LinkedIn Ads for Hubspot Admins

AJ Is here. Hooray. I. My prayers have been answered. I figured if I talked long enough, he would show up. How are you, sir?

I'm doing great. I apologize. For some reason, this didn't make it on my calendar, and so thank you for sending away.

No, it's because I never sent you an invite, that's why. It is 100% my fault. And I really appreciate you being here, man. If this was live, I would. I would demand a standing ovation for you right now because I was sweating a little bit, but I knew. I knew you would come through.

So glad to be here. I do have to give this. What do you call it? The caveat. I didn't prepare the deck. I was going to prepare a deck ahead of time, and since I didn't see it on the calendar, I forgot. So if you don't mind, I want this to be very much like a discussion. I want people here in the chat sharing the challenges they see, the questions they have about LinkedIn ads as it pertains to their admin ship.

You've got an excellent crowd here for that. We've got 180 people here, roughly, and the chat is always popping at the HubSpot admin hug. Those of you in the audience, I just want to tell you, AJ said he didn't prepare a deck, but I know he presents about LinkedIn ads pretty much all the time. This is his business. This is what he does. If you have questions or concerns or problems with LinkedIn ads, you have a great resource here in AJ.

Love it. Do we want to dive right in, or do you want to handle anything right from the beginning?

I've done my housekeeping. Just so you know. I'm at another event. I'm doing two events at once right now, so I'm just. I'm in the storage closet. Don't let that distract you.

Love it. Okay, so I want to have the chat here, really close to where I can see you guys. The biggest question I have for you is to start off is basically tell me the challenges and the specific questions that you're having around LinkedIn ads right now. And I'd love to start that off with our discussion here. So Fernando says, I've been six months testing LinkedIn ads with low results, different formats, and so would love some tips. Okay, cool. I'm super happy to. We can even use some of your accounts or questions as examples, too. Sometimes the data within HubSpot is different from what we see in LinkedIn itself. Okay, Zohray, if I'm pronouncing that right. Great question. I definitely want to dig into that one too. Tim asks the difference in Facebook ads versus LinkedIn. We've done Facebook ads, but want to jump into LinkedIn. I've got a really cool answer for this one. We have a client right now that they're running a pretty significant program on Facebook right now as well as us running a significant program on LinkedIn. And what's so interesting is the costs are so low on Facebook or Meta, they're driving costs per click and costs per lead that are about 1/5 of LinkedIn. So immediately you're thinking like, oh, this sounds really good, like we should go all in on Meta. We noticed there was a huge drop off to sales, qualified leads, sales accepted leads, proposals and closed deals. And so we ended up talking to the sales team to understand what is it that the sales team is doing. And we found out they have to disqualify 90% of the leads that come from Facebook and Meta just because they're not the right people, they're not the decision maker, they're not the ideal customer. And whereas with LinkedIn, even though the costs are five times higher, they don't have to disqualify anyone because we're able to target people so minutely by who they are professionally that they are the right person to feel the pain. They control a budget and can actually spend something to dissipate that pain. So it's so interesting. Facebook upfront costs five times less, but when you actually get to the bottom of the funnel for ROI, LinkedIn is twice as profitable as Meta is from an ROI perspective, all because of the targeting. So all of this to say we pay a premium on LinkedIn ads for sure, but we pay it for that level of targeting because Meta, Facebook, they know a lot about us, but they don't know who we are professionally. Okay, while I was going off on that spiel, I missed some some good questions.

I promise you, the chat would be popping.

It's popping. Thank you everyone. Sebastian asks about targeting techniques. Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to write these ones down. This is great. All right. Karen says marketing team have set up a book, a demo LinkedIn ad, but this captures only personal contact info rather than work related info, then also duplicates contacts in the CRM. This one's really good one. So when you use LinkedIn's lead generation forms, and for those of you who don't know that LinkedIn has this product, the way it came about was that originally LinkedIn ads users were sending traffic to their landing page and they were complaining to LinkedIn, hey, your traffic is bad quality because it's not converting. And LinkedIn was like, yeah, we don't really think it's our traffic. So they came up with these lead gen forms. So as soon as you interact with one of the ads that you have one of these lead forms attached to a drawer slides down and all of the fields that LinkedIn knows about that user that you've added, everything LinkedIn knows is auto filled. And so if all you ask for is like first name, last name, login email, all of those things pre filled, all someone on a mobile device has to do is just hit that submit button. So it creates really, really high converting forms. This is fantastic, especially when you're looking at it like a cost per lead or a cost perform fill. But I think if I'm reading it right, this may be what your team has done. And the login email address that people use on LinkedIn is, is 99% of the time their personal Gmail. A personal, not a work related email. So a lot of times we'll use enrichment services to say, hey, here's the person's first name, last name, personal email. Can you pull their work email so we can grab it? But in just the last year LinkedIn has given us a field that we had before, it's called work email. And they gave us a little tick box that says validate work email. So that means if they, they have to type it and if they type a Yahoo or a Gmail, it says sorry, you can't submit the form. So it's forcing them to actually submit a work email. That could be what you need to do. You may need to go to your team and say, hey, can you change your form field and ask for work email Specifically they may type in a different work email. You still may end up with duplicates. I don't know much work what to do with that, but hopefully those are some good ideas for you. And then Kyle and Dana, if either of you have anything to add to any of these points, feel free.

You are doing great.

Okay, awesome. Sebastian, I'd love to cover yours here. The types of targeting techniques on LinkedIn. So there are two buckets that I put every type of prospect in. Two ways of targeting. One is the individual, the professional, his or herself. We target them by things like their job title, their level of seniority, what department they work in, skills on their profiles, and maybe groups that they're members of. There's several more but that's kind of how I define the individual. If you tell me that, that your ideal Prospect is a CFO, but your product costs $6,000 a month, I could tell you very quickly your ideal prospect is not a CFO of a two person company. So then the second bucket that we have to put people in is what kind of organization do they represent? And there's three types of targeting that I or three facets of targeting that I love to narrow people down. Here we know who the individual is when we narrow down on the company. I like to use industry. This is the industry that their company is. I like to use their company size by number of employees. They do have a company size by revenue, but you don't need. It's not quite as accurate as company size by employees because that's declared by the company itself. Whereas revenue is just kind of guest I think through a partnership with Crunchbase, but I'm not totally sure it's a lot more accurate at large companies than it is smaller. And then we have which I'm sure many of you are involved in, which is abm. This is where we say I don't care about your industry or your company size. We know that this list of companies is in our target audience, so we want to target just that. And for LinkedIn we can upload a list you can sync live lists from from HubSpot so that they're always, always there and updated. And this is where we can say like we want this role or these few roles at this list of companies. We call it account based marketing and we only want to show specific ads to them. So very cool. The only downside to the ABM is like any audience on LinkedIn we can only target down to a minimum audience size of 300. What I would love to do is show ads to every individual company. Just say like, hey, for when we target Microsoft, our ads are going to say hey Microsoft or did you know what Microsoft needs? That would be amazing. But unless you have at least 300 people who are good prospects for you at each company, you can't break it down to a one to one campaign per company. So I really love when you're done combining these things, the Persona like the professional and the type of company that they're at, if you can end up with an audience size between 20,000 and 100,000, I really like that that's the sweet spot of audiences. If it's much larger than that, I might think about ways of making it more targeted, adding more criteria that they have to fit maybe an interest or we actually did this recently where we had an audience that was like 400,000, which was bigger than I like. And we're like, hey, how about we just add on this interest of B2B marketing and then it shrunk the audience down to like 60,000 and we're like, hey, that's great. So that's my ideal. I love to get in that range. So hopefully that helps you understand the kinds of targeting techniques that you should try and where you want to end up. Okay, Kiran, when you're talking about your team, have set up a book, a Demo ad on LinkedIn. I want to give you all a word of warning because I think every client, I mean 99.9% of accounts that we've worked with and I've spent over 150 million on LinkedIn ads at this point. We've worked with over 1,000 different accounts, 99.9% of them, they have a goal of getting prospects on calls with their sales reps. That's what we want. We want sales opportunities. What we have found for the vast majority of the time is if you go after a cold audience who doesn't already know like and trust you, and if you show them a bottom of funnel ad, it's too much, too soon. We've probably heard this metaphor before, but it's a lot like proposing marriage on the first date. In order to get someone to know, like and trust you, we have to nurture them. So usually what I'll suggest to people is, yeah, go ahead and try. Try launching a. Take a demo ad to your cold audiences. But realize that 95% of the time that's going to fail. You will get clicks because people are curious. But none of these people are willing to meet with your sales team. And if you do happen to get someone to sign up to meet with sales, 70 or 80% of the time, they'll just ghost the sales rep. They just won't show up on the call, which we don't love. So what I suggest instead, make sure that you have at least two stages of your funnel. What you have are these cold audiences where you're showing ads that are very much like geared to be helpful. Give them free tips, tricks, strategies, short videos, like 15 to 30 second videos are great for this. Like, let me just share with you a quick tip. Something about your industry that you didn't know. Something that's going to help you do your job better. If you have that set of ads to your cold audience and then retarget anyone who has engaged with or watched a certain amount of, of the videos in those ads. Then try retargeting them with, with something like book a demo, get a free audit. You know, those kinds of offers that you can ask people for. Just remember, cold audiences are not ready to meet with your sales team. Warm audiences are. And the way that we create warm audiences is through retargeting. Okay. Tom asked. Oh, yeah, please.

No, I was just gonna say Micah just weighed in with B2C versus B2B. Earlier someone asked the same question. First of all, are your clients mostly B2B? Do you have a mix of B2B, B2C? Do you think of LinkedIn as being primarily a B2B or is there B2C use case here?

Yeah, there are B2C use cases, but they are kind of few and far between. What we find is B2B2B is like, it's the bread and butter of LinkedIn. They've actually, the LinkedIn marketing team have gone all in on like a hashtag, the place to B2B is what they call it. They've gone all in on B2B. They've completely ignored the fact that there are really strong B2C use cases. But I think it's a small population of their total accounts. The B2C that I've seen work really well are higher ed. So if you're an MBA program and, and you're trying to target people who have a bachelor's but don't yet have a master's or PhD, it's perfect. I don't know of an MBA school that's not advertising on LinkedIn because we have that education level targeting. So that's.

I think they are all targeting me specifically.

I get it too. I don't know. At some point they've got to let me go, but they kind of realize I don't, I don't want an MBA. Yeah, school. Glad to be done with that. Another B2C use case, though, is recruiting. And this is kind of where LinkedIn had its humble beginnings. You know how I told you that cold audiences are not ready for a bottom of funnel kind of call to action? This is recruiting kind of breaks this. If you go after really good potential employees for your company and you target them with like a, hey, you look qualified for this position. Are you interested in applying? You can get good applicants from that, even from cold audiences. And the way I reason through this, I think what happens is people are. Because a job opportunity offers so much value for people, they are Willing to jump right to A. Sure, I'll fill out an application, I'll spend some time kind of offer. Whereas in B2B, if it's just like, hey, check out our software, most aren't willing to do that yet we do have some other kind of niche B2C use cases, financial services, where it's like, hey, we want you to come and invest your money here or come support this project. Fintech kinds of software kinds of use cases. Even though it's technically B2C, there's good reasons to target people by who they are professionally, to make sure that they have disposable income that they could spend and invest. We even see like the higher end automobiles are advertising on LinkedIn. Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, they all advertise on LinkedIn. And so I think the rule is because LinkedIn ads are so expensive, we pay a premium to advertise. Whether you're B2B or B2C, as long as your ideal target audience is narrowable by who they are professionally and a closed deal or a lifetime value of that customer is high. I call that higher than about $10,000, but your mileage may vary. Then I think LinkedIn ads is a great use case. That's probably more than you wanted to know, but that's. Yeah, B2C can be good.

No, we're happy to go deep. That was awesome.

Okay, I want to go back to. Sorry, I know there's lots of questions after this, but I'm going to try to work my way through the Zohray. Your question about the data within HubSpot being different than what we see in LinkedIn itself, could you clarify what the data is? I'm going to guess it's like actual website traffic. LinkedIn reports that they sent 15 clicks, but you look in your HubSpot analytics and it says only 10 made it to the page. Let me know if that's the one, if I've nailed it there, because I'm happy to go.

He says no, it's the number of leads, but Fernando says yes.

Okay, all right, so let's cover both. I actually don't know the answer to the leads question because I'm not strong on HubSpot, unfortunately. So others of you may be able to help in and help answer that, but what we see from traffic. So there's a couple reasons, I'll say a few reasons why traffic might look different on inside of LinkedIn than it does on your website. And it's the same whether it's HubSpot's analytics or if you're looking in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. One of the biggest challenges that we have is LinkedIn sends traffic. Someone clicked on the ad when they go to your landing page. If it takes longer than about 1 second to load on mobile, they a lot of times they bounce. So you may have 30 or 40% of your traffic bounce. So LinkedIn reports 15 clicks. Only 10 show up in analytics. Darn, that sucks. The best thing you can do about that though is work on site speed. Do anything you can to optimize the speed of your pages loading. Try to get it there under a second. For mobile, you can also move your your tracking codes to the top of the page so that they're prioritized. Those tags fire early on because if they're in the global footer, like I see a lot of people do, someone could get to the page, read a paragraph or two on a slow Internet connection, and then before the last tag fires, they bounce. And that's the tag that's telling you whether or not they got there. If you are in Europe or marketing actively to Europe, you probably have a consent banner, a cookie banner on your site and and realize that if someone doesn't click accept on the cookie banner, analytics will not fire. So that's something we see a lot. It's like LinkedIn says, it sent 15 visits, but zero showed up on my website. I'm not a lawyer and I'm no expert at gdpr, but I have seen some of those GDPR banners that are very inviting to click accept all and I've seen some that make you feel like sketched out. Oh, I better deny. So maybe putting some thought around the, the layout of that banner and those buttons on how to get more people to be willing to accept. Okay, let me scroll down here. Two more questions. Aluko asks general problems with HubSpot Social Analytics. So maybe you guys can enlighten me on social analytics through HubSpot. What's involved? What do these social analytics look like and are they provided by something like a clear bit or another partner? I'm not totally sure on that one. Okay, Nadia asks here, would love to learn more on the best way to optimize my LinkedIn ads through HubSpot. HubSpot has the benefit of if you're managing your ads through HubSpot, you get to see deeper. Oops, I'm hitting stuff on my desk. You get to see stuff deeper into the sales funnel. So if you're just inside of LinkedIn's campaign manager, you'll get to see clicks, impressions, engagements, leads or conversions, but it stops there. Whereas inside of HubSpot you can actually see down to oh, this lead became a sales qualified lead, this one is in pipeline and it's likely to close. You know, that is the kind of data that you can get from there. So I think that's great. Whether you're in one platform or the other, it really doesn't matter. What I care most about are the metrics. I actually want to share with you a few of the metrics that I really care about that LinkedIn makes it kind of hard to get to. So one little trick that LinkedIn plays on us is they coax us into using an objective because it has a great name. So for instance, you see an engagement, the engagement objective, and you go, yes, of course I want people to engage with my ads and that's going to happen. What they don't tell you though is that depending on the objective that your campaigns choose, if the very first thing that it asks you is what objective, the definition of a click changes. So if you're paying by the click, let's say you, you have the objective of website visits. You might have to bid 10 to $16 per click to get traffic on that objective. But every interaction that someone makes with those ads, all of those interactions are free until someone clicks the button that takes them to your website. Only then do you get charged. Whereas engagements, you might pay three to seven dollars per click for an engagement campaign, but they are charging you that for every single engagement that that ad gets. And some of them are cool and helpful like liking and commenting. Giving more social proof to my ads, that's cool. Some are going to click to your company page and maybe even follow your company, which are all great. What I hate are things like if your ad goes longer than about 160 characters there in that intro, when they click the see more to expand your ad and read the rest of your ad copy, you get charged for that under the engagement objective. You also get charged for that under the lead generation objective, which I hate. I really wish LinkedIn would change. So be aware of that. If you are using the brand awareness or the engagement objective when it says clicks, you should not actually expect that many clicks going to your website. There's another column. If you flip your columns to the engagement columns, there's one over to the right called landing page clicks or clicks to landing page. That's the one that you actually want to look at to see does that report 15 and then maybe on my site analytics it'll tell me 13 or something popped in. Okay, I think that was what I wanted. Oh, okay. So now I'll share some of the metrics that I really care about that LinkedIn doesn't share when you're running video ads. And the same thing goes for. Okay, I think we actually need to stop and talk about thought leader ads. This is LinkedIn's and I'd love to have you share in comments. If you're using thought leader ads right now, they're really cool. The story is you go back more than a year and a half ago and the only ads that we could run were were from your company in the newsfeed. And if you think about how you interact with the newsfeed, I'm guessing it goes a little something like this. You're scrolling through your newsfeed, a company pops up that you've never heard of before and you just keep scrolling. And because of that, ads on LinkedIn on average got about half of a percent of a click through rate. So 200 people visit, you get 200 people see the ad, one ends up clicking and then great, you're above average about. It was last year LinkedIn released the ability to do thought leader ads. And this is boosting an individual's post. So think about it. You have your CEO, an internal influencer, your head of sales, whatever they post on LinkedIn and through your ads you can say, I want this post to now be seen by our ideal target audiences. These can be video, they can be single image and they can be just text, like a text only. And they don't support anything else right now. But we're seeing these be some of the highest performing ads right now, especially the video versions of them. And I reason that it's like if I'm looking down the newsfeed and I see a face, someone that I don't recognize, I'm going to wonder like, am I connected to this person? Should I know them? Who is this? What are they saying? And we actually see this proven out in the dwell time metric on LinkedIn. If you look at dwell time, you'll see your thought leader ads end up getting about 1 to 2 seconds more dwell time, which means people are looking at them longer than your company ads. So now that we've talked about thought leader ads, feel free to ask any questions you want about them. But the metrics that I really care about, LinkedIn will report on anything video. They will give you your view rate, which is usually about 25%. And what that means is 25% of the people that your video shows up on their screen as they scroll, if it's playing for longer than two seconds, they call that a view and it's calculating Your view rate. 2 seconds is not a lot of engagement though, especially because they call it a view organically on LinkedIn if you're watching for three seconds. So why in ads do they charge us after two seconds, I wonder? They want the money. But I look at a view rate and go, okay, that's not a great guide for how engaging this video is. Did they keep it on for two seconds? What I mostly care about is I want to see real engagement, like how what percentage of them watched to 50% of my video and how much did it cost to get someone there? So LinkedIn will tell you your 50% view rate or at least they'll tell you the number of people who made it to 50%. So you can take that number and divide it by total number of impressions. That's going to give you your 50% view rate. Which don't be surprised if it, especially if it's a longer video, if it's kind of a low percentage. But just use it as a benchmark to understand like, are people consuming my video? Are they not? But the one that I really like is cost per 50% viewer. So you take your total cost, you divide that by the number of 50% viewers of your video ad, and usually it's between about 2 to $4. We pay 2 to $4 to get someone to watch at least 50% of a video ad. Makes sense. So I really like those for video. Anyway, feel free to ask any questions you want on those. I've got a whole bunch of other metrics that I calculate that LinkedIn doesn't give you things. Like I told you, the clicks to landing page may be different than your clicks that are reported on the ad. So a lot of times I'll calculate my cost per click and my click through rates based off of the landing page visits metric, not the clicks visit. So I'll usually export my LinkedIn data to Excel and do these calculations in Excel or Google Sheets or whatever. But yeah, I love to calculate landing page visits over impressions and costs divided by landing page visits. Those are a great way. Okay, Sebastian asks, if I wanted people to fill out a form for a free, let's say HubSpot checkup, what would you do? I think you're offering enough value in offering something like a free checkup that it may be, you may be able to get cold audiences to want to do this. So what I would say is use LinkedIn's lead gen forms at first because they convert so much higher. I'd probably have a single image ad describing what they're going to get out of the free HubSpot checkup. Have them opt in with the lead gen form and then have your flow trigger from there. Sometimes the challenge we get is that it's really easy to get them to fill out the form because but it's really hard to get them on a call or to respond to an email. If you find that to be the case, it might actually be better to ditch the lead form and push right to a landing page where you have your sales reps or whoever's calendar embedded right in the HubSpot landing page. So they fill out the form and put the event right on their calendar. That could work. If you find that not to work very well, you may need to nurture that traffic first, at least in one stage before you ask for something like that. But I think it's worth a shot. Okay, time wise, how are we doing? Because I could keep talking for a long time, but feel free to cut me off anytime.

You're doing great. No, no, no. We'll go to the top of the hour if your voice will hold out. So.

Okay, cool. All right. Lance McCall asks would love to be able to launch ad sets Multiple creatives via HubSpot to follow LinkedIn ads best practices. Let me just share with you about LinkedIn's best practices because their best practices are not always actually in your favor. If you talk to your rep, your rep is gonna tell you we see the best performance. When you add at least seven ads to a campaign, what they are actually saying behind the scenes is LinkedIn ads has a frequency cap that if you have four or fewer ads, you can only show it's actually three. Three or fewer ads in a campaign. LinkedIn will only be able to show any of your ads in that campaign to one individual every 24 hours. So that's their frequency cap by naturally you're only gonna be able to reach someone no matter how hard, how high and how hard you're bidding, how aggressive you're being. They'll only get to see one of your company's ads per person per 24 hour period. Once you hit four ads in a campaign though, then they'll start showing it that number of times. The number of ads you have in a campaign, they'll show that number of times to the most active members in a 48 hour period. So LinkedIn has this frequency cap that they can break. When you put seven ads in a campaign, which is what your LinkedIn ads reps will always recommend. What they're saying is you can annoy the crap out of your most active users by showing them seven ads in a 48 hour period and they see the best performance on their end, but they gauge performance by how much you're spending. When all of these advertisers are able to show their ads more often, it creates a more competitive auction and so prices for everyone come up. LinkedIn sees better performance because you pay more. So the initial assumption here is that you want to follow LinkedIn's best practices of launching lots of different ads. I would say keep it to 2 to 4, don't go crazy with it. And if your LinkedIn ad rep says something, you can just say, thanks, we got it from here. That's not advice that we actually want to follow. Okay. Adam asks about data enrichment of HubSpot contacts with, with LinkedIn data. I know there are data enrichment providers and I, and I have heard that there's an integration there with HubSpot where this can be done automatically. But I don't actually know if anyone knows.

Feel free, I'll hop in here. This is definitely not my forte. Anytime you start talking about HubSpot's integrations with another system, you're on the fringes of my knowledge because I just live and breathe HubSpot all the time. But there are a couple of different things that are worth noting here. In addition to the LinkedIn ads integration, which includes live company lists like AJ was talking about, we have a now really robust sales navigator integration where as you're looking at companies and Things on, on LinkedIn, you can just add those to HubSpot and when you're viewing them in HubSpot or in LinkedIn, it will tell you if the LinkedIn data has changed since you put it into HubSpot so you can update it so that HubSpot stays in sync with LinkedIn, which is, which is cool. I don't know if I would go as far as to call that data enrichment. Right. We, we bought Clearbit, we, we have a data enrichment platform now. There's that whole thing that will get you more than what's just on LinkedIn. But if, if, when you say data enrichment, you mean primarily the stuff that is on LinkedIn, I think the sales navigator integration would be a good thing for you to look into.

That's great. And then with the Clearbit integration, what does it actually Take for someone to get that set up. So Clearbit can start giving us more data on the people in the CRM.

Right. So two answers to that question. HubSpot does not provide email addresses. Like you can't just say this person, the VP at this company, give me their email address and phone number. That is not the business HubSpot. It is. That's a, that's a, that's a principled choice we made, not a technology limitation. But if you say here's a person's email address, what can you tell me about them? We will, we, we have our, our clear bit database of.com like 200 million profiles that we can enrich and tell you a lot of things about a person or a company. So as far as minimum requirements, you're going to have to provide an email address to learn about a contact or a domain to learn about a company. If the other, the other half of that question is what does it take to get set up? Breeze Intelligence is what we're calling the platform is credit based. So you buy a certain number of credits per month and you get to enrich that many fields. And I, that's all I know about the pricing. I don't know how much credit is or how big the packages are, but that it is an additional fee on top of like normal HubSpot subscription.

Love it. All right, thanks for filling me in. I'm learning here. This is great. Okay. Alexandra asks, are the LinkedIn ads audiences too narrow and niche and how do we make those more general but with good sales results? Most of the time I see marketers testing out LinkedIn ads. They go right for job titles as their way of, of targeting the professional. And the challenge that we find with job titles is that there are, there are infinite job titles out there that people choose and LinkedIn have to take those and put them into buckets that they recognize. And so because of that, because there's, you know, 300 different variations of an admin in a job title, LinkedIn have had to try to understand those and put them into more, more narrow buckets. And because of that, they only understand about 30 to 50% of job titles. So if you go and build a campaign targeting just specific job titles, you might see really small audience sizes and wonder like, oh, this is too small to actually do anything with. What can I do to increase it? And usually what I find the answer is is there are two different ways that we like to target that are broader. So you can target by job function, which is what department someone works in with their level of seniority. So let's say you're targeting something like a VP of it. What you can do is rather than using VP of IT job titles, which there might be limited, instead you go job function is in the IT department and their level of seniority is. Did we say vp? Yeah. Say it's a VP level of seniority. And what happens then is you get 100% of your audience, not just 30 to 50% of them. And that's a great way of expanding that audience. That's actually how I recommend running your ABM campaigns. Because when you narrow your whole scope of targeting down to just a specific list of companies, if you layer job titles on top of those, they're really small. But instead if you can break them down by their more broad the department they work in and their level of seniority, now that creates larger audiences. Something else you could try is skills. Because each member on LinkedIn we can enter up to 50 skills on our profile. So if my job title is marketing manager, if you look at my skills and I have skills like social media advertising, LinkedIn advertising, meta advertising, you could surmise what kind of digital marketing I do and be able to target me by that. Or if I have skills that are very like SEO and organic or email specific, you could be targeted that way, even though your title is just a little bit more broad. Okay, scrolling down to your more awesome questions here, Matthew brings up something really cool. He says, build the audience in meta and then retarget on LinkedIn. I actually, I do that and I do the opposite of that. So here's the concept is that any traffic that you drive from meta, you paid maybe a fifth as much for it. If you then you go into your LinkedIn to create a retargeting audience where you say when UTM source equals Facebook and UTM medium equals paid social or whatever you use, when you see that string in a URL, put someone in this audience. So now in Facebook, sorry, in LinkedIn, you now have a retargeting audience of the traffic that saw you originally on Facebook that clicked on one of your ads there. And now when they are on LinkedIn, you get to stay in front of them. The opposite is also true. If in my LinkedIn ads, if I have my UTM source equals LinkedIn, I can go into meta and I can set up a retargeting audience there that says when you see traffic with UTM source equals LinkedIn, create a separate retargeting audience for that and stay in front of them wherever they are. And stay top of mind, then you know that you're staying on top of and in front of your most valuable audience. And. And of course, you paid a premium to get in front of them in the first place. So staying in front of them for pennies on Facebook's audience network is really cool. So thank you for sharing that. That's awesome. Fernando says, I've seen contacts interacting with my campaigns, even excluding their job titles or countries. Why is this? So what you want to do is. I can actually go off on a little bit of a tangent here and talk about the major pitfalls that people fall into with LinkedIn ads. The first one that happens is the geography that you choose with your campaigns. LinkedIn defaults to something called recent or permanent geography. And I always, almost always, unless it's like I want to target people at a specific event at a specific time, I hit the dropdown and I change that to permanent geography targeting the reason why. And we definitely see this in like after the summer, where if we're targeting just the US all of a sudden, like in the late summer or early fall, we'll start to have clients say, hey, we just got a lead from the Philippines. We just got a lead from like Western Europe. And as it turns out, when someone logs in on the LinkedIn app from a different IP address from a different country, LinkedIn keeps that in their knowledge banks for like six months. And I actually can't find that written anywhere. But. So that might be hearsay. But if you can imagine if that's true, six months of like, someone from the Philippines came to New York on a vacation for a trip or a business meeting or something, and now they're living back in the Philippines. They're getting targeted as if they lived in the US and we're paying US level prices because you can sure believe it, if you want to target the Philippines, your clicks are going to cost a lot less than if you're targeting New York or anyone in North America. So that's the first thing I would do is try changing your geography to permanent, meaning you're only targeting the people who their profile says they live in the location that you're targeting.

Sorry, that. I think that's a really interesting insight. Just to stay state it really clearly, it defaults to the recent location.

Yeah.

So you got to find this dropdown and change it to permanent. Otherwise you're going to be targeting people based on any IP address they happen to log into when they're visiting their grandma versus, like their actual where they Reside.

Exactly. Yep. It's a big pitfall. Other pitfalls are when you finish your defining who someone's profile is, like the targeting at the bottom, there's going to be a box that LinkedIn Auto Checks and it's called LinkedIn Audience Expansion. It says, Enable LinkedIn Audience Expansion. LinkedIn by default, their talk track that they teach everyone is this is a good box for everyone to check. But if you, if you take one of your more senior reps and you really nail them down on it, they'll say, yeah, we have to recommend it. But. But when a client is struggling, we always tell them like, the first thing is uncheck that box. What it does is it takes the targeting that you've defined that you're paying a premium to advertise to these people. And then it allows LinkedIn to throw people in that are lookalikes of them. But there's no control over how many people they throw into the audience. There's no control over being able to differentiate between them and see how each of these buckets perform. It's just they muddy your audience by throwing people in. So. So 100% of the time, this is one of those ones where there's no odd, cool hack that you can use. No, it's just 100% of the time, always uncheck that box. The next one is, if you scroll down, LinkedIn will auto check under placements, a placement called LinkedIn's Audience Network. And what it is, it sounds great. In theory, it's we target people on LinkedIn, but people don't spend all their time on LinkedIn, and we know that it's important to stay top of mind with people. So how about we can target people by their LinkedIn facets, like who they are professionally around the web, when they're using certain apps, when they're reading certain sites or visiting certain sites. And it sounds really cool. In theory, especially when you look at the costs. The average cost per click on LinkedIn targeting North America is like 10 to $16. When you have the audience network turned on, all of a sudden you see that that drops to like an average of two or three dollars. So you're like, wow, this sounds amazing. But we have spent a lot of time analyzing this traffic, trying to understand, is it bots, is it spam? Like, how is this traffic worth so little? All of that to say if you don't really know what you're doing or this isn't part of a specific test for the audience network, always uncheck that box. And the last pitfall that I see most advertisers do is when you go down to the bidding and budgeting section. This is how you're paying for your traffic on LinkedIn. The default option that LinkedIn has is called maximum delivery bidding. And you actually have to go out of your way to select the one that's better for you. Because maximum delivery bidding, it's the most expensive way to pay for your traffic on LinkedIn 90% of the time. Like, it's not even close. And LinkedIn reps will tell you, we recommend you use maximum delivery bidding, but it's really bad advice because it causes you to overpay. If you leave audience or sorry, Maximum delivery bidding turned on, your average cost per click will probably be 20 to $40. Whereas if you choose the option that's hidden. So there's three options. There's maximum delivery at the top, that's auto checked. There's one called cost cap Bidding that I do not like. And the third option says click here to see more options. When you click that one option, it reveals a single row that says Manual CPC Bidding. When you click the manual cost per click bidding, that is the least expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. And they hide it because they like looking really good every quarter on their quarterly revenue announcements. But it's not best for your campaigns. For your campaigns, what I recommend is choose a cost per click bid and bid significantly lower than what LinkedIn recommends because they're recommendations. When you click that, they'll look kind of crazy. They'll say other people like you are bidding 27 to $98 per click, which is absolute garbage. Start by bidding like 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever it takes. And then the goal then is to bid as low as possible to still spend your daily budget. So if a campaign has a daily budget of let's say $30, if you bid LinkedIn's recommended of like $30 per click, you're going to get a click like around midnight or before people even get into the office and boom, your daily budget's gone for the whole day. But if you bid like let's say seven, you might find that on average you're only spending like $15 a day and you want to be spending 30. Cool, easy answer. You just go in and increase your bid. If you're bidding 7, bid up to 750 or 8 or 825, you know, whatever it takes and, and just keep playing with your bids until you can hit about what you actually want to be spending per day. That is how you get the cheapest costs on LinkedIn. That's how you keep from way overspending, which I don't know why LinkedIn doesn't teach this. I feel like if you do a good job of teaching your clients how to have better success, how to get traffic more efficiently, they're going to stick around longer, they're going to bring more budget. But whatever. Those are some of the best advice I could give you for your LinkedIn traffic.

All right, I'm going to hop in here because we are coming up on the hour. Aj, you're rocking it. I feel like you're just hitting your stride. You're not even tired yet. Lots of love in the chat. If people want to get in touch with you and talk more, what's the best way for them to do that?

You can definitely follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. If you just. If you connect with me on LinkedIn, make sure you do the little note and just say, like, you heard me on the admin, like the HubSpot admin.

Tell them you're a friend of Kyle's.

Yeah, then I'll know to make sure I accept it because I have like 800 of them sitting there, and if I don't know where it came from, I don't accept it. I'm also the host of the LinkedIn ads show podcast. So if you're a podcast listener and you want to hear really geeky knowledge every week about LinkedIn ads, check that out. And our site is b2linked.com. If you go there, you can check out blog posts and reach out to contact us and all that.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much for being here. Just sliding this here in at the end. In addition to knowing all there is to know about LinkedIn ads, AJ is also the most serious root beer connoisseur I've ever met in my life. So if you're looking for a recommendation, even based geographically, AJ and I met at a. At an event in Wisconsin and he was sneaking out to get some local root beer brews to check him off his bucket list. So thanks so much for being here. Seeing a question in the chat. When is part two. I am open to that. Aj if you were open to that, we can talk about more. And next time I'll send you a calendar invite. That's how well you did today.

And next time I'll bring a deck and have, like an actual spiel to give. So this works out great.

You're a champ. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Aj, any. Any things you wanted to say that you didn't get a chance to say?

I don't think so. I'm just. I'm most interested in the questions and challenges that you guys as admins are having around LinkedIn ads. So reach out to me on LinkedIn. My DMs are open and free. Like, hit me up. And if I can't answer them there, I'd love to answer them on a future podcast episode or in a round two that we do here for the HubSpot admins.

Cool. Just don't ask him to join your MBA program. Not gonna. Not gonna happen.

I don't want to go back to school. Sorry.

All right, well, I'm gonna shut it off here, aj. Again, thank you. Can't thank you enough, everyone. Thanks so much for being here, for being a great audience. It's been another admin hug, and hope to see you all back again soon.

Bye, Kyle.

They want a tour of the closet. All right. I say closet because they're using it as a storage closet. I'm in a hotel, and I think this is like a small. Like a conference room or something, but for a closet. Yeah, it's enormous. I'm in lovely Hartford, Connecticut, sitting on the floor. Thanks for your concern.

There are two really good root beers.

From Hartford to say he knows I trust him. All right, well, thanks, everyone. Have a great day.

Bye, guys.