn't like the ads, even though they were conditionally or automatically approved, they could be disapproved later. Now, I'm not entirely certain about how it works now, but I would guess that there's now some help with machine learning involved on LinkedIn side to help find ads to disapprove. And then humans can handle appeals. There's probably still quite a bit of human involvement, but I wouldn't be surprised with LinkedIn being a tech company if there's not some ML or AI kinds of stuff going on there too. If you go into LinkedIn's Help section and search for the ad guidelines, you'll find a help article called Advertising Guidelines. It says it was last updated in 2021 Back in January, and this article has a great list of things that LinkedIn cares about reasons that they might want to disallow an ad from running. I'm going to read off some of the reasons that they might disapprove an

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Episode 59 LinkedIn's auction Campaign Quality Scores for Sponsored Content Help Article LI's Privacy Centric Explanations - really interesting to understand LI's direction towards privacy Episode Six NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript I win auctions every day. No, I'm not an eBay addict. I'm a LinkedIn advertiser. We're talking about how to win the ad auction on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! LinkedIn's ad auction is confusing to advertisers because it's so opaque. And you don't quite know what's going on in the background. If you're looking to improve the performance of your ads, though, you'll definitely want to understand what's going on behind that curtain. So on today's episode, we're going to do a deep dive into the ad auction. First of all, some great stuff in the news. I found a resource that LinkedIn released called the professional identity resources for LinkedIn advertisers, I've gone ahead and link that down below in the show notes so you can check it out. But basically, it's a download of how LinkedIn is looking at, and thinking about privacy concerns. And it's really helpful to understand the direction that LinkedIn is moving with things like conversion tracking, and some of the things we've seen recently like with reach being taken away. So if that's interesting to you definitely go check that article out, there's quite a few things there. I was also able to attend the meeting for LinkedIn API partners and we got a bit of a roadmap update, which was really exciting. Usually, LinkedIn likes to keep their advances that are on the platform up to date with what's happening on the API as well. So if you happen to use LinkedIn API in any way, like if you're using a partner of LinkedIn, that helps you at all with what you're doing inside of campaign manager, then you might notice this kind of functionality coming out. What they talked about, that I got especially excited about were dynamic UTM parameters. And it looks like these are going to be available in LinkedIn API first, and then we'll eventually get them inside of the dashboard. So for those of you who are already advertising on Facebook, and you love how you can create the same ad once, but in every campaign, or every ad set that you run it in, you can have different UTM parameters running to it, we're eventually going to have that on LinkedIn as well. I'm a huge fan of this. I've been asking for it for years, they also talked about how offline conversions are coming. And I've got this inside of my campaign manager dashboard so it's available on the UI to me now, I don't know if it's available to everyone yet. But we know it's probably coming to the API soon. So you might be able to use a different partner program to help you with something like these tying offline conversions back to your adspend. 2:39 So let's talk about offline conversions. It's a little bit limited in the way that LinkedIn is doing it. But you'll understand why. Imagine that you're advertising and then one of your ads turns out later to generate a sale. What you can then do is send that list of email addresses of those people who've become your customer back to LinkedIn. And then LinkedIn will take that and match it up to that same user if they're able to find that same email address attached to a user and figure out which campaign which ad they initially clicked on. And then they'll be able to do that attribution. The obvious weakness here, though, is that LinkedIn knows personal email addresses, because that's how we log in and sign up for LinkedIn. And if you close a customer off of LinkedIn Ads, they're probably going to end up giving you their professional email. So let's say if LinkedIn only understands 50% of email addresses, that's still cool to have these offline conversions being tied up in the platform. So I'm excited about the functionality, but just realizing it's not going to be fully complete. There was also some new development around DMP segments coming out with the API. So that could end up being interesting. If there are those of you who are using DMPs. Going a different direction here. One of LinkedIn engineers reached out to me with a really interesting ask. She said, she's working on the accessibility features for campaign manager, and that she's searching for some LinkedIn users who might actually utilize those accessibility features. So maybe it's someone who is vision impaired. And they're using things like a screen reader, or utilizing the alt text of images, when either creating or consuming different ads. She would love to have a brief chat with them over zoom or over the phone and share some takeaways with their engineers as they're trying to make

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Lead Gen Form Ads Reporting UTM live builder Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript I think B2B marketing and CRMs go together like chocolate and caramel. Today, we're diving into CRM reporting on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you listened to the last episode about the cookiepocalypse, you know that conversion tracking as we know, it probably isn't going to be reliable in the future. Luckily, B2B and E commerce have something in common here. In E commerce, marketers will always have purchase data, whether or not it occurred, what the sale value was, etc. And no cookie can affect that. There's a very clear line all the way from ad impression to a purchase. In business to business. When someone fills out a form it goes into your CRM. So if you're doing it right, there's never a challenge in figuring out how many leads came from a specific effort. If someone filled out a form and submitted it, it's in the database, it's become increasingly important in business to business to make sure that we've got data available to us as marketers, so we can close the loop on reporting. That way, when a platforms conversion tracking is way under reporting, because cookie data is limited, or when a platform may be way over reporting because it's using some algorithm to calculate the estimated number of conversions, you can be totally carefree. On this episode, we're gonna dive into the connection between your ads efforts, and your CRM platform and show you what you can do with the day that to close that reporting. Another hat tip to Mark Bissoni for requesting this topic. And any of you out there who have a topic you'd like us to cover, please do reach out to us at [email protected]. We are always looking forward to helping you become more super powered and hear about the topics that you're interested in. In the news, for you listeners who are attending HubSpot Inbound conference in Boston, I'm going to be speaking on Thursday there. So I'd love to get to connect if you're going to be in town. I heard a couple of weeks back that my session was totally filled up. So I hope you got registered early. But if not get there early to stand in the standby line, I speak at quite a few digital marketing conferences every year. And Inbound is by far the largest one that I speak at. And it's one of the ones I most look forward to every year. Okay, for the topic at hand, let's hit it. 2:27 What is a CRM? What is a CRM? First of all, we talk about it a lot in business to business, we may use the acronym, or we may say customer relationship management platform. But realistically, we're gonna say CRM, because the other one just hardly makes any sense. It's basically a database of your customers, your prospects, really anyone you'd want to keep track of. There are so many different types of CRMs out there. Really, anything can qualify as a CRM. If you just keep an Excel sheet, or a Google sheet of all of your current customers with some data about them, that is a really basic CRM. So don't be daunted when you hear the term if you haven't heard of it before. Some of the major CRMs that you've probably heard of before, are like Salesforce, HubSpot, Constant Contact. There's way, way, way too many to list all here. And all of them have their own personalities. Some are very tailored to sales, some are tailored more to marketing, some are better for email versus reps who are making calls. We B2Linked we actually went through several CRMs testing this, and we would have one that worked really, really well when we were doing outbound. And another that was much better with handling inbound. One connected to email really well and made it easier to do newsletters. And ultimately, you're gonna have to study all of the different capabilities based off of what you need your CRM to do. I would say most of our larger clients use Salesforce. And what's so cool about Salesforce is it's infinitely customizable. You can literally make it do whatever you want. But along with that customizability it means it's incredibly complex. Most of our clients who use salesforce.com have an internal Salesforce admin whose job it is just to keep the platform up and running. So if you don't want to hire a full time admin, there are certainly simpler CRMs. But it's great because you can make it do whatever you want. HubSpot has recently become a pretty great contender in the enterprise space. It offers the CRM functionality for free, but then the fees really start to kick in when you add on different marketing or different sales packages. I should say that HubSpot relationship with LinkedIn really makes it special. Because HubSpot and LinkedIn communicate really well. A lot of th

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Data about cookies Browser fingerprinting Audience segmentation 1st party vs 3rd party cookies How Apple's ITP treats cookies Server side tracking with Google Ads Website demographics episode Sites the LAN shows up on NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript Are you prepared for the cookiepocalypse? We're going full prepper on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Come step down into our homemade bunker. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you haven't been living under a rock, then you've likely heard about the impending doom of the browser cookie. Well, a lot of what we do as digital marketers is dependent on cookies. So you may have asked yourself, how much of your work will be affected. The subject is highly technical, so we wanted to simplify it as much as possible for you, just in case you're not a JavaScript developer. I'm going to run you through the basics of what cookies actually are, and what's happening to them. Then we'll get to jump into the cookiepocalypse and how it's affecting LinkedIn Ads specifically. As a bit of a disclaimer here, I did do a lot of research for this episode. But as a favor to those of you who are highly technical, if I got anything wrong here or overlooked anything, please do reach out and I'd love the correction and insights. Credit where credit is due, this is an episode that was requested again by Mark Bissoni like the last one. So thanks, Mark for the great ideass. I think we have one more from you here in the can. First in the news, my apologies for missing last week's episode. Our company went on a retreat, and we went down to beautiful St. George Utah. It was like a four hour drive for us. We rented a really cool mansion that had its own arcade and theater and pool. And we even spent a day at the sand dunes in side by sides and on dirt bikes. All of that was way cool, but my favorite part about it was that because we're a remote team, and we talk a lot over zoom, we discovered that no amount of zoom calls can take the place of the effectiveness of an in person conversation. As an example, a group of us were just sitting at a table working, and a conversation naturally started up. The result of the conversation was after an hour, we got way more movement on our own sales and marketing strategy than we've made the whole past year on it. Our company meetings went very much the same way. We found opportunities that we never would have found over zoom. We set company team and individual goals. And the excitement from that was palpable. Between you and I, I didn't know if the investment in the retreat was going to be a worthwhile expense. But boy, now after having done it, I'm a huge believer in company retreats. If you listen to episode 67, that was all about the organic side of LinkedIn. I have some sad news, our guest Mark Williams, his dad just passed away. I heard from his podcast. So those of you who aren't following that, if you're connected to him reaching out and just passing your condolences could probably go a long way. There have been a couple of LinkedIn features that have been rolled out or are in the process of rolling out some good, some bad. Let's talk about the audience insights tool. We talked about this one in the news section of episode 57. It's a really cool feature where you can go in and look at any given matched audience. And LinkedIn will tell you in great detail about the audiences and what they like and what they're into and what makes them up. And this is a feature we've been really excited about. We got to play around with it a little bit in its alpha or its beta. And now it's fun to see it out in everyone's accounts. If you want to access it go to plan in your navigation instead of campaign manager, and then audiences and then you can click the checkbox next to any of those audiences and click insights, then it will take you to the Insights page. If it hasn't been rolled out to you yet. It should very shortly we've seen it in the vast majority of our accounts. A new update that we were not fans of, LinkedIn made some changes to how they calculate reach. One of our loyal listeners, Tom Tigwell from the UK, he reached out to me about it and said, "Hey, did you see what LinkedIn is doing with reach? Looks like they're sunsetting it." We posted about this on LinkedIn, and Jay Rathell, another one of our loyal listeners, he talked to his rep and clarified a few things. And LinkedIn's response here is actually really applicable to today's topic. He said, as a result of identity changes, we're making updates to reach and frequency metrics in the campaign manager tool. The current reach frequency, and cost per 1000 members reached metrics will be replaced with a one day, seven day, and 30 day averages for ea

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Performance chart Demographics Audience segmentation Make optimizations Bidding/Budgeting AB testing Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript What if I told you that I was going to lay out all the different ways that I handled LinkedIn Ads reporting and optimizations in one single episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show? interested? Let's go. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of the topics that we get the most questions on is reporting and optimization on LinkedIn. And it's simple enough to jump in and just build some ads build some audiences. But that means at some point, you have to analyze what you're doing, and decide what's working and what to do differently. This is an episode that was requested by one of our subscribers, Mark Bissoni, who's a digital ads pro in Chester, England. And in this episode, we're gonna go through how you can use all the data that LinkedIn provides, both within campaign manager, as well as some of the things that you can do once you get the data out of campaign manager and into Excel. And also, because building reports is such a visual thing, I'm going to do a series of videos on our YouTube channel, where I walk you through how to build each of the different types of reports that I'm talking about. So make sure you click the link in the show notes to our YouTube channel, and follow that so you can get notified when they get released. This week in the news, I just saw that the link to business manager appeared suddenly in the left hand navigation at the bottom of all of our accounts. So it may still be a feature that's rolling out if you don't happen to see it in your account yet, but it is coming and it's probably out for most. For those of you who don't know, what business manager is, it is LinkedIn is answer to Google's MCC, or multiclient center. Early on, it was a big challenge for agencies who advertised on Google, because they would have to go and grant every one of their employees access to the Google Ads account. And what was especially painful is that once a Google Ads account was connected to an email address, that email address, couldn't administrate or have access to any other Google Ads account. So Google came out with the multiclient center or MCC. And it's a group where you can have multiple accounts granted access to a single email address. And that's how agencies manage Google Ads. Facebook lots of years later came out with business manager. LinkedIn is very, very close to that. Obviously, LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps most closely of all the platforms. And it's making it a lot easier for agencies to grant access to their team, just by adding their team member to one business manager account, instead of adding that same team member to every single LinkedIn ads account that you have. So this is something that the community has been asking for for a long time. And it's a great release. I want to highlight a review that came in this week. It was left by Gabe Harris, who runs Facqt Media, and they're a paid social agency out of Oakland, California. And I got to actually meet him when I was out on a trip to the Bay Area years ago, way cool guy. And he said, "Insightful LinkedIn expert. Indeed, this podcast is like having a LinkedIn ad coach for free. I love how generous AJ and his guests are in sharing their knowledge and expertise. I love how he leaves these experts to offer the best of their knowledge and experience to us listeners. Super insightful, we learned so much." Thanks so much gave, I really appreciate the kind sentiments there. That's exactly our goal. We treat this podcast like training for our own employees. And we don't hold back. I'm glad it's been good for you and your team as well. As a reminder, I love to give a shout out to those of you who leave reviews for us. So please take this as a sincere ask for me. If this show has been of any use to you, please do return us the favor by leaving us a review. I'd love to shout you out. Okay, let's hit it. Starting out with a little bit of a disclaimer, we may not touch on every single optimization or reporting case, but we're gonna hit a lot of the most common ones. We've definitely tried. But I'm guessing that we probably have 40 or 50 different reports that we've built for clients over the years. So my hope is we hit the major ones. But definitely if there's a type of report that we didn't hit on here that you'd like to use, please get in touch and let us know. So let's start out with the types of reporting that we can do from right within campaign managers dashboard. One of the things that I like to do is go in and look in the campaign's view. And I will sort the campaigns from high spend to low spend. What this does, it shows me in case I hav

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google and Facebook Bidding/Budgeting Lead Gen Forms Testing Strategy Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript So you're hiring a new LinkedIn advertising manager and you want to train them right? We're talking about proper training around LinkedIn Ads on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. We face pretty significant challenges when we're trying to hire someone who's responsible for LinkedIn Ads. And this is especially compared with all the other major ad channels, because most digital marketers come into the marketing industry with some sort of experience in either Google or Facebook Ads. So when you're like us, and you're specifically trying to hire for experience in LinkedIn Ads, you'll likely find that it's hard to hire someone with any sort of solid experience. And if you can't find someone with existing experience, you probably need to end up training them yourself. So this episode is all about how to get someone up to speed with LinkedIn Ads quickly and with very little drama. And as you might guess, this is the same process that we actually use when training internally as well. In the news, I have to apologize, because it's been about a month since the last episode, but I have good reason for that. I got to engaged. And my life has been a little bit of a whirlwind around that happening with all the planning for and now wedding planning. And we're currently planning for a wedding on September 23, of this year of 2022. So I couldn't be more thrilled. Thanks, everyone, for letting me share this little experience. I also wanted to share a review that was recently left, the username is choerauf. And they said, "Amazing resource. I have years of experience in digital marketing and paid ads. But when my new job was heavy on LinkedIn advertising, I knew I needed a resource to get myself up to speed on how best to use LinkedIn. This show has been everything I needed and more." Thanks so much for leaving that I really appreciate that. It's this kind of feedback that keeps me running the show, I do want to ask a special favor of everyone out there who's listening. If you have gotten any value out of this show, please go leave a review. It takes a lot of work to put these episodes together. And leaving a review is how you can say thanks if you've gotten any sort of benefit out of it. So please take this as a serious ask and favorite that you can do for me and go leave a review. All right. With that being said, let's get on to the topic. Let's hit it. So if you yourself are the one who was training, I think there are some things that you as a trainer should know. And first on that list is just realize that whoever you're training, no matter how experienced they are in digital marketing, sometimes they may be more experienced than you in number of years. Or maybe they're far less. Just realize they don't know what you do plan on going all the way back to the basics. And don't assume that they know something that you think is simple. In digital marketing, we use a lot of acronyms. People will call it alphabet soup. And it happens a lot where we just say things that are meaningful to us. But if others don't know what we're talking about, they are immediately alienated and tend to zone out very quickly. And you definitely don't want someone to zone out because we already have to repeat things in training lots of times. For my experience and training, normally, people retain about 10% of what they're being taught. And of course, every time you learn something, you're going to gain a little bit larger a base of what's going on. So your learning will be exponential. Remember that LinkedIn ads is a very complex platform. And it can feel like they're trying to take a drink from a firehose. So much coming at them all at once. And it's going to be hard to retain. So make sure that you as the trainer are being extremely patient, you're willing to repeat things as often as they need to be, and you're doing your very best to break down very complex topics, and elements of the platform and concepts into just the very, very basics. I like to separate roles into those that are more strategic versus those that are more tactical. So generally, if I'm going to be training someone on how to take on LinkedIn Ads, I'm going to train them at the very tactical things, things like how to write ads, how to manage bids and budgets in the platform, how to launch a new ad, how to create a new campaign, those types of things. And then me myself as the trainer, I'm going to take on myself, the more strategic types of tasks, that would be things like determining budgets ongoing and ensuring that we're not overspending a budget, determining which offers to run, you