LinkedIn Ads for HubSpot Admins Part 2
Kyle Jepsen and AJ Wilcox walk through advanced LinkedIn Ads strategies for HubSpot users, covering audience targeting, ad formats, and budgeting. They compare LinkedIn to Facebook and Google Ads and answer questions about running campaigns on the platform.
Again, AJ was here five months ago, talks about LinkedIn ads, got so many questions we couldn't possibly answer them all. So we're going to pick up answering some of those questions. But aj, do you want to start just by introducing yourself and kicking things off?
Yeah, I'd love to. So my story is I fell in love with LinkedIn ads about 14 years ago, back before most people knew that there were a LinkedIn ads as an option. Just over 10 years ago, we just turned 10 years old in October, I founded B2 linked. We're an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is all we do. I'm super heavy ADHD and so I didn't think I was going to be able to stick with something for more than like two years. But here we are 10 years in and I absolutely still love them. Obviously HubSpot has become a huge part of advertising on LinkedIn. Their super deep interconnected partnership together means that as a HubSpot admin, you've got a lot of tools at your disposal that you didn't have before. And even more so would love to be able to talk about all those kinds of things. LinkedIn ads in general, as a platform, it's different from Meta because we're able to target people by who they are professionally. We can target imagined by something like someone's job title in a certain industry of a certain company size in a certain geography, so we can get so specific about who we're targeting. Whereas something like Meta really only knows who you are personally. And there's a big difference there. When you're trying to sell an enterprise level product or a product that only a certain kind of business user is going to use, LinkedIn makes a lot of sense. What you should also know about it, if you don't already, is that LinkedIn ads are expensive. We pay a premium to advertise on them. And so for that reason it's really important to get them right and make sure that we're following all the very best practices and getting costs as low as we possibly can. It does not make Sense to overpay. LinkedIn is making plenty of money, they don't need extra money. So only pay as much as you as you need to and we can talk about the methods for how to do that. So last time you all sent in like, I think I counted like 44 questions that we didn't get a chance to get to. So I put four of them in the chat that I was like, oh, okay, these four would be good to start with, but any questions you have light us up in the Q and A. You put them in. Q and A is probably better than chat. I can't see both windows at the same time.
Right, yeah. So everyone, we'll start with these four. Man, the chat moves so fast. I will copy them into the chat again so you can see where we're starting. And yeah, if you have more questions about LinkedIn ads, drop them in the Q and A. If you see a question in Q and A, you like going to the.
CEO and the janitor and everyone in between. And obviously, if we're paying a premium, we want to reach the exact right people. In addition to ABM, you can use LinkedIn's data to figure out the type of company so you can narrow down by industry. I think there's like 170 different industry subtargets, but you probably want to go and research the kinds of companies on LinkedIn. You can go search for them and see what industry they list themselves at so that you know what kind of industries to target. I also love company size. This is the number of employees, and they go from buckets like 11 through 50 and then 51 to 200, and they go on from there. So most of the time I'm trying to understand for this audience that a client is telling me what's the Persona and then what's the type of organization that I want to reach them at? And I combine those together and make a really nicely stacked audience.
Nice. The second question, Ah, scrolled away. There it is. You've kind of already touched on. But if there's more you want to say, by all means. What's the difference in Facebook ads versus LinkedIn? We've done Facebook ads, but want to jump to LinkedIn?
Yeah. I think the perfect illustration for this is actually for a client. So we. We were running a really heavy LinkedIn ads campaign, and they were also running a really heavy meta ads campaign at the same time. And we were kind of comparing, and right off the bat, I was looking at the results going, oh, no, our meta cost per click and cost per lead is like 1/3 of LinkedIn. So I'm going, oh, crap, our days are numbered. Right? But then we took it a step further. We went and talked to the leader of their sales team who was looking at his metrics. We broke it down by channel, and he said, oh, this is really interesting. We actually end up disqualifying 90% of the leads that we generate through meta. And we don't have to disqualify more than like 5% with LinkedIn. And what that taught us is yes, cost per click is important. It's nice to know how much it costs to reach someone who's interested. But at the same time, if your sales team goes 90% of these, let's just throw out, huge, huge waste of money. Whereas LinkedIn, they weren't getting thrown out for being just, you know, not qualified enough. They were, the sales team really appreciated those leads. So even though we were paying three times more for them, in the end, if you look at a cost per close deal or a cost per sales qualified lead, LinkedIn was twice as profitable as Meta. I'm not putting Meta down. Meta has its, its place for sure. Especially if Meta can figure out who you are professionally by who you are personally. Someone who's like a real estate agent, you could imagine Meta looks at them and goes, wow, they follow a lot of things dealing with houses, they follow a lot of other realtors, they engage, I can guess this person's a realtor. And so in that case, Meta ads is probably great for reaching realtors. But if you're trying to reach, let's say CIOs and CTOs of enterprise sized companies, good luck. It's like Meta has the greatest data scientists on the planet, but they can't put together who someone is professionally. They used to give us filters, like we could target by job title, but I think no one used them. And so they just eventually took it away.
Yeah. Okay, I've. Jeanette. Hey, Jeanette is here. So, Jeanette, I don't know if you remember asking this five months ago, but she asked. I've taken numerous runs at LinkedIn ads, but my targeted lists are usually too small. Any tips or tricks?
Yes. Okay. So Jeanette, thank you for answering this one or asking this one six months ago or whatever. We did it. The absolute minimum audience size on LinkedIn is 300 people. So as long as your audience is at least 300 people, the campaign is eligible to run. That being said, if you're running a campaign with 300 people in it or anywhere close to that, it's probably not going to spend a whole lot. It's probably not going to throw off enough data for you to really tell, like, yes, this is working or no, it's not. So LinkedIn is going to suggest if you have an audience less than 50,000 people, LinkedIn's gonna pop up a big red message that says like, hey, you're targeting too narrowly. You should expand this. But my ideal is somewhere between about 20,000 to 100,000. Now, does this matter? Does this mean that if you have a retargeting audience of 400 people or a thousand people, or an ABM audience of 2,000 people, that it's not worth running? No, just, it's totally worth running. Just don't put a whole lot of hopes into it of like spending your $5,000 a month budget, for instance. Like, let them, don't give them too much budget, let them spend what they're going to spend and don't force them. Because if you force it, LinkedIn will spend your money. It just won't be spent efficiently. I audited three accounts last month who were all paying between 20 to $40 per click, which is insane. If any of you, like, look at your cost per landing page, click. If that's anywhere above, let's say $16, you're probably way overpaying and you could probably slim things down quite a bit, save yourself a lot of money.
So.
So that's my thought on audience size. If you are, let's say you're doing account based marketing and so you have a limited list of companies. A lot of people like to add job titles on top of that and narrow that down. But it's important to understand that LinkedIn actually only understands about 30 to 45% of job titles. So when you're layering on just job titles, you're missing a good chunk of your audience. So what I would suggest anytime I'm working with an ABM list, I would overlay job function with maybe seniority. And those are by far the broadest ways to target. And that's a good way of making sure that you have as many from your audience as possible when you're starting with a limited set. Anyway.
Love it. Sort of tangentially related, Robin asks, is there a minimum budget you recommend for LinkedIn ad for a LinkedIn ad campaign?
I do. Now this is heavily dependent on the audience size you're going after. I routinely tell someone like, if all you're using LinkedIn ads for is for retargeting and account based marketing, it's going to create small audiences. And don't follow my advice here, but if you're using LinkedIn as a you want to create a lead generation machine targeting cold audiences, warming them up over time, and then getting demos, consultations, sales out of them, I would not suggest dedicating less than about $5,000 a month to it simply because by the end of every month when the executive team comes knocking, you want enough data to tell you whether or not what you're doing is working. And I found it to be about in that $5,000 range where it's kicking out enough data that I can tell what's working. So it's probably a good budget to start with. That being said, you can spend all the way down to $10 per day. That's LinkedIn's minimum daily budget. They won't let you spend underneath that. You can spend very little as long as you're patient.
That makes a lot of sense. Okay, that's all for our icebreakers. If you all want to head over to the Q and A tab now, I've seen we've got 15 questions currently. Go ahead and add your questions there. Look through the questions, upvote the ones you like while that is sorting itself out. Just a funny story for you, AJ back in, I think it was 2019, I went to New York City to speak at a HubSpot user group, and it was hosted at LinkedIn's offices in the Empire State Building. And so I spoke as a person from HubSpot, and then someone from LinkedIn spoke about LinkedIn stuff. And during the Q&A for the LinkedIn one, someone asked, why are LinkedIn ads so expensive? They're. They're so much more expensive than everything. And this poor LinkedIn person was, like, not an ads person at all. They were like a sales navigator person. They. They clearly KNEW Nothing about LinkedIn's ads offering. And they're like, I don't know, are they that much more expensive I'd have to look into? I mean, they're really good, so they're. They're probably worth it. Anyway. Next question. It's just, like, so funny to me that the LinkedIn person did not have an answer. And you, like, are now doing basically two full sessions on why LinkedIn ads are awesome.
I like their Empire State Building office, by the way. It's super cool.
It is cool. Or at least it was in 2019.
Yeah.
Okay. I am sorting these now by Most voted with 1112 upvotes. Joshua asks, if we have lists of contacts in HubSpot, but we don't know their LinkedIn profile, what are the options for getting ads in front of them on LinkedIn?
Ooh. So, for background, I. I'm not very skilled in HubSpot. We've got a lot of clients who are sending lists in and out. And so I may ask for some of your help in, like, helping me understand how this works. But when you go to upload A, there are two kinds of lists. We can upload to LinkedIn. One is a list of companies, those are our ABM lists, and another is a list of contacts. When you do this manually, there are a whole bunch of fields that LinkedIn asks for to try to figure out who that person is. It is very important to understand that LinkedIn profile URL is not one of them. If we were to be able to provide someone's LinkedIn profile URL, it would match at 100% immediately. LinkedIn knows this. And the only reason I can think of that LinkedIn wouldn't allow this is is just for privacy reasons. Privacy concerns. And I've pressed them them on this a few times, like, why don't we have this? And they go, oh, we've talked about it internally and it seems like it would be a privacy issue. But here's the cool part. You don't actually need that because if the data that you're aggregating comes from LinkedIn anyway, there are a lot of services out there that do pull data from LinkedIn, whether it's sanctioned or not. If you give LinkedIn a first name, a last name, a job title and a company name, those four things LinkedIn's like, oh, I don't even need an email address to match that person. I know exactly who they are. There's only one Jeanette SWEITH in this department of IBM, like, okay, we matched her. This is great. Whereas every other platform out there, you're stuck with like, hey, hey, if I don't have someone's email address, there's no chance I'm going to be able to match them. So LinkedIn is actually really kind that way. So it takes us back to the Data that's in HubSpot. Don't worry that you don't have someone's LinkedIn profile URL in your data. If you have those four fields, First Name, last name, job title and company name, especially as close as possible to the way that those would be on LinkedIn, it's going to match at a really high rate even without their email address. Which is great because most people log into LinkedIn with a pro, with a personal email, but they will give you their professional email in the sales process. And so email address is going to match at a pretty low rate. But those four fields, if you can upload those, you're going to do great.
That is really interesting. And as I'm thinking through it, like, yeah, if you went to Facebook and searched for Kyle Jepsen, you might find me. You might find the guy who's a high School teacher in Ohio and you might find that creep who was arrested for murdering his wife back in like 2007. But if you search LinkedIn for Kyle Jepsen, HubSpot evangelist, I'm the only one, you know, like, there's nobody else that is going to come up in that search. So it makes a lot of sense. All right, okay. Votes have been coming in. Let me resort this list with 10 upvotes. Rafael asks what ad formats are the best performing inside LinkedIn.
Super good question to ask and also really, really hard to answer. LinkedIn has like 15 different ad formats right now. The reason why it's hard to answer is you have to ask at which stage of the funnel and what kind of offer. So I'll back up a little step here. You may not want me to, but I feel like I have to fill in these gaps. I would say 99% of businesses, when they come to me and they say I want to advertise on LinkedIn, what they actually want is meetings with their sales team. That's the goal. And call it a demo, call it a free consultation, a sales call, whatever you want to call it, that's the goal. But we also know that if we go to a cold audience, someone who's never heard of us before, and we say, hey, do you want a demo? Do you want to do a trial of our product? Do you want to talk to someone? The answer is inevitably no. I don't know who you are. Like, I don't care yet. And it's very much like before someone is willing to spend that much time with you, they need to be able to know like and trust you first. If you are asking that too soon, it's kind of like asking someone proposing marriage on the first date. You might be a great partner for marriage, but you just creeped them out by asking like, gotta let these things happen as they happen. Very much the same with ads. So I will, I know that's the goal I want to do. I want to ask them for that demo. I want to propose marriage. But in order to get there, I've got to walk them through several steps first. So I put everything into a three stage funnel. I call them my stage one, Stage two and stage three. Stage one is your cold audiences who you know or at least you can't tell whether they've ever heard of you before. Stage two is made up of anyone who's interacted with your ads at stage one and now you know they've had at least one positive interaction or major interaction with your brand. And then at stage three, you know they've had at least two because that's made up of the retargeting audiences from your stage one and your stage two. It's actually just your stage two. So you're graduating people down. So what I found is the absolute best ad format right now on LinkedIn. It is at stage one to cold audiences call it your top of funnel. Whatever. The highest performing ad format is what LinkedIn calls a thought leader ad. These are an individual's post on LinkedIn that the ad account has been able to promote. So they call that a thought leader ad. There's only three types of you can do a single image, you can do text only and you can do video. Now video. So Kyle, imagine you're doing this on behalf of Facebook. If you look into the camera and you record 30 to 40 seconds of saying, hey, HubSpot admins, here's a quick tip for you on data cleanliness or how to use a new product. You know, one of our new products and it's a quick tip trick, strategy, industry update, something you post it personally. HubSpot then boosts that post. The results that we're seeing from These are insane LinkedIn video ads. We oftentimes are paying some somewhere about like 2 to $3 for someone to watch. 50%, that's my favorite metric is a cost per 50%. These thought leader ads, when they come from an individual, they make such a strong connection with a human. We connect with humans, we don't connect with companies. The costs are insanely low. And my favorite way to retarget these is by saying something like, anyone who reaches 50% of one of my video ads now graduate them down to the next. I know if they made it 50% of the way through, they got the gist of my message. So that's my absolute favorite ad format at the top of the funnel. But they're also very limited. You can't attach a lead gen form to them. You pay for every single click on it, whether it's a click to your landing page or clicking see more or like. So they're not great for bottom of the funnel. I probably wouldn't run them there. But top of the funnel, they're great at the bottom of the funnel. My favorite ad format right now is conversation ads. They don't work at the top of the funnel because when you get a personal message from someone that you don't know, it's spam. But when you get a personal message from someone at a brand that you've now had at least two strong interactions with. It's a personal invitation. And they work a lot better in the middle of the funnel, like in your stage twos, sometimes even stage ones. Single image ads are like, they're the easiest to build. They're really simple, really flexible. You can use them in about every objective you can think of. You can attach them to Legion forms and, and everything you can do with them is, is retargetable. So I probably answered way too much on that one, but those are my three favorite.
That was really great. And let me just double click into a couple of details. So the thought leader ads, those are posts from personal pages. Like if you are posting stuff to your company page, you cannot turn that into a thought leader ad. Right. It has to be like from an individual's account.
Well, if you post something from your company page can be promoted. It's just, it's in a different category. They call it a boosted post as opposed to a thought leader ad. It's technically the same thing, but they don't perform as well because we again, we connect with people, not companies.
Yeah, yeah. And people I don't know come up in my LinkedIn feed all the time just because that's how the algorithm works. And whether they're promoted or not, I don't pay attention. But when companies come up, I just scroll past them real quick because that's not what I'm looking for. So, so, and then something you said very briefly that was one of my big takeaways from our last session is you said you, you were talking about cost per click and you said it doesn't matter if they click the link to the, the landing page or if they click see more or if they click like click is a click. And so like see more. That's, that's like when I can't see the full text of the post, I just click to see the second half of the sentence. Right. Like, and that that counts.
Yeah. And it depends on your objective. I love the objective called website visits because any other click on that post, Liking commenting, view more, click to the company page. Those are all free. You get all of those without being charged. The only time you're going to get charged is if someone clicks the link that then takes them to your website. So I love that. But you can't run thought leader ads in the website visits objective. You have to run it in the engagement objective. Yeah, engagement clicks are less rather than paying like seven to eight dollars per click. That I might do for sending Someone to a landing page engagement clicks I might pay one to $2 for. So you're paying less. But then every kind of interaction someone does on that post, you get dinged for. So if you happen to have a post that, let's say 50% of the engagements, the clicks go to your landing page, you just got a cost per landing page visit that was like half of what you would have gotten if you were running a company page post on the website visit objective.
Amazing. Okay, that was great. Charlene asks, what types of CTAs do you find work best? Do you incorporate softer CTAs before the hard book a meeting?
Totally. Yeah. And in fact, I want multiple soft CTA is before I ever ask for a meeting. There are brands who can get away with this. I've worked with clients where I told them the same thing, like you've got to provide value multiple times before you ever ask for something. And at stage one, to cold audiences, we show ads that say, hey, book a meeting. And they did. Just so happens there are brands out there that maybe your product is so disruptive in the marketplace that, that there's latent demand or you have such good product market fit that people are scrambling. Like as soon as they hear of it, they want to come meet someone and look into it. So it does happen. But don't count on your brand being the one that that happens to. So sure, always test like, hey, book a meeting. But if you're getting costs per lead that are like above $500, that's the market telling you. You get a conversion rate of like, you know, 0 to 1%. That's the market telling you they're not ready for that call to action and you should give them some value first.
Yeah.
So softer call to actions. Like think of stage one, I ask someone, like I give them a hook, give them something interesting, educational, free. At stage two, I'm going to be giving them deeper information, longer videos, maybe join a webinar, maybe subscribe to a podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Something that can take a little bit more of their time. But again, it's offering a lot of value for free. And then only by stage three am I giving them the hey, we're, let's, let's do this.
Yeah. Vera asks, in terms of duration, how long should you run an ad for before optimizing or making changes to the ad.
Oh, I have a little bit different of a response to this than your LinkedIn rep might give you.
That means he's telling us the truth.
And they're different approaches for sure. So for me, if I and it depends on how performance goes, if I launch an ad and it's doing great, I might let that ad run for a month or maybe even more before retiring it. And the way you can see for your audience, if you start running an ad and you can track its click through rate over time, as soon as you start to see the click through rate start to fall, what's happening is people in your audience have already seen the ad before and they're going, I've already seen that, I'm going to keep going. And when enough people have done that, your ad has saturated that audience so you're kind of done. I take that as a signal like, hey, now it's time for me to refresh my ad creative and give them something new. If, however, if I launch an ad, I always launch my ads in twos. So I launch an A B test today. If my performance on one or both of those is really poor, I'm still going to give it probably a week to see because I want enough data on it to tell like definitively yes it sucks or no it's going to redeem itself and so I'm probably going to switch that out after a week. That being said, every so often I'll see an ad where the disparity between the two is so big. This one is converting and I have a cost per lead of $30. This one I've spent $500 on and it hasn't converted yet. If it's only three, four days in, I can still say with pretty much certainty the one that hasn't driven conversions. It sucks and I should probably take it down. So if there's a big disparity, I'll retire an ad sooner. But otherwise I try to give it at least a week and really good stuff. You can usually run for a month without having to refresh something.
Love it. Joshua again asks, how would a small or solo team best approach LinkedIn ads for top of funnel to drive lead magnet or newsletter subscriptions assume a very targeted industry or audience?
I would say first off, try going to that cold audience and see if you're driving ads to the newsletter. If you get conversions, if conversions are expensive or are not happening, that's probably a signal that the audience needs to be nurtured and educated a little bit before you ask for something like that. So try it out. Just check and see. You'll have to set your own benchmark for what too expensive of a cost per captured email is but if I'm capturing someone for, let's say, more than like 80 or $90, I would call that expensive. You may have a different benchmark internally. So what I would suggest, especially for a small team. Small teams have a big advantage here because a lot of the clients that we work with, we'll have a point of contact on the marketing team. And when I tell them, hey, can you go get the CEO or founder or someone to record a video of them, like giving a tip or a trick or an industry update, they look at me like I'm crazy. Like I'm so many layers away from the CEO. I could never do that. Like, I don't. I never even met the guy or the girl. So at a small team, you really have this advantage where, like, you could get everyone on the team who's an internal subject matter expert and turn them into influencers by having everyone record and post and turn those into your thought leader ads and then retarget anyone who engages with those as you're like, hey, now, do you want to join our newsletter? That might be my suggested approach.
Got it. Emma asks, how do you balance the specific targeting with audience size? If I put these layers on and only get 3,000 people, what targeting should we loosen up?
It depends. I would never loosen up targeting that includes a lot of bathwater with the baby. Um, like LinkedIn used to tell people, and this made me so upset. They would tell people, like, you've got to have 300,000 people in your audience, and if you don't have that many, go find audiences to add to them. And it's like, no, no. The reason why you want more people in an audience is so that there are more people in it who are eligible to see ads, so that I can not have to bid super high for my traffic and, and I can spend a decent budget. LinkedIn wants you to spend the entire budget that you've allocated to the platform. But including people who are irrelevant? Absolutely not. Like, that's not. I would never, ever suggest that. So if you legitimately have an audience that is 3,000 people, you can't figure out how to broaden it without letting a lot of, like, without diluting the audience, then just be okay running a small audience. That being said, um, the things I really care about, I want to make sure that I have reached the right individual, and I want to make sure I've reached the right type of company. So if you're using just job title targeting to reach the individual, again, remember, LinkedIn only understands, like, 30 to 45% of job titles. So you might be omitting half to a to two thirds of your audience by using that. And, and you might try job function with seniority instead if that's too broad. You might try specific skills that your prospect might have because someone can add one job title to their profile but they can add 50 skills. So that's a way of like being able to micro in on one particular thing that this broad job title might care more about. So I might look to broaden up that way. And then on the company size, sorry, on the company side, be really thoughtful about if it's industry targeting. Industries are kind of hard on LinkedIn. Like a lot of people will add industries that don't make sense or LinkedIn hasn't created a very good category for them. And so I might loosen up on, on, on your industry but keep on company size, that kind of thing. I don't know if that fully answers the question, but that's the way I would approach it.
It makes sense to me. Amanda asks, how do you explain the value difference between LinkedIn ads and Google Ads for B2B mid market?
I would look specifically at the quality that comes from Google clicks because Google is amazing at being able to capture the bottom of the funnel. Someone is typing a keyword saying exactly what they want and, and you're able to show them exactly what it is they want. And by this time they're in the research phase, they're in the decision making phase, they're ready to jump right to the bottom of the funnel and talk to someone. So that's great. If you look at the quality of those meetings though, you can't communicate very clearly in the keyword that you're typing. Whether you're looking for an enterprise level product or a consumer. You can't communicate very well if you are purchasing on behalf of a business or if you're just looking for something personally. And you know there's a lot of, a lot of searchers who are searching for things like free coupon discount that you can take out with negative keywords but still like that's the keyword intent people are typing to get there. So these Google Ads leads, they're going to close really fast, but they're going there for the most part. They're going to be deals that I would consider very like Tire Kicker and Monon. So that's great. If you look at the quality of those meetings though, you can't communicate very clearly in the keyword that you're typing. Whether you're looking for an enterprise pop kinds of deals like they probably don't know you very well. They're probably not super educated if you level product or a consumer you can't communicate very well if you are purchasing on behalf of a business or if you're just looking for something personally. And you know there's a lot of, a lot of searchers who are searching for things like free coupon discount. Look at the deals that are coming from LinkedIn from the very beginning you got to define exactly who these people were professionally. You know they represent an enterprise of a certain company size size unit you can take out with negative keywords but still like that's the keyword intent. People are know that they're the decision maker and that they probably have budget like all of these pre qualification measures that make sure that every single person is very well qualified. And now your job is not just capture them when they're ready, it's educate them to teach them why they should be ready. And then as soon as they're ready you get them so typing to get there. So these Google Ads leads, they're going to close really fast but they're going there for the most part. They're going to be deals that I would consider very like tire kicker and mom and pop kinds of deals like they probably don't know you very well. They're probably not super educated. If you the, the difference in you look at the deals that are coming from LinkedIn from the very beginning you got to define exactly who these people were. What am I saying? The difference in the quality of the lead like the deep professionally, you know they represent an enterprise of a certain company size. You know size is oftentimes very important to point out with LinkedIn but I'm not poo pooing Google. I think you need to use both. I would just balance like get to know that they're the decision maker and that they probably have budget like all of these pre qualification measures that make sure that every single person is very well qualified. And now your job is not just capture them when they're ready, it's educate them to teach them why they should be ready. And then as soon as they're ready you get them. So the difference in point where you can measure what is my cost per qualified lead and then use that as your, your yardstick, your, your measuring stick to measure both your LinkedIn and your Google traffic. And then if Google what am I saying? The, the difference in the quality of the lead like the deal is high, lower its budget and give more to LinkedIn. If LinkedIn's high, lower LinkedIn and give more to Google. That's the way I would approach.
Yeah, love it. That of course makes my heart sing.
Because you know, fully size is oftentimes very important to point out with LinkedIn. But I'm not poo pooing Google. I think you need to use both. I would just balance like get to the point where you can measure what is my cost per qualified lead and then use that as your. Your.
There's a platform that connected ads to deals that would be wow, what an incredible.
Anyway yardstick, your measuring stick to measure both your LinkedIn and your Google traffic. And then if Google.
Can we target members of a LinkedIn group? You actually mentioned this very briefly in your CFO example, but can you go a little deeper?
Yeah. So this is something that meta advertisers have been wanting for so, so long and LinkedIn's been able to do it since it launched in 2008. Early on with LinkedIn groups were a big thing and it's one of the first things like I created my profile and goal is high, lower its budget and give more to LinkedIn. If LinkedIn's high, lower LinkedIn and give more to Google, then I went and joined groups and. And I would actually be active in those groups. Those groups have since turned into more of like. Well, that's the way I would approach.
Yeah, love it. That of course makes my heart sing because you know, if only there was a platform that connected ads to deals that would be wow, what an incredible. Anyway, Tom asks, can we target members of a LinkedIn group? You actually mentioned this very briefly in your CFO example, but can you go a little deeper?
Yeah. So this is something that meta advertisers have been wanting for so, so long. A link dump fest, like a spam fest. And LinkedIn is not very proud of their group's products so they don't lead people to it very much anymore. All of that to say if you target by groups, it's incredible targeting. If you went out of your way to go join a group about HubSpot, chances are you live and breathe HubSpot. It's really important to you. And so being able to target that is growing and LinkedIn's been able to do it since it launched in 2008. Early on with LinkedIn groups were a big thing and it's one of the first things like I created my profile and. But not everyone goes out of their way to go join join groups and so it's probably going to create some smaller audiences. And then I went and joined groups and. And I would actually be active in those groups. Those groups have since turned into more of like a link dump fest, like a spam fest. And LinkedIn is not very proud of their group's products, so they don't lead people to it very much anymore. All of that to say if you target by groups. So what I would recommend is include groups targeting as part of your, like it's one campaign in a sea of other campaigns so that you can try to get the most out of it. But yeah, LinkedIn's allowed us to do this. It's really cool. You're not just advertising to people when they're in the group. You're saying if you are a member of this group, no matter where you are on LinkedIn, I'm showing you this ad groups. It's incredible targeting. If you went out of your way to go join a group about HubSpot, that's really cool.
Okay.
Chances are you Live and Breathe HubSpot. It's really important to you. And so being able to target that is great.
I. I'm curious about this question is okay if you don't know the answer. It's a little outside of LinkedIn ads, but Amanda asked another question for AJ's brain. Thoughts on what LinkedIn will be doing with information scrapers like Apollo and Zoom Info? Is LinkedIn Getting rid of them to push Navigator?
It's hard to say. LinkedIn have their terms of service and they haven't really fundamentally changed. They don't want anyone using their data, even the publicly available data. They hate scraping and they don't like it when someone logs in as someone else. They only want the one person whose account it is to log in. And they build all of their business tools in a way that you don't have to share passwords and usernames so that you can comply with those terms of service. So anytime there is a service who has either scraped a great deal of information from LinkedIn's database, which I think some of these providers have basically made a business off of, or if they're trying to automate the usage of your LinkedIn profile or log in as you to accomplish something, I think all of those apps and products, their days have been numbered from the very beginning. It just seems like this happened to be a really convenient time for LinkedIn to go all in on this decision and make a big splash. They really wanted to. It appears they really wanted to make an example of some of these apps. But like you said, it's kind of convenient that this is happening as their sales navigator tool is getting better and they're adding more features and all, all that. So yeah, I think so. But I also hope that LinkedIn takes this as a hint that their sales navigator tool, they've put so many limitations on it that people are going elsewhere trying to find functionality so that they can do more with it. And LinkedIn for whatever reason is not giving us the functionality. So they're going to third party apps. I think everyone can kind of come together on this one and like LinkedIn, please give us the functionality that businesses need and maybe we should have less reliance on third parties that are breaking LinkedIn's terms of service.
Makes sense. Okay, this question was answered, was asked at 11:05 and we've talked about a lot since 11:05 or I mean 9:05 your time. Is there a good approach to using LinkedIn ads for mid funnel nurturing top of mind interactions?
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is. I've been asked before where LinkedIn belongs in the funnel and I can very definitively say it's not a bottom of funnel and it's not a top of funnel platform. It's like an all stages of the funnel platform. So it is more expensive than other middle of funnel types of ads that you could run. But if you take this audience that you've built for your middle of funnel, let's say it's a newsletter list, an email list, if you take that to Meta and Google, you might get like a 20 to 40% match rate on it. And so you're not able to reach very much of your middle of funnel audience. But like we discussed on LinkedIn, we can really get high match rates by either uploading a list of companies that match at a really high rate and, and overlaying, let's say job functions and seniorities to make sure that we're getting the right kind of person, but we're also getting their coworkers and their boss and their boss's boss maybe. Or we have the contact lists that we can upload with first name, last name, title and company and get really high match rates without even needing their email address. The one big downside is that we're only reaching someone when they're on LinkedIn and that seems like a miss because people don't spend nearly as much time regularly on LinkedIn as they do on Meta or around the web. So LinkedIn has this product called the LinkedIn Audience Network that lets you show ads to people who are. They're defined by their profile on LinkedIn. They've logged in in the last. I don't know what makes them active, but now LinkedIn's able to send to partner networks and, and show ads to them around the web on apps and on sites. The real downside, though, we've been testing this quite a bit and we found a lot of really bad quality traffic coming from this LinkedIn audience network. But they have the ability to upload block lists and allow lists. So what we did for a client, we whittled this list down to just the very highest quality publishers. So we're talking like Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, like the biggest platforms you can think of. And we say, okay, LinkedIn, show as much as you want only on these 15 news providers. And now we're able to reach people around the web, but in a really controlled way. And we see a lot better quality traffic coming from that. So that might be something you consider is use the LinkedIn Audience Network, but be really tight around your allow list of what sites you'll allow traffic to come from.
Got it. That actually helps me ask another question to you. I wasn't sure what LAN stood for, but I'm guessing it's LinkedIn Audience Network. So David asked, what is the right mix of showing ads on LAN versus on LinkedIn native?
Again, really heavily dependent on your block list or allow list that you're using. I would say right out of the gate, block all apps, because the only apps it's allowed to show on are Android apps. And there was one time I found that a single Android Sudoku app was spending 60% of a client's budget. And I went, that sure seems like there's something fraudulent happening here. So I think blocking apps altogether is probably a good idea. But what the mix is, I think if I bid the LinkedIn audience network down to like $1.50 per click and I bid my LinkedIn only traffic down to like 7 or $8, the right mix is the mix that they actually spend at. If your LinkedIn audience network is able to spend two or three times the budget of your LinkedIn one, cool, I'd be okay with that. And I might say maybe land can be 2/3 of your budget, but if you have to bid higher, if you're, if you're bidding up into like the 3, $4 per click range, I wouldn't say that that would be the best use of your money. I think traffic that comes from LinkedIn proper is always going to be the very best quality.
Makes sense. Emma asks. This is, this is going back to what you were talking about earlier with, you know, AB testing and how long do you run ads? If I am limited to only four creatives, should I run them together or wait until I see that decline in performance to refresh?
Oh, my preference would be to run two at a time. So when I launch ads, I try to pause any other ad that's in that campaign and I'll launch two, let those two ads simmer that they're running, I'm getting some performance from them. And then when I've decided that my AB test, I have the data I want, I know which one's a better performer or whatever, I will pause those two creative and launch the next two. What that does is it basically ensures that LinkedIn is going to give enough impressions to all four of those ads over time that I can actually tell which ones worked. If you launch four ads at a time, there is a decent possibility, I'd say it's probably like a 50, 60% chance that LinkedIn is going to give two of those ads most of the impressions, and it'll probably just mostly ignore the other two. So if two of your ads that you went out of your way to create end up getting fully ignored, like served couple hundred impressions and then stopped, like, was it even worth creating those ads in the first place? I'd say probably not. So, but if you run them two at a time, you can make sure that they are really getting their time in the sun.
Got it. Scott asks thoughts on best practices for exclusion filters to keep your competitors out of your ads.
Ooh, yes. There's really only one way that you want to do this. I guess there's technically two ways to any campaign you can add exclusions, and one of those exclusions you can add is company name. So if you have just a handful of competitors that you'd want to exclude, you can choose that filter, type in the names of the companies that are your competitors. As you type, LinkedIn will suggest you click it and great. So now you're excluding your competitors from ever being served your ads. They can still see them through the LinkedIn ads library. It's like kind of like Meta has. It's for data transparency. So you can still they could go out of their way to go see your ads, but they won't be served them. And if they click on them, it's not going to charge you money. We also, let's say you have more than a handful of competitors if you have, I don't know, 200 companies that you consider competitors or maybe even add to this, these are your competitors, but they're also your current and past customers that you've already acquired. And maybe your trying to think of.
Another example here of like partners or resellers or.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are perfect examples. Add all of those together in one list, upload the list as an ABM list, and then you can now exclude that list from campaigns as well. So if it's just a handful, type them in manually. If it's lots, upload the CSV.
Got it. Let's see, Vidushi says do you think LinkedIn benchmarks shift as we see new trends? For instance, does a 0.44 click through Rate still a decent click through rate for sponsored content ad formats? These benchmarks are from 2022.
Yeah, it's really interesting. Benchmarks on LinkedIn tends to stay the benchmarks for a long time. The same benchmarks I've been sharing since very, very early on have stayed about the same. For instance, text ads. LinkedIn have said since 2010 they've been saying click through rates on average are about 0.025%. I find that to be the case. In fact, they may have lowered a little bit. Now it's a little bit more rare when I get.025%, but they stay pretty constant. So the 0.44% click through rate that they cited before, you'll notice as they come out with other benchmark reports and share things, a lot of times the number will be higher. But that 0.44 is actually quite accurate from my experience, if you're judging by link click through rate. So the percentage of people when they see your ad, they click on the link that would take them to your landing page. That tends to be about half a percent. And then when you see LinkedIn come out with updated data where they say oh, the average sponsored content ad has a 0.6 or a 0.7% click through rate. Oftentimes if you look into the data, they're counting across objectives where some posts from the engagement objective, where every kind of interaction counts as a click, that's of course going to raise raise it. And they're averaging that with those that might be in the website visits or website conversions objective where only a click to the landing page counts. So yeah, stick with your 0.44 for link clicks. It's probably still about right.
Cool. Justin asked a very interesting question. He says can you target followers of a specific LinkedIn company page that there is a buying group within our industry that is a focus for us, but the buying group doesn't have a LinkedIn group of members.
Oh, this is so sad to me because this seems like it would be so easy for LinkedIn to come out with, but we can target our own company page followers, but we can't target the followers of any other page. That's the big downside. So what I would try to do instead, if you could get either a contact list or an account list of the people who are users of that product from somewhere, if it's like a built with or a data nice or some kind of a tool could give you that kind of list, then you can upload that into LinkedIn and target the right people at those companies that you know are using a certain product. But that's a bit of a workaround, admittedly.
Yeah. All right, Lyndon. Lyndon, good to see you. Would we need to have LinkedIn Sales Navigator to access LinkedIn ads?
No, no, they're totally different products. You don't get any sort of additional functionality from LinkedIn ads if you have any sort of a premium account or anything like that in the future. Because right now this is in, it's in an alpha test and it's moving really slow. So I hope this is functionality we have soon. LinkedIn is rolling out an integration between Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Ads. So if your sales team is going and tagging, creating lists of individuals as they're doing their daily thing in the future, you'll be able to pass that audience right into LinkedIn ads for targeting. We don't have that yet though, unless you're part of that alpha test. So in the future, might be cool to have.
Cool. John asks, do you ever measure funnel progression for your Tier 1 and Tier 2 audiences or simply the tier specific metrics and overall CPL cost per lead?
I don't think too much about the graduation metrics, to be honest. What I do is I purposely put the ad formats in each stage of my funnel that are very. That are most efficient at passing audiences to the next stage at the lowest cost. So for instance, I know the cheapest cost to get someone from stage one to stage two is a thought leader ad where I'm saying any sort of interaction on this, on one of these posts, retarget them. Whereas if you're running like a website visits kind of campaign and you're saying only the people who click on the link to go to my website count them in order to have a list large enough to even start showing your ads, you've got to have at least 300 people do that action, which 300 people times how much you're paying for. A click like that tells you how much it's going to cost you to fill that audience bucket. So that's more of what I concentrate on is I make sure every stage of the funnel, I'm able to retarget as much as cheaply as possible to graduate them down.
Got it. Well, friends, we've once again filled an hour with just pelting AJ with questions. Aj, we've got about two minutes left here. Is there any last closing thoughts you want to share?
I don't think so. Just thank you everyone for coming and bringing such awesome questions. This is one of the most engaged audiences I've ever gotten to present to, so thank you. And I'm going to be taking these extra questions that we haven't had a chance to get to, and I'm going to use them to create content in the future. So if you want to Listen to the LinkedIn Ads show podcast, that's where every week I dive into an area of LinkedIn ads at a really deep level. Or if you want to follow me on LinkedIn or even reach out to the chat there.
Yeah. Thanks everyone so much for being a part of this. Please connect with aj. Follow him. You've seen how what a wealth of knowledge he is. Aj, I can't thank you enough for coming back a second time and just taking questions nonstop. Your champ. Thanks, aj.
Have me back anytime for round three.
