[Masterclass] 6 - Advanced Techniques: Using LinkedIn's Ad Tools and Features

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

Hello hello and welcome to episode six of the LinkedIn ads masterclass where we're talking about advanced techniques and how to use LinkedIn ads tools and features to the best of their abilities. Now, we're diving into this because while LinkedIn Campaign Manager can seem like a simpler tool than like Facebook ads, there's a lot of features under the hood here that I find that many accounts haven't even touched. So you may be overlooking some functionality that might be able to help your campaigns. And that's what we're going to dive into today. The previous episodes in this masterclass covered strategy and other best practices, and in episode three we talked through the process of setting up and launching your first campaign. So today we're going to cover the other tools and features that are inside LinkedIn Campaign Manager so that you can plan and run your campaigns most effectively using those tools. Now we'll break Today's episode into four sections, just like how Campaign Manager is organized. Part one here we'll talk about planning and audiences on LinkedIn. Part two, we'll dive into the advertising component and talk about some campaign features that we didn't talk about earlier. Part three, we'll move on to testing and the features that LinkedIn offers. And then part four, we'll talk about analyzing your campaigns and using things like LinkedIn insight, tag and website demographics. Now, before we dive in, I'm excited to share a couple show notes about future episodes. So you're currently listening to the initial Masterclass season where we're covering LinkedIn ads from start to finish, everything that you need to know to get up to speed and run effective ad campaigns. After this masterclass, we'll be jumping into new episode formats that I'm excited for. So these are going to be a mixture of different topic deep dives where we'll take a single topic and go super deep on the nitty gritty best practices along with different interview formats where we'll be bringing on other experts and partners such as some of the third party tools and integrations that I've mentioned in different episodes that work with LinkedIn ads, along with the different skill sets you'll need like copywriting and design to help you create the best ads for LinkedIn. Now as we go, always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or email us at podcastpeedworksocial.com or with your thoughts on topics you'd like us to cover or new LinkedIn ads tools that we should review. So when it comes to LinkedIn ads and digital advertising as a whole, there's a whole lot of topics for us to cover. So make sure you subscribe and follow along for future episodes. All right, so let's dive into this episode on advanced LinkedIn techniques, tools and features. The first section here is planning. So this is where you're going to find your audiences live in Campaign Manager. First you have your match audiences and these are lists that you've uploaded, custom retargeting lists that you've created, and different lookalikes that you might have created. For lists. On LinkedIn, you can upload a contact or company list which are useful when you know the exact people or companies that you want to target, or when you want to exclude past customers or contacts or other lists that maybe you want to keep out of your campaigns. Now, LinkedIn is the only platform that works with company lists, and this is the basis for how ABM or account based marketing is done. For a couple tips on your lists with contact lists we find the best match rate when you use the email field because there might be multiple users with the same name or very similar names. And using the email column is the best way to make sure you're going after those same unique users that you want to be targeting. And with company lists we find the best match rate when you use the LinkedIn company profile URL column. Because if you're using the company name column, there's a lot of chances that you might not get the name to exactly match and it might match the wrong company if there's other similar companies out there with the same name. So the URL column is the best name to match off of. These lists can be uploaded manually or even be Synced from a third party system like your CRM or HubSpot or Marketo or even like a data platform like Demandbase or six Sense. There's a lot of data tools out there that can help build company lists or build contact lists for you based on other criteria that maybe LinkedIn doesn't have inside its platform. So you can check out some of those tools and those integrations there. This is a useful advanced strategy is syncing your sales team's target account list and then serving ads to those same people. That's a good way to like warm up and introduce an audience before your sales team reaches out so that it's more likely that they're familiar with your company by the time that your sales does reach out. Another good list to sync is your Open Deals list, so you can serve ads to other senior members and increase your odds of winning the deal. Another strategy is to upload your current customer list and then use LinkedIn's generate insights option to analyze them and reverse engineer your targeting criteria for retargeting audiences. You can create custom audiences based on user interactions with your ads and your website. Plus these can be set to being time bound, which are key for building an effective retargeting funnel so you can identify and focus on the people who have shown interest and engaged with your company. Most recently. The different types of retargeting audiences you can build are company page visitors, event RSVPs, Leadgem form opens and submissions along with single image ad clicks, video ad views, and website visitors. Most of these can be created with a 30, 60, 90, 180 and some a 365 day window. Last option here are lookalikes. With lookalikes on LinkedIn you can select a seed audience that you want to create the lookalike based off of, which could be another list or a retargeting audience we just discussed and then LinkedIn will build a list of similar people to that seed audience. These we usually find are hit or miss. If you're advertising on LinkedIn you usually want the specific targeting that it offers, while lookalikes tend to be a few hops from that original parameters. Note that lookalikes are static lists on LinkedIn, so once you create the list it's set. You may want to regenerate your list regularly to keep them fresh. Coming soon is something that I'm excited for are called predictive audiences. These have more options in terms of the seed list that you can create based off of website conversion actions, not just a pure list you upload or just retargeting list. These can also be created off of conversion events that people have taken on your website. And these act a little bit more similar to Facebook's lookalikes where you can select a percentage of how similar you want this list to be and these lists will continue to live update as you go. You won't need to manually refresh them. There's also a tab at the top there for saved audiences on LinkedIn. So these are audiences that you build in Campaign Manager using those built in options and filters and then they're stored here. What's interesting is that you can click into these to get even more insights into that audience pool when you go through the saved audiences section. Remember back when you were Building the audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, that right hand bar gives you some audience details into the percentage makeup by company size, seniority and et cetera. While clicking into that audience via the saved audience will give you some more details including the percentage of audience pool by actual companies. I cross my fingers and hope that someday we will be able to save an audience in one place and then have that audience update propagate to all the campaigns using that saved audience. Just like how Facebook audiences can. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping all right, so those are the audience creation options. You can also analyze audience segments by clicking Generate insights on any of those in the Audiences section. You can also click into Company Lists to see the engagement at the company level. This is really interesting and useful to be able to see the number of employees reached at the company level. Impressions and engagements Most often we're putting the target accounts list here and then using it here to aggregate all those stats in one place. Say I have a company list that's targeted in multiple campaigns. It's useful to then view that company list to see the aggregate reach impressions and engagements across all those campaigns and then all that summarized for each company on a list in one place. All right, so that's audiences. If you remember back to our targeting episode, audiences are the most important first place to start planning your campaign. Next, let's hop over to the Advertise tab. Now back in episode number three, we went through the process of creating and setting up and launching your first campaign, so I'm not going to go through all that again here. There's two important features that I want to make sure that I highlight. The first is bulk actions. Using bulk actions, you can select multiple campaigns or ads to edit at once. This is handy because LinkedIn Campaign Manager doesn't have the best bulk editing tools when you're just clicking through the interface. So if you need to rename a large number of campaigns, or change budgets on a large number of campaigns, or even turn off a lot of ads, it's a little bit surprising that you can't do this with a native interface very easily. So I, for example, use this feature a lot when I need to Update budgets for 50 or more campaigns at once, or if I need to rename an ad set in bulk, this is where bulk actions can come in handy. Now note that the UX of this feature isn't great. You have to export a spreadsheet and then in that spreadsheet you make your changes and then you re upload that edited sheet and then you wait for that to be processed by LinkedIn. It usually processes very quickly. But nevertheless, for big accounts, this is a must have when you're trying to make big changes to a lot of campaigns or ads at the same time. The second feature here is the demographics button. Now with all the planning and targeting that we've discussed up till now, once you launch your campaign, this is then where you go to see the effects of that targeting. So this demographics button will display reports of the actual people reached as your campaign runs. So then you can analyze that to see if you're reaching the right people or not. And then the performance stats of those different segments. And then once you verify that you're reaching the right people that you want to reach, you can analyze these segments to see what are the top performing and lowest performing segments to understand if there's certain changes you want to make to your targeting. Maybe based on that performance data, you would focus on a certain segment or exclude another segment to optimize your performance. All right, so we're cruising right along and next we'll move on to the testing tab and the testing features that LinkedIn has in campaign manager. So this is probably the least used and most misunderstood tab in Campaign Manager. But here there are two testing options that LinkedIn offers. Number one is A B testing and then number two is brand lift testing. First let's start with a B testing. So this is LinkedIn's built in way to be able to split test two facets of your campaigns. You can either choose to split test ads or audiences or placements. After that you select what your metric is that you want to, that's most important. But your options are only cost per click CPM, cost per view or cost per send. So LinkedIn is going to be evaluating based on the cheapest results. Now the way that these are executed is LinkedIn will create two campaigns split testing that facet that you selected and then those two campaigns run simultaneously. And then once statistically significant results are achieved, that's when it'll report back to you its findings. So these leave a bit to be desired in terms of execution because they're only evaluated on what's going to achieve the cheapest cost. You know, really in advertising we want to know what's going to drive the most conversions and the best cost per conversion. But that's not what is evaluating here. Then once these tests are complete, you're kind of left with these campaign shells in your account and then you have to then move your learnings into another campaign or apply them somewhere else after that. So for now I still prefer to do my own testing in my ongoing campaigns that I can continue running afterwards. The other option here is brand lift testing. These are a pretty interesting feature that's relatively new on LinkedIn and what happens is that LinkedIn will deliver an impression to a user and then within seven days of delivering that impression, they will also serve a survey question to them right in the feed. It almost looks like a LinkedIn organic poll, but displays slightly different. And you can tell it's kind of coming from LinkedIn. And it's a survey question that people can choose to answer in the feed. But you can survey based on 10 different brand metrics. And those brand metrics are number one aided awareness, number two ad recall, three brand familiarity, four brand favorability, five recommendation, six product consideration, seven employer familiarity, eight employer favorability, nine employer recommendation and 10 employer consideration. So some of these are kind of the marketing and sales side surveys and then some are employer branding side questions. So based on the metric you choose, you will define the survey question that's served to the user after the impression. For example, if you select brand Favorability, it then asks the user how favorable do you view? Insert brand name here, with the options to respond being very favorable, somewhat favorable, neutral, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable. Now the interesting thing about these brand tests are that they only require the ad account to spend a certain amount in ad spend over a period of time. That amount starts at 60k over 90 days for one question and increases with every additional metric that you want to include in the survey. But if you have just one question in the survey, the minimum you can spend is 60k over 90 days to be able to run one of these tests. But it's important to note that there's no additional charge for running these brand tests. So if your account spends more than 30k on a monthly basis, you can add in one of these brand lift tests for free. And there's almost no, no reason not to. These can provide more data on LinkedIn's impact on brand awareness, which is something that many people say is the most important part and the hardest to Measure part of LinkedIn ads. Outside of these built in tests, LinkedIn also offers some third party testing options. If you are a big enterprise account, you'll get access to these, including using Nielsen and the big testing options that they'll run alongside of your ads. All right, so that's the testing section. Next we'll move over to the analyze section and we'll talk about how to analyze your ads. With the LinkedIn built in features, we'll be talking about insight tags, conversion tracking and website demographics. So first we'll start with the LinkedIn insight tag. If you've done any Facebook ads or Google Ads, or use Google Analytics, this is a very similar little piece of code that you put on your website so that you can track visitors for the purpose of creating retargeting audiences or configuring conversion tracking with goal URLs. So once you have the insight tag on your website and you have some traffic that has visited your website, you can then go to the website Demographics tab. This is super useful data because it'll tell you who's visiting your website down to specific company names. The best part is that this data is free. All you need is your LinkedIn AD account and your insight tag to be set up. But you don't need to be actively running or paying for ads to get this data. So if you're listening to this, get your insight tag set up ASAP so you can start tracking this data on your website. Now going back to the website demographics, you can see the data on your visitors by breaking down facets like job titles, job functions, locations, industries, company sizes, and even company names. Again, this is super useful as you go to plan your targeting. First analyze who is already visiting your website and now the advanced strategy to use here is you can create website audiences back in the audience section. So you can create an audience on your high intent pages like demo requests and then you can run this analysis to visitors of those pages. So you can analyze who are the people that are most commonly making it to my demo request page and maybe even my demo request thank you page to know who's converting the most. All right, so let's move on to conversion tracking. This is the most important part of your tracking and analysis section. Overall, with LinkedIn conversion tracking you can create conversion events for things like page views, form submissions, data, demo requests, purchases, and more. You can create conversions that track a goal URL, such as if somebody makes it to a thank you page after a form submission, that can trigger a conversion. Or you can trigger a conversion with a pixel or piece of JavaScript code that you can put on your website. You can use a tool like Google Tag Manager to trigger a button click or a form submission or some other action that might happen on your website. Additionally, you can put this into an app so that you might track users in an onboarding flow or actions in your app or purchases in your app as well now, conversion tracking is the key to understanding the impact of your campaigns once a user leaves LinkedIn and visits your website. LinkedIn also offers offline Conversions, a feature which allows you to upload a list of conversions or integrate another system to use in conversion tracking. This is super useful for being able to track leads who move later into your sales stages like opportunities, and who go on to purchase and sign a contract with your company. Since most of that happens offline in B2B, using offline conversions is the best way to push those signals back into LinkedIn to associate and attribute which campaign and which ad this originated from. So after enough of these signals, you can start to determine which campaigns are generating the right leads that are making it through the sales process and purchasing all right, so we covered a lot of great features and strategies today and I hope you found a gold nugget or two to try in your campaigns. As a quick recap, we covered Part one planning your audiences, creating retargeting audiences to build your funnel, and then syncing your audience list to coordinate your efforts with your sales teams. Part 2 We covered the advertising campaign features using bulk actions for managing a large amount of ads and campaigns and using demographic reporting to compare to your original targeting. Part three was testing and using LinkedIn's built in A B testing features or using LinkedIn's brand lift testing, which we are fans of and is a little nice freebie if you have the ad budget. Part four was analyzing and we covered the LinkedIn insight tag, website demographics and conversion tracking. Remember to get your insight tag on your website so you can start seeing who's visiting. All right, so thanks for listening. Remember, if you ever want to get a hold of me or the podcast team, you can reach us@podcastpeedworksocial.com and I'll catch you in the next episode of the Masterclass.

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