LinkedIn Ads Show

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