Showtime! LinkedIn Video Ads Best Practices

On LinkedIn compared to other platforms. Platforms like Meta, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are more video heavy platforms. People are scrolling around, they have more leisure time. Those apps tend to be used after hours and on weekends when people have more time to kill and are more likely to watch videos. So in general we don't see and again, this is changing and it's great to see us changing. But for now, what we've historically seen is people don't watch as much video on LinkedIn as compared to other platforms. So a lot of this is going to. A lot of my recommendations here are going to be based around that user behavior. So first let's start with when do you want to use video ads? Video as a, as a medium, it's great because it's very high fidelity interaction. You can convey a lot of information, many frames of information versus a single static image. You just have one frame of information. A video can show a whole lot more. So it's a very rich format. Video is great to show off a person and their personality and help the viewer get to know that person. Videos are also great for showing off features or software products, for showing off products and services and how they work. It's great for showing off software and showing interfaces, tutorial videos and walking through things like that. So video is great when you have a lot of information you want to convey or more complicated topics that can't be explained in just a image ad. So the flip side, let's talk about when video isn't as great to use most of the time. So we talked about videos good when you want to explain a lot of information or have more info that you need to explain. But on the flip side, we usually see that video is not. Does not perform as well when your goals are to drive traffic to your website or to drive leads on the platform using any kind of like LinkedIn, Legion form or leads on another website. And the reason for that is because when you do have a video ad, people often are going to, you know, sit there and watch the video. And then often people don't often watch the whole video, but they might watch the first half of it and they might going to continue to scroll through their feed from there. So videos do usually have a lower click through rate. So it is. You will get less clicks to a website or to a lead form, you'll have lower engagement rates. So if you're using an objective like website visits or Legion, typically you have to bid more for those clicks because LinkedIn as an algorithm is largely based off of engagement rate. So if you have a lower engagement rate with video ads, you have to bid more for it. So again, if you're looking to drive traffic to a website or capture leads using the LinkedIn forms, that video often does not perform as well because they tend to have lower engagement. The video format on LinkedIn is not as good for small animations. You might see lots of ads and posts on Facebook and Instagram that have a small amount of animation and it is a video file that's playing there. I've seen people try to use them in the same way on LinkedIn, but you have to upload it, you know, as you upload as a video. The reason for that, that it isn't as good is because there's often a short lag between a video loading. So video is a great format, but for most people I do recommend starting with image ads. Get that figured out, get that working well and then once you have some stuff that's working there, then consider adding in video or split testing video. Once you already see images working, keep in mind that video has a lot more variables involved with like the watch time and are people playing or pausing it and how much are they seeing and what are they seeing. So there's a lot more variables there. So usually most people do want to start with image ads and then consider moving to video or split testing video after that. Also if you're just doing a very little bit of animation in the video, maybe just like a little bit of animation of text or something like that, then you can also use GIFs in image ads and sometimes website or to drive leads on the platform using any kind of like LinkedIn, Legion form or leads on another website. And the reason for that is because when you do have a video ad, people often are gonna, you know, sit there and watch the video. And then often people don't often watch the whole video, but they might watch the first half of it and they might gonna continue to scroll through their feed from there. So videos do usually have a lower click through rate. So it is, you will get less clicks to a website or to a lead form, you'll have lower engagement rates. So if you're using an objective like website visits or Legion, typically you have to bid more for those clicks because LinkedIn as an algorithm is largely based off of engagement rate. So if you have a lower engagement rate with video ads, you have to bid more for it. So again, if you're looking to drive traffic to a website or capture leads using the LinkedIn forms, that video often does not Perform as well because they tend to have lower engagement. The video format on LinkedIn is not as good for small animations. You might see lots of ads and posts on Facebook and Instagram that have a small amount of animation and it is a video file that's playing there. I've seen people try to use them in the same way on LinkedIn, but you have to upload it, you know, as you upload as a video. And the reason for that that isn't as good is because there's often a short lag between a video loading. So, so video's a great format, but for most people I do recommend starting with image ads. Get that figured out, get that working well. And then once you have some stuff that's working there, then consider adding in video or split testing video. Once you already see images working, keep in mind that video has a lot more variables involved with like the watch time and are people playing or pausing it and how much are they seeing and what are they seeing. So there's a lot more variables there. So usually most people do want to start with image ads and then consider moving to video or split testing video after that. Also, if you're just doing a very little bit of animation in the video, maybe just like a little bit of animation of text or something like that, then you can also use GIFs in image ads. And sometimes those perform better for having just a light animation in your creative. All right, so where else do video ads perform well? So videos tend to perform better in retargeting campaigns. Once somebody already knows who you are, what you do, they have that context there. Then number one, they're going to be more likely to watch a video ad because they already have some familiarity with you. And if they've never seen your brand before, they're going to be less likely to sit there and watch the video. So we see more watch time and higher watch percentages on retargeting with video. So you might not use video in your cold campaigns, but we usually see it perform better in a retargeting campaign. That's not to say it can't perform well in a cold campaign, but we just see performance stats are better in retargeting campaigns. The next thing to think about is what's, what is the creative, the strategy in the creative that you're using. And we do see that people of course, grab the most intention. And next, as we think about creative, what types of creative tend to work best just like anything else, imagery of people or having people and faces in your video are have the highest engagement rates and have the longest watch time. If you ever watch TikTok videos or videos on other platforms, very often they'll do a side by side and have one thing going on one side and then somebody's reaction to the other side. In general, faces grab the most attention. So now while I wouldn't use that format specifically on LinkedIn, what we do see work well is anytime you are showing something that that isn't evolving a person having the little bub face in the right hand corner or in one of the corners of the video helps because that helps increase engagement. People are going to watch that, see who's talking, they can see somebody speaking versus if you just have a narrator voice that is not as engaging as having someone's face over the video. Selfie videos do have higher engagement rates because again, somebody's going to be watching this person talk and explain what they're talking about. Whenever you have a selfie video, usually you want to have a title over it so that it can kind of set context of what's this person going to be talking about. So here are a couple more examples of when we find video ads be the most effective. So number one is after someone's already visited our website or our company page, maybe they clicked on an image ad to get there, or maybe they're just organically on their own visiting our website then now introducing video as a retargeting ad for this can be effective. And some things that can work here is once someone's been to your website, maybe they just visited a couple pages but didn't go any further. That's where a video ad from the CEO can be good to kind of introduce the company, talk about the benefits of using that company, maybe how they're different. But getting to know the CEO and getting to hear from the CEO can be effective that way or any other leader in the company. So next are putting demo videos in feed. So maybe somebody made it to the request a demo page but they didn't actually request that demo. Put a video ad in the feed just to show them the highlights of the software. But don't, don't give it all to them there, make them still click. They can hear how other people are using your software, the value that they're getting from it. All right, so now let's move on to the technical components of video ads on LinkedIn. So the first part here, let's talk about objectives. So video ads can be used in every objective on LinkedIn. Additionally, they have their own format Called Video Views Objective. If you want to bid on a cost per view basis, you can use the Video Views Objective. These do optimize more towards people who are likely to watch video in feed. So we do see longer watch times on average by using the Video views. Now let's dive into the technical details. All right, so now for the video file that you're going to upload to LinkedIn. Number one, the max video size is 200 megabytes. The documentation actually says 500, but if you try to upload a file over 200 it says error. The max file size is 200. So LinkedIn needs to figure out their documentation there. But the max video size is 200 megabytes. Keep in mind that this can be small for a video file. Video files can be very big, especially if they're high resolution. Now for the aspect ratio of like what's the orientation and the actual pixel size of this video. Aspect ratios can range from 9 by 16, which is the vertical format that takes up the full screen like a, like a TikTok video, all the way down to a 16 by 9, which is the horizontal format. The short horizontal format that will show up that you see often on LinkedIn is like that's the original ad size from back in the day. So aspect ratios can range from the vertical format all the way down to that horizontal banner format. One by one or square formats tend to be preferred because they'll show up on both mobile and desktop versions. And I should note that anything taller than a square will not show up on desktop and will only show up on mobile devices. So if you are doing vertical videos, then note that those do not show up on desktop. They will only show up on mobile devices. That ad won't even serve on a desktop. So. So there's kind of some pros and cons of that. Number one, the pros are that it takes up more space on mobile and you're optimizing towards a better experience on mobile. And most users are on mobile. So it is better to serve a mobile optimized format to mobile users, knowing that most of the viewers anyways are going to be on mobile. The con is that often the best converting traffic does come from desktop. We do usually see that people on desktop do tend to convert a lot higher because it's a more full experience. On mobile. You're doing a lot of things. There's notifications popping up. You're used to swiping real quick between apps or swiping away from that post versus on desktop. If you Click on a link, it's going to open in a new tab and redirect you, and then you're going to be on that full desktop experience. You have the space to read and see the imagery and see other videos. So desktop tends to be a more immersive experience. We do tend to see that desktop has a higher conversion rate to actually somebody submitting a demo form. So those are some of the pros and cons of using mobile versus desktop. Now for minimum height and width in terms of pixels is 360 pixels. That is quite small, so I do recommend bigger than that. And then the max height or width in terms of pixels is 1920. So watch out. If you're getting an ultra HD video from your video editor, you often need to tone that down so that it can fit into these aspect ratios. I've received lots of videos over the years and I'll go to try to upload it and I'm like, oh, this video is either way too big in file size or too big in number of pixels. I need to go back to the video editor, have them cut it down or optimize that resolution so I can upload that to LinkedIn. Some tips are if you get a video that's too big or needs to be cut, you can use cropping tools. Canva's got a lot of good tools. It's very easy just to upload a video to Canva and then re export it in a lower resolution. If you're on Mac, QuickTime can do some resizing for you and also exporting videos. Different format. But in terms of file format, that format actually needs to be an MP4 file. So if you are using any Mac editing or QuickTime, it's usually going to give you a mov file. Or if your video editor gives you any other file formats, you need to get an MP4 format. If you're getting a different format, there's lots of converters online that you can use to upload your video file. It'll just convert it to a different format for you. You can re download that and then upload that to LinkedIn. And then in terms of duration of how long the video can be, you can go from three seconds is the minimum. So you can't have a two second video. It's got to be at least three seconds all the way up to 30 minutes. So 30 minutes is the max. You can't go over 30 minutes. That is the max for the ad format. But also keep in mind, if your videos is around 30 minutes, it's probably going to also be over that max file size. So be careful of, you know, the longer a video is, the bigger the file size tend to be. And that max is 200 megabytes. LinkedIn in their docs even recommends 1530 seconds is recommended because it does say that some the video won't show up at all placements if it's over 30 seconds. Other placements that this can show up are in the LinkedIn Audience Network which is showing video ads on third party websites along with in feed videos. So LinkedIn recommends 15 to 30 seconds as the recommended time. And in general, especially on social video, shorter does tend to be better because people's attention spans are short. They're not gonna sit through a whole video there. When you're serving a video ad, you're interrupting somebody so they're not actively searching you out at that point in time. So when you're interrupting them, something quick and punchy is gonna do the best. They're not as likely to sit through a longer video. Maybe your your ad links to where they can watch the full video, but that video in the feed is tend to be is better if it's a short and punchy video. One other thing on size, physical size of the video is I did mention how it can be all the way from fully from the full tall videos the 9 by 16. I want to note that if you use that full 9 by 16 format, LinkedIn's actually going to shorten your video down. Not crop, but it's going to shorten it down and add little bumpers to the side so that it can fit in a shorter height wise view. And a user can click full screen to then see that in the full view or if you're ever pushing this on organic that if it's in a videos for you section it can then show the full view. But in the video ad it is going to shorten, squish your video down a little bit and then add bumpers to the side. So because of that, if you're running for video ads we do recommend the tallest that you use is a 4 by 5 which is 1200 by 1500 pixels. Because if you go above that then LinkedIn is going to start to shorten it back down to that size. And then again when it's shortening it down, it's also, you know, squishing in the sides to do that. So you're gonna have bumpers on the side. So to not have bumpers you gotta use the 4 by 5 aspect ratio which is 1200 by 1500 pixels. All right. And then as you think about running this into different campaigns, if you're ever running it in a website visits campaign or a lead gen campaign and you're doing manual bidding on any of those, then we have the concept of chargeable clicks. Like what is a chargeable click on the ad when you're manually bidding? Because when you're bidding on those objectives, you're gonna bid on a cost per click basis. So there's certain clicks that LinkedIn doesn't charge you for. Like often the social, like somebody just liking your post on a website visits or a legion objective does not charge you for that click. But it's important to note that just clicking play or pause on the video is a chargeable click. So this is one of the reasons why video can have mixed performance and sometimes can perform worse is because lots of clicks that people are gonna make on a video is to pause the video or restart the video. So clicking play or pause in the video is a chargeable click. So you can get lots of clicks on your video that are not clicking to go to the website or clicking to open the form. So that's one of the reasons why video can have mixed performance when you're using a visits or lead gen objective. So often if you are using video, it does tend to work best for like a video views objective or a brand awareness objective or bidding on a, on a CPM basis. And now also when you upload your video, LinkedIn's going to have a couple more inputs there. Of course you can name the video when you upload it and then there's an option to upload a thumbnail. I do recommend uploading a thumbnail because I have seen in the feed sometimes, sometimes it can take a second for the video to fully load. Videos are bigger file formats. It's, you know, it's reliant on your network to, to serve that video ad. So if someone's on WI fi, that's gonna be a faster load. But if someone's on their cell network, it could take longer for that video to load. So you don't wanna have any delay there. So upload a thumbnail. That thumbnail will be instantly displayed when a user scrolls your ad into view and then your video will play from there. So I do recommend when you use that thumbnail, have it be the first frame in the video. So it's a seamless continuation from the thumbnail into the video. If you have a, if you choose a very different thumbnail, then that can Be kind of a jarring experience and somebody might think that oh, there's something wrong with this video here or this post. I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep scrolling by. So do upload a thumbnail and it is recommended to have that be like the opening frame of the video. The other thing you're gonna upload is an SRT file. So if SRT files are used for captions. So if you are transcribing your video and can get an SRT file, you can upload that with your video and then LinkedIn will display their captions over your video using an SRT file. I actually recommend baking your captions into the video and not worrying about SRT files. So lots of video editors can do this, but it can automatically transcribe your video and then put those words as captions over your video. But I do recommend bake those into the video so that is a graphical caption that's baked right into the video. Then lastly to note is the reason for that is most people do have their sound off by default. So I do recommend either bake your captions in or use an srt file, but baking your captions in is usually recommended. And now if you're going to bid on the video, so if you're doing any kind of website visits or lead gen objective, the cost per click is going to be the same as if you it was an image ad. So it all depends on the competitive level of that audience. How are how many other companies are bidding on that traffic will determine your your CPC that you can bid there and that you'll get. Keep in mind that videos ads do have lower engagement rates because people are watching the video, they're not necessarily engaging. So because of that you often have to bid more on a CPC basis. And then if you are using video views objective, the average bid per view range that I see is about anywhere from about 14 cents all the way up to 50 cents per view. So again depends on who you're targeting and how competitive that audience is. Two more interesting call outs on functionality of video ads. Number one is when you're on mobile. When a viewer is watching your video ad on mobile and they click on that video ad, that experience is going to pop up the web browser and the video is going to be pushed up to the top. So somebody clicks on your video ad, the video itself actually moves to the top top of the screen. So and then we'll continue playing there and the website will load below it. So it is an interesting experience because that video is still playing up top. So that does help get more watch time of that video. But also the website is displaying below. The trade off is that it can be a little distracting that two things are going on at once. Is somebody reading the text on your website or are they watching the video and not reading the website? So because of the these two two things happening at the same time, you'll probably have lower watch time and you'll have lower conversion rates there. So again, video is better when you want to use the video to convey a point, not necessarily when you want to get a website opt in or something like that. If you do get website opt ins, consider that kind of the gravy on top. So another interesting piece of functionality is video looping. If your video duration is less than 30 seconds, LinkedIn will actually loop your video after it's done playing up to 30 seconds of total playback time. So if Your video is 15 seconds long, then LinkedIn will loop it to full time. So it will play 30 seconds worth. It'll play the same video twice. But if Your video is 30 seconds or longer, it's only going to play that video once. So I just thought that was an interesting point in how video ads function. I like that they do that looping because it gets a little more watch time out of your video. All right, so that's all the technical aspects of video ads on LinkedIn. Next we're going to jump over to creative. All right, so let's talk about the most important part of the video ad is the video itself. So when you're playing a video ad on LinkedIn, the first couple seconds of that video are absolutely critical where someone's going to decide if they're going to continue watching or not. I see. I've seen lots of videos that start with a big logo and tagline and that's not an effective experience because that screams ad and people are going to be are just going to scroll away and go read or watch something else. On LinkedIn, the most compelling thing to start with is the picture is a person or someone's face. People are always the most engaging compared to like other things you can put in the video. I find it's effective to overlay a title to have some context with the video there and then have that title fade away after a couple seconds. Because if someone's just watching a video, you don't know how long they're going to watch that video for. So sometimes it can be hard to understand what's the point of this video? What's the core message that you're trying to convey or what is this video about when most people aren't watching the full video. So I find having a headline that shows up in the beginning to set some context of what this video is about, what they're going to hear and see in the video really helps set context for the rest of that experience and then have that headline melt away after a few seconds so that they get the full video watching experience from there and so it doesn't just take up space for the rest of the video. Number two is to have captions baked into your video. Most videos are going to start by playing muted in the feed unless somebody unmutes the video. So having captions is essential to make sure whatever's being said can actually be conveyed to the reader. They actually understand what is being said and they're not missing that part of the video. So what are some good examples of great video ads that you can run? Number one is an intro or story video from the CEO. That's a great video to run because it gets the user to get to meet your CEO, gets to hear the story, hear the journey. That's a very strong relationship builder and introduction into the company. Some things you might talk about are why they started the company, their their why behind the company, the mission, their vision for the company, along with maybe explaining some of the features, the most powerful benefits there. Number two is a picture offer video. So this is where maybe you run in a website visits or lead gen objective. But having kind of a short commercial can work as an effective video ad that you can run in the feed. You might say, you might call out hey financial advisors, are you looking for ways to xyz? If you are, click on this video here to sign up for your free consultation call or something like that. Short pitch videos can work well. Again, you'll still want to have a headline and captions so that you're conveying all that. But short commercial videos can work well in the feed too. So put your offer into a video ad and then run that right in the feed. Then number three is showing off a great feature or showing off your product or service visually. Walking through how it works. The more that a user sees and hear something and how it works, the more that they hear and see your product or service, the more familiar they're going to be with it and the more comfortable they're going to be signing up for a demo or purchasing your product. Additionally, the more that they can visualize themselves using that piece of software or product or service, the more likely it is that they're going to convert. A couple more tips are to have quick cut scenes in your video so that you're maximizing the time that is on screen there. Cut out any spaces, any gaps, any filler words so that your video is as punchy as possible. Don't have long transitions. Again, fit your video pack the biggest punch into the shortest time possible. Because the longer a video is, the more drop off is going to happen. Fewer people are going to watch all the way to the end. So last is my favorite video editor for non video editors. If you're a hardcore video person or have a video team, they're probably using Adobe tools. Those seem to be the best among the video editors that I talk to. But for myself and if I'm just doing a quick edit, I love to use Descript as a video editor. It's great because it makes video editing very easy. I can easily cut out certain parts and it has the basic tools that I need. It can also automatically transcribe the video and put that into captions of the video. So it makes captioning very easy as a process. That's one thing that I wish Canva did a better job of was was automatically transcribing captions. Maybe at somebody they'll have that, but for right now they don't have that. And that makes descript a better video editor. All right, so for the last section here, let's talk about measurement analysis and optimization. So first as we're analyzing our ads, we first need to know what's our goal of running this ad. As we mentioned, you can run a video ad for website visits, website conversion and lead gen. So if you're running any of those objectives, of course you're going to want to analyze your video based on the actions taken and if if that video is converting to the actions that you want to take or not. To track this, you're either going to use leads for the built in lead gen forms or you're going to track website conversions for website visits or website conversions objectives. Otherwise, if you are running your video for the goal of delivering content to somebody, then you're going to analyze consumption metrics. Those metrics are views, view rate and cost per view to understand are people watching your video, at what rate are they watching the video and then how much does it cost to get that view. Additionally, LinkedIn will tell you number of views at 25% watch time, 50% and 75% watch time. I don't love using this metrics because if you have two videos of varying length, then these mean different things. But those are the, those are the stats they offer. So you can look at number of views at 25%, 50%, 75%. You can see number of video completions. So you'll want to optimize for consumption to see which videos are being watched the most. And maybe you're going to split test different videos and maybe you're going to split that. And the best thing to start with is split testing different opening scenes to see what really catches the reader's attention that causes them to watch the rest of it. Those are the biggest things to split test is that opening few seconds. Maybe you open with a person or maybe you open with a screenshot and then see which one gets people to watch further. Also, a new metric that LinkedIn's rolled out recently is called dwell time. And this is a great metric because it will tell you about how long on average are people sitting there and reading your ads. So finally now you can use this metric to compare videos of different duration to see what is the average watch time of each of these videos. You can also compare use this metric to compare side by side with image ads to see are people sitting there and reading the image ad longer and actually consuming it or are people actually sitting through your video to watch that video for a longer period of time. So again that that metric is average. Dwell time is a new metric in campaign manager. Not all accounts have it yet. Most do, but it is still ramping. So if you don't see it yet, you'll likely be seeing it soon. Some other things you might split test with your video ads are if just try the square format versus a vertical format to see if one of those engages the audience more. You might test the text you put over the video. So if you do start your video with a headline to start, maybe that headline melts away after a few seconds. That text there on the headline, you might split test different text there to see what grabs other people's attention. All right, so we've covered a lot today for video ads and I hope you learned a couple tidbits to improve your videos or you know what to expect when you go to plan out your video ad campaigns. So let's recap here and go over what we covered today. So the top three uses of video ads that we see perform the best is number one, retargeting to explain complicated topics or show off certain features. Video tends to do better is retargeting campaigns once somebody already knows about you Then they're more likely to sit through and watch a video. But in a cold campaign, if somebody doesn't know you yet, they're less likely to watch a longer video. Number two are using it as in thought leader ads from leaders at the company. So thought leader ads overall get a lot more engagement because people are always going to engage with people more than they will companies. So using video in that format is great because it really helps accelerate the relationship building with whoever's posting. And then number three is using videos for testimonial videos. It's great for your prospects to hear directly from your customers and users what they like about the software and how it's benefited them. Video testimonials are so much stronger than testimonials because they're hearing directly from the user. Next, we went over technical specs and while there's a lot of them there, it's best to start with either a square or vertical format with 4 by 5 being the recommended tall format. If it's taller than that, then LinkedIn's gonna shrink it down a little bit and add bumpers to the sides. The best duration is about 15 to 30 seconds. You can have longer videos, but know that there will be tends to be a lot of drop off after that 30 seconds. And then the first couple seconds of the video is so important to get get right. And then finally in technical specs, the max file size is 200 megabytes. We also went over some creative tips and again we said that the first three seconds of the video is so key, that opening frame is so important. Make sure you upload a thumbnail there so somebody has something visually that will grab their attention right at the start. And then the first three seconds are what's really going to convince somebody to watch the rest of the video. Number two is to use people in your video. Whether you're overlaying the person who's talking or having faces in your video, or have a full frame, a full selfie video of that person talking. And then the final tip was to bake in captions because most people have sound off in the feed. So baking in captions, make sure that they're able to at least read your message as they're scrolling through. All right, so that's what we got for you today on video ads. Again, I hope you learned something to improve your ads or plan out an effective campaign. If you're interested in learning more, you can check out our YouTube channel. We have a lot of in depth videos and tutorials and walkthroughs along with more episodes are coming that we're going to be having interviews with experts. We'll be talking about topics like attribution and even more ad creative best practices. So stay tuned for more. Additionally, I want to mention that we are hiring at speedwork for a senior LinkedIn ad strategist. So if you or somebody you know is a LinkedIn Ads Expert and you enjoy B2B marketing and helping craft strategies, then I encourage you to check out that our job posting for that. And you can you can find that job on our website, or find it on our LinkedIn page, or feel free to ping me directly for more information. Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.