LinkedIn Ads Best Practices from INBOUND2020

[JenBerenguer]

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a chance to see AJ Wilcox at INBOUND2020, but because I thought his session was such a valuable [and awesome] one, I wanted to share some of my learnings around LinkedIn Advertisement with you, if you couldn't attend. 

So let me start off by giving due credit: AJ runs a LinkedIn Ads agency, so get in check B2Linked out if you love the lessons I'm sharing. 

Advantages and disadvantages of advertising on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an expensive platform to advertise on and the clicks may cost between 8 and 11 dollars. However, it is one of the best platforms to get a very tailored target, especially for B2B companies and that on itself is probably enough to balance the disadvantages.

We have to consider though that because it is expensive, it's also a risky platform to invest on, as mistakes can end up being very costly. There are also some other limitations you usually don't have when advertising elsewhere such as device level or time of the day bidding. That means that you don't really have control not to spend your budget on people scrolling on mobile if you don't have an optimized website or to allocate your spend during business hours.

Talk numbers to me

This was one of my favorite parts of the session as I hear clients all the time asking for some benchmarks on what success looks like in LinkedIn advertising. 

Here's B2Linked's take on what's a good performance.

• Sponsored content

CTR - 0.39%

CPC - $8

CVR - 10%-15% 

• Text

CTR - 0.25%

CPC - $3-6

CVR - varies

• Sponsored InMails

Open Rate - 50% (a lot of people tend to open to mark it as read)

CTR - 3%-4%

CPC - $23-58

CVR - Varies

Important note: As much as these could be great industry numbers, your best benchmark is your own past performance. Not all businesses are the same and neither are their paid campaigns.

Bidding

Quick clarification on the types available:

CPC - Cost per Click

CPM - Cost per Thousand Impressions

Here's some gold advice from AJ about bidding - What bidding type should we go for and when.

- Start with the minimum possible daily budget in CPC type to evaluate what your rates are

- Don't use auto-bidding

- If you're hitting the budget too quickly, you're probably being inefficient

Hacks to optimize spend

Based on your average CTR numbers, here are some recommendations:

CTR<0.35 - keep trying and testing with ads

0.35<CTR<1 - bid down to get lowest CPCs or up for more traffic

CTR>1 - change to auto-bidding with CPM type

Although you can't really pick the time your ads will show, B2Linked research shows the optimal time to advertise on LinkedIn is between 6am and 11am. This is a time for high supply and low price. They even developed a tool to help with scheduling here.

Target audience

Here is some advice to optimize the way you set up your target audience:

• If you're using skills or groups as a criteria, exclude BDs, Sales and Marketing folks - they're most likely your competition, unless your product is dedicated to this type of professional
• If you're using company size, instead of targeting SMBs, for example, just exclude Enterprise. That way, LinkedIn will also show your ads to those whose size is unknown (which are usually small companies, btw)
• If you use age/time of experience as a criteria, be careful because it can be inaccurate. LinkedIn measures what's in your profile and often you see Directors who don't need to bother in adding all their past experience and therefore LinkedIn won't recognize their 20+ years of experience and other times you see students adding every single summer job they've had since they were kids, which will look like they're within your time of experience criteria.

Organizing your campaigns

The easiest way to have a clear view of performance is to segment it right. By having one campaign for managers, one campaign for directors, one campaign for individual contributors, for instance, you can very easily see which ones are bringing you better results, decide on which to keep, shut or change budget and you won't need to create a million campaigns throughout the years, you can keep the target and change the ads or ad groups.

Testing impact

These are some numbers from AJ I absolutely loved to see. What's the percentage of impact that changing an asset could have in your performance?

• Ad copy - 5-15% improvement
• Landing page- 50-150%
• Offer title -200-300%

Measurement and improvements

When evaluating what's not working in your campaign, have in mind what are the metrics that actually matter

If you're focusing on CTR and having poor performance, you should review your ads - your copy, images, consider the format (what if video would work better), etc.

If you're focusing on CVR and having poor performance, you may want to review your offer, the value your adding with it, your landing page experience and how much trust you are passing in the process (after all, your prospect is exchanging their most valuable asset with you - their data).

Those were my main learnings, but of course I'm not everyday working on paid social so I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you best run your own LinkedIn campaigns, so share them with us!

Jen