All About Text Ads, Spotlight Ads, Dynamic Ads - The Cheapest Ads on LinkedIn

You're listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio, the podcast dedicated to exploring and mastering LinkedIn advertising, with your host, Anthony Blatner from speedwork.

All right, B2B marketers. Today we are talking about the small but mighty ad units on LinkedIn. We're talking about the text and dynamic ad formats, also called Spotlight ads. With these ads, you can get some of the cheapest CPMs possible on the LinkedIn platform and they tend to be underutilized. So there is some opportunity there. So we'll go through what they are, how you can best use them. We'll talk about some tips and tricks you can get the most value from this ad unit. All right, first, we'll start with what's new on the LinkedIn platform before we dive into today's episode. So I know the applications are opening soon for the LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert program. I was selected to this program last year and I can vouch and say it's been a great program to be a part of. We all got to go to the LinkedIn London offices and meet the team there. Uh, we've met a lot of people at LinkedIn. We've had some LinkedIn private special training sessions and gotten to learn more about the platform and then the added bonus of getting to meet all the other experts from around the world. So it's only been a great program. And if you are looking to continue to deepen your skills and knowledge on the LinkedIn platform, I highly recommend it. It is an extensive application process. You'll have to get references and talk about your experience on the platform. But if you are planning to, if you want to focus more on LinkedIn advertising and LinkedIn marketing, I definitely recommend it. So those applications should be coming out soon. Keep an eye open. In the meantime, get started on the certification process and get into the Certified Marketing Insider program. And then that's where you'll hear about the Certified Marketing Expert program. Other things in the News is that LinkedIn is beta testing LAN only campaigns. So up till now LAN was only an add on checkbox. You could do with campaigns that would also run on LinkedIn. So your options were either on LinkedIn only or on LinkedIn and LAN. Now they are coming out with the feature so that you can run LAN only campaigns. This is also kind of paired with the timing of the connected TV campaigns which are coming out. And those are also LAN only types of campaigns. In addition to that, there's some new metrics that LinkedIn's been rolling out. It's great to see more data and visibility come. The big one was the dwell time metric that came out about a month ago or so. This is will report back to you how much time people actually sit there and read your ads, which is a great indicator to know. You know, is this ad grabbing someone's attention? Are they reading the contents of my ad or are they just scrolling by? And it also gives us a way to kind of compare video and image ads side by side. Where video always had, you know, some metrics for how much were people watching the video. But image ads, all you would know is if they clicked or didn't. So now having the dwell time metric is great to have a next level of understanding of how engaging your content is. So kudos to LinkedIn team and I've heard that there's more stats and data coming out. The other one that I've heard about is that there's some additional thought leader ad metrics. We do have member follows now, so we can see how many follows that person has gotten from a thought leader ad. Now there's also clicks to the member profile, so just like how a normal LinkedIn ad you can click to the company page. Now LinkedIn is also reporting on clicks to the member profile, which is again more great data to be getting. All right, so let's start with diving into what these ads are. So if you've ever spent time on your desktop on the LinkedIn platform in your web browser, you'll then see these ads in the right hand side rail of the desktop experience. So I'm noting here that these do not appear on the mobile app and these are the only ads that will show up only on desktop on LinkedIn. In fact, these are the only ads you can be 100% certain are only going to show up on desktop on LinkedIn. All the other ads you can't control that completely. But with text and dynamic ads, you'll know that all of your traffic you're getting to your website or all the impressions you're serving are only on desktop, which is a great thing to be able to know. The other item to note is that they are mostly text based. They are smaller ad units cause they show up on the side rail there. And I guess that's also as how the name indicates when you call them text ads. They are mostly text based. Each of them has a little bit of a visual element to it, but they are heavily text. So let's dive into the key components of each of these. First I'll start with the text ads. So you have four different inputs that you can give it. When you're setting up your text ads, the first one is the ad image. And most often people use your logo here for the ad image portion, but you can upload other imagery there if you maybe want your product logo, which might be different. This is typically recommended to be 100 by 100 pixel image, so it is quite small, the 2 megabyte file size limit. Second is your ad headline, which is limited 25 characters, so that is pretty short. And then your ad description, which can then go up to 75 characters. And the way that they're displayed is just right on top of each other. You'll have your ad headline at the top and then your ad description below that. And then the ad image that you're giving it will show up to the left, right to the left of it. So it's all kind of what it's in one ad unit. You'll have your image to the left and then just to the right you'll have the headline and then you'll have have the description right below that. Then finally you'll give it a destination URL which you can set to either be any URL that you want to give it, or you could. There's also the option to select your company page so that you could then drive clicks to your company page to learn more. Probably 99% of the time we're driving traffic to an external website URL to our company website using the option of the. When I think about driving traffic to the company page, you know, maybe that's for like a job ad or something like that. But whenever you're running job ads, you'd want to use the second one here, which is the dynamic and text ads. Those ones are, are better fit for job types of ads. But the text ads that we're talking about here, you can give it a destination URL or you can have that click to your company page. So next, let's dive into the Spotlight ad Unit. This is aka Dynamic Ads. I use those names interchangeably in the LinkedIn interface they're called Spotlight Ads, but in lots of LinkedIn's documentation they refer to them as dynamic ads. So they are one in the same. We'll also put follower ads and job ads under this grouping because they show up in the same spot. They're all, they're all the dynamic format. And then Spotlight, I guess would be the ones that are not follower and not job ads. The kind of like the plain version of it. So the options that you have when you're setting up your Spotlight ads first is you have the option to give it an ad background image. Now you'll have to see how this image lays out and we'll include some links to visuals here. But this, this is a basically a square ad unit that shows up in the right hand side rail. There's. You've seen these if You've been on LinkedIn before, in the middle you'll have your company's logo and then often you'll have the profile, your profile pict next to it. So it's interesting to put your profile picture next to a company logo. That's why they often lend themselves well for recruiting types of ads. That's right in the middle. And then ripple low that you'll have the ad headline. And now the ad headline can be up to 50 characters. And then right below that is the call to action button. And then that also can be a custom call to action button. You can give that 18 characters. Next is the ad description. And this is kind of small text which lives at the very top. And that's going to be 70 characters. And this was only displayed if, if you're not using a background image, we'll get back to the background image in a second. But if you're not using a background image, then you do have the option to give it add description text which will then appear at the top. So overall you have the ad headline there, which is just 50 characters, shows up right in the middle. And then you'll have the, your company logo and then the person's profile picture and you can change out that company logo. You can give it a different company image. Again, if there was maybe an image, maybe if there was like a logo for a community you were recruiting for or one of your products or one of your departments at your company, if you had a different mark for that, you could then swap that in there. You can also customize the company name that you're writing there. By default it's going to pull in the company name that you have on LinkedIn. The max is 25 characters. So if you do have a longer company name on LinkedIn, some companies say, you know, comma, division of XYZ parent company, or maybe they'll have like a little descriptor right there in their company name. Sometimes you might have to cut down your company name if there's too many characters there. And then of course lastly is the URL that you're going to be giving that ad now back up to that background image. If you do choose to use a background image, you can then upload that image into the background there. You'll want to kind of, you'll definitely want to preview how your ad is laying out because some of it is covered up by the logos there and the text there. So definitely when, if you're designing an image to go in the background there, we recommend upload it, make sure that it's laying out the right way and you're not covering up something that you intend to be in the image. And then I'll also mention the two kind of subtypes of these dynamic ads is number one, the jobs ad. It's a very similar ad unit, has the same inputs, but instead of clicking to an external URL, you'll click to your company page careers page and then somebody can apply to the job is there. And then the other version is the follower ad unit. This is actually a very interesting ad unit. When somebody clicks on the CTA button of this ad unit, it will automatically follow that company page. So it's there is not a step in the middle of having to go to the page and then re click follow. Clicking follow that first time does follow the company page. And I'll also note that when there's, there's actually two views of these. There's the non follower view and the follower view. So when somebody's not a follower of your page, they're going to see the follow button. And then once they have clicked or if they are already a follower of your company page, then what they're going to see is the external URL version of this ad. So even with follower ads, you can give it a destination URL. If they're not currently a follower, their click will follow your page and also take them to the page. And then if they already are a follower, they'll click to that external URL. These followers are very interesting because they're the only ad unit. Well, they're one of two kind of options for driving more followers to your company page. They're the most direct, you know, click to follow ad unit. But then your other option is using the engagement objective on LinkedIn. When you use the engagement objective, the ads you're going to run are going to have a follow button in the right top right hand corner of those ads. And if you're running it from a company page, you know that follow will then follow the company page. If you're running it from a Thought leader app, that follow button will then follow that person. So get more followers is always a good thing. Followers then have the chance of seeing More, more content updates from you guys in the future. So it is a good action to take and a good sign from, from your audience. If they're wanting to follow you and follow your company, that means that they're wanting to learn more. The last point I'll add in here is because we know B2B sales do take a while, it is a good action to get people to take is to follow your company page or follow you so that they can continue to see updates from you over time organically, without having to be a paid ad. And even as an advertiser, we'll take all those free impressions we could possibly get. All right, so next let's talk about some pros and cons of using text and dynamic ads. So I'll break down each into we'll talk about all the pros and then I'll talk about all the cons and then next after this, we'll talk about some of the best practices for using these ads. All right, so for the pros, the number one is what I've mentioned, that these are the only ads that you can ensure are going to show up on desktop for your prospects. There's one campaign that comes to mind that's still running that has a very long that I could think about that has a very long form that needs to be submitted to collect all the information that it needs for the for prospects to submit their request to the company. This long application form required a lot of inputs. And you know, you can imagine somebody on their phone seeing a whole ton of inputs. They're probably not going to submit that on their phone. They're like, okay, I'll come back later to submit this. So whenever we did run sponsored content ads, we saw very low conversion rates because a lot of that traffic was coming from mobile and just not converting because the form required too much info there. So when we launched text and dynamic ads, we knew all that traffic was coming on a desktop. We saw that conversion rate increase a lot because those people are on desktop. They were able to quickly type in the information that the form needed and they weren't as overwhelmed by that long form. So again, they're good for that. Other things that I've seen be useful for running it as the desktop only or knowing that it's going to be desktop only is that you can take people back into your app. So maybe you're targeting current users and you want to take them back to finish setting up their account. You can do that because you can link right back to your app. All right, so the other pro is that you can deliver a lot of impressions for very cheaply. So like I mentioned, these have some of the cheapest CPMs you can get on LinkedIn and it's because you can bid on a CPC basis. And these ads, the, the pro is that they're very cheap. The con is that they're very small and kind of out of the way, so they don't get a lot of clicks, part of them not getting a lot of clicks. So these ads are delivering a lot of impressions. You only pay when somebody clicks. So that's only one out of X amount. So that makes your CPM cost very cheap. Now that might be a little bit of a vanity, vanity metric when you look at it, because, you know, do people really see all those impressions? Is kind of the question that we'll ask. And yeah, probably a lot of those impressions are missed, but there's probably also a good number of those that people do notice your logo, they do read the headline and they, you know, maybe they don't click every time, but at least they're reading that they're seeing your logo over and over again. It's keeping your brand top of mind. So those are kind of some of the benefits that come with it. Next is that they are pretty simple to set up because it is, you know, you can give it a little logo, you can use a different mark for that if you want, but they're just a little bit of text you need to put in there and then they can get running very quickly. Another pro is that for text ads. LinkedIn recently started adding social proof to these text ads, which I think is a great addition because they are such a small ad unit. This little boost definitely makes them kind of worthwhile again. Previously, text ads used to show up right at the top of the newsfeed and in the side rail, maybe about a year or two ago, they took away the top ad part, Carsonuts only in the side rail. And when they did that, they lost a lot of kind of impression inventory. And people stopped using text ads a lot. You know, they were still useful for certain cases, but just a lot less inventory. And then within the last year, LinkedIn added this little social proof pill to the bottom of the text ads where it'll show the viewer all of their connections that follow that page. That's advertising. So I think it's a great little boost to do. Those profile pictures are going to, you know, grab your eye, you're going to see it and then it adds just a little bit of connection there you're like, oh, I can see that these other people are following this page. You'll see a couple sample profiles that it'll pick out and then it'll tell you how many people are of your connections are following that page. So, you know, maybe it's a few connections, but I've seen somewhere I'll see like hundreds or thousands of connections that follow a page. So it's a nice little social proof boost to that. And then also again, it's, it's useful for job ads, for, for spotlight ads. It puts the person's profile picture who's viewing next to the company logo there. And it just, you know, that just gives the, gives the impression of, you know, putting that person next to the company for like a recruiting type of ad. So it conveys that to them. And if you spent time on LinkedIn, you've probably seen lots of these, you know, explore opportunities at XYZ Company or seen open jobs at XYZ Company. All right, so next, let's talk about some of the cons here. So like I mentioned, they are a very small ad unit. So while it does deliver a lot of impressions, maybe a lot of these are not really seen out there. And then also because it is a small ad unit, there's just a limited amount of like visual space you have often just limited to just your logo and there's a very limited amount of text you can give it. So you can't really convey a lot of information to somebody. So clicks that you do get, those people might not have a lot of contacts or information when they do click on your ad to go to your website. So you might be getting clicks, but people aren't really sure who you are or what you do. So those clicks, you might be paying for those clicks and they might not be great clicks to be getting. My corollary in the back of that is to suggest use these as retargeting ads. To start, if you have a very straightforward message and a very straightforward offer you're promoting and a very simple call to action you're promoting, you can then use these to the cold audience. But the best they're going to be most effective using them as retargeting. Once somebody already knows who you are, then showing your logo over and over to them is how you build that brand familiarity. The second part of them not getting a lot of clicks is if you are looking to drive traffic, these are the best option for driving a lot of traffic. Again, because they're out of the way, you're going to know, you're going to see you're going to get a very low click through rate. So it's just very limited in number of clicks you're able to drive. If you do want to run these to the cold audience, you really have to give it a very large audience so that has enough people to reach so that that very low CTR still results in a good number of clicks for you. Another con is that the dynamic UTMs don't apply to these ads yet. So if you are setting up these ads, you'll have to manually add your utms to these ads. And then one more con is that they can mess up your conversion tracking. So if you're using conversion events and tracking tracking events in your website, you know, somebody goes to your website, they view a couple pages, they submit a form there. Very often text and dynamic ads often steal credit, quote unquote, I'll say because these deliver so many impressions to the viewer. Lots of times they kind of, they deliver impression that's out of the way. Even if somebody clicks on a different ad or maybe they then on their own time go to the website and do something there. It's very often that that dynamic or text ad has kind of sneak snuck in the last impression and it'll count a view through conversion even though it didn't have that real last touch. Like somebody probably clicked on a different ad first or maybe they spent some time reading your sponsored content ad in the newsfeed. So very often these text and dynamic ads kind of steal credit for those conversions. So if you are using these, I recommend be mindful of that often we'll either leave these conversion events off these campaigns or we'll create a second set of conversion events and just minimize that attribution window to limit the view window down to just one day. So just so it doesn't deliver an impression and then come to view through conversions on something that happened like 20 days ago. All right, so there's a few, you know, cons there things to watch out for if you do use these ad units. But next let's jump over to talking about tips and tricks and some best practices if you do go to use these ad units. So number one is to often start these as remarketing ads. So again, once somebody already knows who you are, maybe they've already watched a video, been to your website. That's where the high impressions are kind of continue to build brand familiarity. Once they already know who you are, they need to have that brand familiarity first for that impression. To really count or like have an impact. Otherwise, if somebody's never seen you before, then your logo doesn't really mean anything to them. So often they're just reading your your small amount of copy out of context. So my recommendation is start these as remarketing ads. If you have a very simple offer or very clear direct offer or you're a household brand name, then you can often use these for cold ads as well. Number two is with the Spotlight ads, you can actually use the first name variable in your ad copy, which is kind of cool because when it's putting the person's profile picture next to your company logo and then you can say, hey Jane, do you need HR software? Or whatever your ad copy is going to say, that's a kind of a cool effect. To be able to call out somebody's name and then have their profile picture there creates a very personalized experience. Number three is the recommendation to use emojis in your ad copy. Emojis come with a little bit of color that will be in there. So that little bit of color just helps to draw the viewer's eye to your ad. Again, because these are very small ad units, they're out of the way, they're on the right hand side, they don't get seen very often. So any little bit of color you can add to that will help draw someone's eye to it. Again, just like the personalization adding their name in the last step and then adding the emojis in this step, these can all help draw more eyeballs to your ads, increase your CTR and just increase the impact of these ads. Number four is to add the arrow emoji at the end of the cta, either the end of the headline and text ads or the description in text ads and the CTA button in Spotlight. It helps accentuate the effect of you're going to click on this to go to another website, so people aren't surprised when they then click through to another website. Number five is that is the recommendation to use that background image for Spotlight ads. Using some bold colors there also helps draw someone's eye to that ad. You could have a little bit of a design there. It is a very small image you can put there, but you can fit a very little bit of text or a little visual there. It is kind of a low resolution upload when you add it. So do preview it and make sure you're happy with it before you launch it. But what I've seen be successful is having a bold color there or a texture there. Can help draw someone's eye to your ad. Maybe using an arrow in that image to then point down to the rest of your ad copy helps draw their eye in to read the rest of your ad. And when you upload this ad image, you'll want to contrast the ad image, the image background color, with your logo color just to have some contrast there so they can differentiate the two. I've seen some that have the same background color as the as the logo color, and those are kind of easier to scan over and not be sure what you're seeing because it all kind of blends together. Next is with both text and dynamic ads. If you have a few versions of your logo and a few brand colors that you use, use whatever the brightest one is. So if you have some brighter colors and some more earth tone colors, use those bright colors again because it will help draw someone's eye to your ad. Next one is to bake in your UTMs into your AD URL. Again, the dynamic UTMs do not apply to these ad units, so you'll have to bake in your AD UTMs and so that you can track your clicks onto what campaign and ad those are coming from. Next recommendation is to use the website visits objective and then use the engagement objective when you want to use the follower ads. And then finally you can use the job applications objective if you want to do a job. Spotlight ad number nine is you can also consider writing your ad URL in the ad copy there again, because they're out of the way. They just get less clicks. People often will read them more, but just get clicked less, less often. So if you write out your ad URL in that small amount of copy you have, sometimes people will just type that right into the browser. Again, they're on the desktop, so they might just type that right into the browser and you don't have to pay for a click. Again, we'll take any ways we can to save save costs. And then lastly, number 10 is when you're using the follower ads, make sure to exclude your current followers from those follower ads so you can ensure that you're only reaching new prospects that aren't currently following you. So you can maximize how many followers you get from that follower ad. All right, And I have two wishes or hopes that I hope will come down the pipeline. If anyone from LinkedIn is listening, number one is I wish that we could open a lead form from these ads. Again, they are small and out of the way, but I wish that a click to that ad, that CTA button Right now we can go to a website URL or a LinkedIn company page. Why not add a third to open up a lead form right there and then my other wish is I wish there would be cheaper costs, cheaper cpcs if you did direct traffic to your company page. Because there are some times when I think about it would be nice to get more people to go to our go to the company page for a certain case or tactic. But I know I'm going to be paying the same cpc so I might as well send them to my website where they can learn even more and get the whole brand feel as part of that. All right, so there's a lot of info about text and spotlight ads today. I hope you got some actionable things you can take right away and go start using your campaigns. Stay tuned. We have some other exciting episodes coming up. We have more interviews with LinkedIn, hearing from product experts. There's of some new features that have come out and then some features that are coming down the pipeline. So stay tuned for those. There's gonna be some great episodes. As always, if you guys have any questions for me, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and I hope everyone's having a great summer.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.

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