Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show

On this episode, we’re going to be talking about all the basics of LinkedIn ads, what the platform is, what it’s not what you need in order to get started, as well as some of the capabilities of the platform.

Resources for this week:

1. B2Linked.com/checklist – Here’s the LinkedIn Ads Startup Checklist I mention in the show.

2. Also check out this youtube video that walks you throught he basics of successful LinkedIn Ads strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Pm9tNkqrA

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover.

Transcript:

So who am I? Well, I’m AJ Wilcox, like the lovely announcer mentioned, I live in the state of Utah in the United States. I started back in 2014, an agency called B2Linked.com, and we’re an ad agency that specializes only in LinkedIn ads. We’ve spent more on LinkedIn ads than any other person or company out there. We’ve managed over 120 million dollars in spend, managed over 300 accounts. I’m the author of the LinkedIn ads course on LinkedIn Learning, yada, yada, yada. Hopefully this is the last time you ever hear me brag aboutmyself, but just kind of letting you know where I’m coming from.

1:03
I love LinkedIn ads. It’s a huge part of my life, even though a lot of other people would consider it maybe a more boring platform. This is the stuff I think about while I’m trying to go to sleep at night. So little bit geeky there. This is the first episode of the podcast, I realize it may not be the first episode you’ve listened to. But if it is, I’m just going to give you some quick housekeeping.

1:24
First off, I’m going to try really hard to slow things down. But in real life, I am a fast talker, I get excited about this stuff. It makes me go fast. So be prepared, I will likely speed up at times. And just a heads up to anyone out there who is like me who likes to listen to their podcasts at 2-2.5X speed. Sometimes I might not be intelligible at those speeds. So heads up now, I’ll purposely try to slow things down. You can tell even in this intro, and I’m talking too quick, but realized that I’ll probably speed up at times, just be prepared.

1:57
I also have a weird accent. I grew up in the state of Arizona, which has kind of a southern accent. I live now in Utah, and it has its own accent. So anyway, I’ve got this weird combination of the two. I apologize if I’m hard to understand. But hopefully by episodes, three or four, you start to get me. Okay, cool. I’m going to be covering about every possible topic related to LinkedIn ads that I can come up with. It’s a weekly show, but any topic that you’d like me to cover, shoot us a note here at podcast@B2Linked.com. And we’d love to help you out with that. Okay, let’s jump into it.

2:36
What LinkedIn ads is, well, LinkedIn ads is a platform not dissimilar to something like Google ads or Facebook ads that you might be familiar with. It’s a network where you can decide to place ads and show them to specific types of audiences. So you define who that audience is. And you place ads that go in front of them, and then you decide how you want to pay you can pay when someone either clicks or by the number of times the ads are shown. So that is the simplicity of the bones of the network, how you would approach it. Now what makes LinkedIn ads really special is this access to the audience, you have the ability to target the audience by so many different things. We’ll get into that here in just a few moments. But you should also understand that because we get access to a very premium type of audience, LinkedIn ads is quite expensive compared to other channels. We will call it premium priced. We can call it expensive or pricey, spendy, all kinds of different adjectives can describe, which is really the first thing you find out about LinkedIn ads, that if you’re going to pay, you know, $1-$2, a click on Facebook, you might pay $8-11 per click on LinkedIn.

3:49
We also know that because it’s a social channel, we’re showing ads to people based off of who they are, and not necessarily what they’re in the market for or what they’re looking for. So it is not a search channel, something like Google or Bing, where you can put a keyword up like here is the type of products that I sell, and have people who are looking for that product come and immediately by now, LinkedIn is essentially a network that is more middle to top of funnel. This is where you are introducing your brand to people introducing your product, your service, and not asking them to convert immediately. For those of you who are the 5%, that jumping right to the bottom of the funnel and asking for a hard direct response, good for you. But for the 95% that it doesn’t work for. Be aware, LinkedIn sits very squarely in the middle to top a funnel and you will need to do something to start the relationship rather than thinking about just taking a prospect and immediately converting them to business. Okay, so we now know what LinkedIn is what LinkedIn is not.

4:55
LinkedIn is not a great platform for e commerce because you know, like we mentioned before, people are just getting to know you, when they see your ad on LinkedIn, just assume every time your ad is served, this is the first time that someone has heard of your company. And until you really have that know like and trust factor with a brand, you’re not willing to open up your wallet whether the price tag is $5 or $5,000 or $5 million. So ecommerce doesn’t work very well. Plus, ecommerce tends to be in the smaller deal size, the smaller price brackets, and with such an expensive click on LinkedIn, you’ll probably end up eating up all of your margin. Okay, so not great for ecommerce. Although anyone who has had success with e commerce, please email us let us know. So I’m always looking for those success stories and anything I might have missed. It doesn’t work very well for affiliate because affiliate deals are requiring an immediate action and like we talked about, people just aren’t ready for immediate hardcore action at least. So avoid for affiliates, anything that’s high pressure, anything that takes a lot of time up front. Those are things that, you know, when you’re advertising to someone on LinkedIn, You’re distracting them from what they were there for. And they’re usually there for a purpose. It’s not a platform you go and just waste time on. I’ve also found that if you’re trying to get people to download an app, LinkedIn ads are just too expensive. Most people have a cost per install goal on app downloads of, you know, three to four bucks. Even if you had a 100% conversion rate on LinkedIn, which certainly you won’t, you would probably, you know, pay $8-10, to $12 per click, and it just wouldn’t work out. So those are the ones who should definitely avoid, but who then should be advertising on LinkedIn? Well, as long as you don’t fit in one of those categories. Let’s talk through the different areas that you need to keep in mind.

6:54
I have a set of filter questions to help me understand whether or not someone would be a good fit for LinkedIn. And I’m going to walk you through all four of those. The first is targeting. The second is lifetime value. Third is offer. And fourth is budget. So I’m going to walk through each one of these, keep in mind your own business or your clients companies, and see if they would be a good fit here. So first off, number one targeting with targeting, you want to make sure that your ideal target audience is on LinkedIn and is defined there. If you’re going after a really broad audience, something like females between the age of 35 and 85. You are certainly much better off placing a billboard on the highway, or maybe even something like Facebook ads. On LinkedIn, you’re willing to pay way too much for that traffic. So what about if your audience is HR decision makers at tech companies with more than 1000 employees? Yeah, absolutely. LinkedIn is the perfect channel for that.

7:59
Number two here is lifetime value. So because LinkedIn, you’re going to pay $8-11 per click right up front, it means you’ve got to have a pretty large lifetime value or a high deal size. On the back end, when you close a customer to make sure you can still show a return on that investment. What I tell people is if you have a lifetime value of over $15,000, then LinkedIn ads is really a no brainer. That’s based off of North American costs and all of that. So if you’re listening outside of the US where your clicks are half as much or three quarters as much that changes my lifetime value number linearly. So keep that in mind. $15,000. It’s really, really uncommon when we have a client who can’t close business within, you know, $1,000-$4,000 in ad spend. So if it costs you one to $4,000 to close a deal, then you’re going to make $15,000 there’s all kinds of room there for testing, optimization, paying a sales rep, covering overhead, management fees for agencies all of that.

9:03
Number three is offer. You can’t go after someone with a LinkedIn ad and say, Hey, here’s what we do, click here for a demo, or click here to talk to a sales rep. Of course you can do it, there’s nothing stopping you. But what will happen 95% of the time, people will see that ad, they might even click it and charge you money just because they’re curious about it. But they will get to the landing page and you will have a conversion rate of 1.5-4%. (1.5% on the low end 4% if you happen to have a powerhouse brand), someone like Nike or an IBM might be able to get away with this and get closer to a four or 5%. So because so few people are willing to click, what it does is it drives your costs up per click, because you are getting a poor relevancy score. We’ll have a podcast episode all about that and see you’re paying more per click and then fewer people are converting so it drives your cost per lead way, way up, there are certain companies who are making this work. But for yours, I would highly recommend don’t do this approach.

10:08
So when we talk about offers, it’s when I’m sending someone to my landing page, or in the case of using lead generation forms, I’m giving them some kind of offer some kind of call to action. And it’s got to have high perceived value, there has to be something in it for them. Otherwise, they’re just going to look past it because they’re not here to find another vendor to do business with. So what can you provide that is giving a substantial, high perceived value to that prospect so that they will want to opt in with you. Some of the best types of offers we found are things like a free checklist or a free cheat sheet, a guide, a webinar, ebook, free in person events, job offers, I mean, all of these are great types of calls to action that you can give someone and so when you give someone something that they are really hungry for, you’re going to see conversion rates that are 15% or higher. And that will get your costs per opt in down into the, you know, I’ve seen as low as $10-15. But averaging, you’re probably going to be in the $35 to $65 range. And that’s pretty excellent on LinkedIn. If you end up with costs per in the $80-90-100. That means that you probably have a conversion rate that is quite low or is lower than average. And you just need to go back to the drawing board, figure out some kind of offer that people will actually, you know, it’s irresistible, they will want to give their information in exchange for.

11:43
Okay, fourth criteria here is budget. I recommend not going into LinkedIn ads, spending less than $3k-$5k a month just bought based off of my past experience. But I realized there are people out there who are making it work for less for half to make it work for less, they just don’t have those kinds of budgets. So here’s what I want to say. If you are spending $3-5k on ads, that’s generally the amount of spend that it takes to get statistical significance, down to your conversion rates and your cost per conversion. So what that means is, if I have a client who’s spending $3-5k in a month, by the end of the month, when I do my monthly reporting, I can give them really statistically accurate data that will help us optimize and change course as needed. If you are spending considerably less, then just realize you may have to wait until you have spent that amount. Whether that’s over the course of let’s say, one and a half months or two, three months, that’s okay. What it means is you’ve got to go to your boss, your stakeholders, your board, whoever, and let them know, Hey, we’re investing in this channel. It’s going to take a while, you know, don’t ask me about it. Don’t put pressure on me and tell me that we’ve got to take the channel down. When you haven’t heard about all of the raging success on day four, we need to spend some time gather some data.

13:09
Now I’m not telling you that if things are absolutely crappy, you’ve gotten 20-30 clicks, still haven’t seen a conversion, there’s probably a good reason to take a look at your offer and see if you can tell why it’s not converting put yourself in the eyes of your prospects and say, you know, if I were in their shoes, would I convert on this? What would keep me from that? What I found is if you’re spending less than $3-5kper month, you will oftentimes just either you or your boss will get impatient. They’ll say things like, Hey, I know we were investing in this channel, but I haven’t heard anything from it. You know what’s going on, and it’s too early to start making decisions. So we’ve lost too many accounts over over the years from smaller spenders who wanted to know after you know day four what was going on, when there just wasn’t anything to report. So my recommendation is definitely go in with a solid budget, so that you can immediately see the business impact, your optimizations can happen faster, and you’ll see the impact and have more confidence.

14:13
So because of these factors we’ve walked through, we know that there are certain types of companies that have a lot of success on LinkedIn. And we’ll walk through those. So I think the biggest use case for LinkedIn ads is business to business lead generation, that is really the majority of where I come from. But we also know that white collar recruiting does extremely well, like you’re trying to hire a new sales manager. So you put out an ad that’s targeting people with this job title of sales manager in your area, and showing ads saying, “Hey, we’re interested in in you are you interested in us?”. Higher education tends to work really well as well. That would be like an MBA program, recruiting someone because we can target those who have a bachelor’s degree, but maybe don’t yet have a Master’s or PhD, and we know what they studied and what school they went to. And MBA programs love to recruit based off of that.

15:07
We also know that financial services, even though this is technically a b2c type of offer, financial services do work pretty well on LinkedIn, probably because of that high lifetime value. When you pick someone for a financial institution, you’re probably going to stick with them for a long time. I know Amex is a big advertiser on LinkedIn. So financial services work well. Also there are instances of travel working pretty well.

15:32
Okay, here’s a quick sponsor break and we’ll dive into the capabilities of the platform. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn ads experts.

15:46
Alright, let’s jump into the capabilities of the platform. So the platform as we talked about as a way of targeting a specific audience with a specific message that you define, there are four different areas that will cover. If you’re used to things like Google ads or Facebook ads, this will seem very familiar. So first off, we have the ability to change how we are willing to pay. So we can say we are only willing to pay when someone clicks, that’s called a cost per click, or a CPC bid, we have the ability to pay every time our ad is shown. That is called by cost per impression. It’s actually cost per 1000 impressions. And the acronym is CPM cost per mille is how you’d say it. So we go by cost per thousand. LinkedIn also has a way to pay by what they call automated bid. And I call this like, hand your wallet to LinkedIn and say, Please be gentle, you know, charge whatever you want. That’s kind of what automated bidding is. And the reason why is because it’s based off of machine learning. And machine learning needs to modulate your bid in order to do tests. So it will do some tests at the minimum bid level. It will do some tests at $25 or $50 per click, and it’s also always based off of cost per thousand impression bidding. And what I will say is about 90% of the time on LinkedIn ads bidding by cost per click is the cheapest way to go. So that is basically if you are benchmark, we’ll use sponsored content ads as an example here. Sponsored content ads have an average click through rate of .39%. So if your ads are performing at about two times that so if you’re over, it’s actually closer to, okay, we’ll go with two times, here’s about two and a half really, but if your ads are performing at over that over the average, then all of a sudden cost per thousand impression bidding becomes more advantageous. So 90% of the time if you select automated bid, you will be paying too much you will tweet me on twitter saying hey, “AJ, I just had to tell my boss that I paid you know $50 dollars per click What’s going on?” That’s why. It’s CPM bidding or automated bidding. If your ads don’t perform amazingly well, then you will definitely pay more. Okay, so I would suggest starting by cost per click, but you have the ability to do all three.

18:15
There are also several different ad types on LinkedIn. There’s sponsored content ads that show up right in your newsfeed. And don’t worry, we’ll do a podcast episode specifically about all of these different things. But this is more just an overview for you. So sponsored content is right in your newsfeed your newsfeed is the homepage on both your desktop computer when you open it up, or any mobile device the feed is first so this is probably where you want to start out. Next on the list is text ads. Now these are only available on your computer on laptop desktop, where there is a right rail because text ads show up in the right rail. There is no right rail on mobile, so you’ll only get desktop traffic which is actually a great thing.

19:01
Now text ads are the cheapest cost per click on LinkedIn, which makes them amazing. But by virtue of the fact that they’re in the right rail, they definitely look like an ad. There’s, you know, 25 characters of text for a headline, 75 characters for a description, and then an image that’s usually between 50×50, or 100×100 pixels large, or small. In this case, it definitely looks like an ad, it’s out of the way. They’re generally very bottom of the funnel types of offers. And so because of that, they have a very insanely low engagement rate. So if you have a low engagement rate, like .025%, what that means is you’re going to have two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 times your ads are served, very low engagement. So I call these low risk. Not only are you not going to pay very much every time someone clicks, at least comparatively, but you’ll also not have your ads click that’s a whole ton. So that means that these are a pretty low risk type of ad format. If you just wanted to dip your toe into LinkedIn ads, maybe start with text ads, they really haven’t changed since the platform came out in 2007. They were the OG, the original ad format.

20:14
Okay, then we have sponsored inmail. Now, sponsored in mail is very different from the rest of the ad formats, because you only on the other ad formats, you only pay when someone clicks if you’re doing CPC bidding. But on sponsored inmail, you pay every time your message is sent to someone with no guarantee that they’ll see that they got it or open it or click on the link inside. So if you do the math on these, you know people talk about sponsored in mail being such a good deal being inexpensive, because the costs look low, you know, $.35 to $.85 cents per send. Well do the math, about 50% of the people you send it to will open it and then usually between 3-4% of people will click. So based on that math, your average cost per click comes out to $23 to $57. It’s a lot of money for a click. So who then should be using sponsored InMail? Well, you want to use sponsored inmail if your offer feels like a personal invitation, if you got your sponsored inmail as as a an email as a cold email from someone that you didn’t know, if you would classify it as spam, then it’s not going to work very well. It’s going to be the most expensive cost per click that you’ve ever gotten. However, if you got your sponsored inmail in an email cold from someone you didn’t know and you said, Wow, I’m excited about that. That’s a cool opportunity. Those are the types of offers you want to use sponsored in mail for so be aware. That’s usually only about 5% of our clients are running sponsored in mail, but they can be very effective with the right offer, but don’t try running them with something like, you know, download our white paper or our ebook, you’re much better off going after sponsored content with that.

22:06
Okay. And finally, the last ad format is called dynamic ads. They call them dynamic because they actually take the picture of your, your prospect, the LinkedIn member, and they insert it into the ad. It’s supposed to be attention grabbing, others just call it creepy. But anyway, this is an ad that sticks your picture into it. They are in the right rail. So they steal inventory from text ads, and they’re kind of a bad combination, because they’re in the right rail, they have really insanely low click through rates. So if you have a small target audience, it’s going to be really hard to spend any money. But on top of that, their average cost per click is significantly higher than sponsored content. So if you asked me if I want to pay more, for less opportunity to get in front of my audience, the answer is no. I would much rather go with sponsored content for overall reach and then text ads for lowering costs.

23:04
There are some variations of the different types of ads that you can use on LinkedIn. We can do video ads, which you know, really just what you’d expect. They’re insanely expensive right now, but I hope that changes in the future. There are carousel ads, very similar to those that you might have seen on Facebook. So the ability to put multiple images inside of a single ad, where someone can rotate through it and see multiple things kind of cool, but a lot of work for not a increase in performance. There’s also lead generation forms. So this is where someone can fill out a form and actually convert without ever leaving the LinkedIn experience. Because of that you’re not having you know, load times on your site affect people dropping off before after they’ve clicked and charged you money, but before they’ve actually gotten to the site. You don’t have to worry about making them feel at home because they’re already on LinkedIn. They feel comfortable with that brand. So you’ll end up with conversion rates that are 10 to 50% higher in the average case, and we’ve seen them be as high as you know, two, three times the conversion rate. And, and this is great, on the other hand, and you can actually fix these two both sponsored content and sponsored in mail. The downside here is that because LinkedIn has made it so easy for the prospect to fill out the form by auto filling all of their information in the form and making it so all they have to do is just hit submit. Sometimes when you go to contact these people the next day or a few days later, they don’t remember having filled out a form with you. So if your goal is to make a really strong impact on a high value type of consumer, then I would send them to a landing page where you control that experience. When you use lead gen forms there is currently I’m saying this at the very beginning of 2020. There is no ability to retarget that traffic. So if you are interested in retargeting your traffic, you will want to send it to your own website, where you can then retarget with in this order, Facebook, Google, and then LinkedIn if you have extra time and resources, great.

25:11
Now the reason that we go to LinkedIn ads is the targeting is access to this audience that we just can’t get anywhere else. So LinkedIn has amazing targeting just as it’s table stakes, it came out of the gate it back in 2007, with the ability to target by job title by someone’s level of seniority, what department they work in, that’s called job function skills on their profile groups that are members of their company size, their company industry. And for those of you who know about account based marketing, or ABM, LinkedIn is the original ABM platform back in 2007. We can target by company name, or exclude by company name. And this was was and is still one of my favorite parts of the platform. You know, especially from the exclusions perspective, there just isn’t another platform where I know I can exclude my competitors from seeing my ads. And if I’m paying eight to 10 bucks a click, you bet I want to save every single click possible to only those who would actually become a potential good customer for me.

26:15
There’s a whole bunch of other fantastic targeting. There’s education like what where you went to school, what degree you got what you studied, there’s the demographic information you expect, like location that actually just got quite a bit more more specific. It used to just be by metro areas. You can you can target by years of experience, gender, and quite a few others. But back in 2016, we got access to something that LinkedIn calls matched audiences. Now matched audiences are amazing, because they include three different types of targeting that we didn’t have before. The first is called email targeting, which those of you familiar with other platforms will already be used to. This is, you know, just something that LinkedIn should have had earlier, the ability to to upload up to 300,000 email addresses in a spreadsheet to LinkedIn, have them match and then based off of those that they found a match for, put them into an audience and start showing them ads. That’s fantastic. Glad we have it.

26:23
Now. The next was retargeting and again, this is you know, it’s web retargeting. Again, this is something that I think we all wanted much earlier. And the way that LinkedIn pulled it off, was pretty weak and left us wanting.

27:33
But the third release on match audiences is called account, match or company name match. And this one was so exciting to me. So this is just like we had company name targeting before, but using company name targeting you would only be able to manually write in up to 100 companies, the limit is now 200. So you would manually type in 200 companies and so if you’re trying to build a list, like, let’s say you wanted to target the fortune 500, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this, you go in and you type in the first hundred names into a campaign, you say that you start a new campaign type the next hundred. So your fortune 500 is now five separate small audience campaigns. It was not a fun process.

28:21
But now with this account match, we can upload up to 300,000 company names, you make the match rate better by increase or by including the web URLs of the companies. And then LinkedIn will take that match it. And especially with large companies, you’ll have a really high match rate. You can then use this list to either target your specific account based marketing lists, or you can use it to exclude things like hey, I don’t want my competitors and my current customers and maybe even past customers from seeing my ads in the future, because I only want to pay for net new audiences. Very powerful. I absolutely love this feature.

29:00
Then we also got recently actually in 2019, some behavioral targeting, we can target by interests we can target by, and interests, by the way come from how what people share in the newsfeed what they interact with, as well as their Bing search history if if Microsoft has some good Bing search data on them, I don’t know who else here is a, who has Bing as their default search engine besides me, that was a new year’s resolution a few years back that just never changed. But they also came out with some targeting that they call audience templates.

29:35
Now, audience templates There are currently as of recording 26 different groups that LinkedIn said, Hey, we have kind of a template for how we would suggest reaching these type of people. This includes some data that you would be able to get by just kind of futzing around and doing what you want, but they also have some data here or some targeting based off of data only they have.

30:00
For instance, they have one called New to job market that allows you to target members who have or are in the process of completing a bachelor’s degree or an associate’s, but they have limited job experience listed on their profile. So this could be a really good for catching. Maybe you’re looking to hire interns or something like that. Or maybe you want to exclude them because they don’t have enough experience for what you’re doing. So I call this and also the interest targeting a bit of a yard sale. And what I mean by that is you never know when you show up to a yard sale, or garage sale or whatever you want to call it, what you’re going to find it’s going to be a weird assortment of things that are not related. And when you go to audience templates or interests, you will see the same thing. You just have to look through it and see, you know, is there anything valuable here or not? I totally expect LinkedIn to keep coming out with new targeting, and I’m excited to see what they come out with every new piece that we get access to helps us serve our clients better. So super excited for them to continue developing, targeting excited for what’s on the horizon.

31:05
Okay. And finally, with capabilities, we’ve got the reporting aspects because anyone who has managed a PPC campaign knows how valuable the reporting is. With LinkedIn, we have access to all the traditional things that you’d expect. We have a breakdown either by campaign or by ad of the impressions. So the number of times your ads were shown, clicks, the number of times they were clicked on, spend, and conversions. If you’ve set up conversion tracking, then of course, you have the ratio of all of those things like your click through rate, which is your clicks over your impressions, or your conversion rate, your cost per click your cost per conversion. So all of those are helpful metrics. Inside of the campaign manager that we use to manage LinkedIn, the columns are pretty weak. We can’t rearrange them. We can’t customize them in any way. So you will find yourself clicking around quite a bit through the interface. And that’s just what we have to do as LinkedIn advertisers until they improve the platform.

32:06
Some of the weaknesses in reporting that you’ll see, we don’t have the ability to see based off of frequency. So the number of times that our ads have reached a given audience. This is something I love about Facebook. LinkedIn does not have this. They also don’t publicly show their relevancy score, which is like your quality score on Google or relevance score on Facebook. You can see it if you go and run a report at the campaign level, but you really have to dig for it. I would love it if it were just something that we can see in the interface. There’s also no reporting by hour so if you’re wondering what time of day people tend to converge, what what times of day are cheapest, which times of day are most effective? You can’t do that through the ad platform. Not a great fit for that. And because there’s no hourly reporting, there’s also know how early day partying or scheduling you’d have to go to a 3rd party tool for that.

33:02
So as long as I haven’t scared you away, and I hope I haven’t been down on LinkedIn, I mean I’m in this platform every single day, and I’m very well aware of its its pros, and especially cons, but I have, if I haven’t scared you away, and you’re excited to start advertising, I want to give you a run through of how you can get started.

33:19
So first off, every one of our clients that we bring on to start running their LinkedIn ads, we run them through an eight point checklist of everything we need to get started. We took that same checklist and we made it available. So anyone else who wants to start advertising can use the same checklist. So anyone who’s interested, please go to B2Linked.com/checklist and you can follow along. So you will first of all need to have a company page on LinkedIn. This is a question I get quite a bit. No, you can’t boost or promote personal profiles, it has to come originate from a business. So make sure you have a company page. If you do not get one created, it’s pretty easy. And if there is one created, you’ll want to get admin access to it. You certainly can publish ads if you have a lesser right. There’s a right on the company page called direct sponsored content poster, which you can publish ads, but you will likely want full admin access, because that’s the only one where you can delete ads if there’s a problem. So to cover your butts, I would say get full admin access.

34:34
Next, you’ll obviously want an ads account. So if you go to linkedin.com/ads. If you don’t have an account, you just click buttons until you do there’s a Create Ad button currently, and you click it it opens up the platform and allows you to create an account. If you do have an account already created, you just need to go to someone who has full admin, the the status, or the right is called account manager. So you go find someone who has account manager access to campaign manager and have them grant it to you.

35:13
All of these rights are given to personal LinkedIn profiles, which I actually really like. I like the fact that when an employee of ours moves on, we can remove rights from them. And we don’t have to go and scramble to change a group password or something that I remember having to do quite a few times and other agencies when we managed Google and Facebook.

35:33
The next thing you’ll probably want to do is go and place your credit card in there because if you have not placed it, you will have a red nag banner over the entire every screen that you load until you do put your credit card in there. So do yourself a favor put it in now although it may not be fully necessary to have it there until you’re ready to launch get it in there just so you’re not bugged.

35:57
Next, you’ll want to get the insight tag placed on your website. Now, the insight tag is not unlike any of the other tracking pixels that your other platforms use. You may have already done the same type of thing with with the Google either Google Ads Google remarketing Facebook pixels. All of these are little snippets of JavaScript code that you put on your website to let LinkedIn know when people are on your site so that they can identify them.

36:25
Now, the reasons that you would want to have this insight tag placed on your website are three reasons. So the first, maybe not super exciting given what I’ve shared about LinkedIn retargeting, but you can use that tag for retargeting. Pretty okay, then you can use it for doing conversion tracking, which is really exciting. That means that when you are running your ads, you send someone to a form. Once they fill out the form, they are then redirected to a page that we call a thank you page or a success page. You can take the URL of that success page, tell LinkedIn what that is, it’s under account assets and conversions, if you would like to see that, and LinkedIn will mark anyone who has hit that page as having converted. This is great for managing your LinkedIn ads, knowing which offers which ads, which campaigns are converting, so you can make quick decisions. So I highly recommend this.

37:22
But the third and I think possibly the most exciting reason you would want to have the, the insight tag placed on your website is something called website demographics. So many of you may know Google Analytics, or Facebook analytics. These are free services that allow you to understand how people are using your website, and it’s free gives you lots of cool data I highly recommend. Now, LinkedIn has the same type of thing that they call LinkedIn website demographics, but it’s not as well publicized and it’s not nearly as powerful. But what it does is it will tell you the same types of demographic reporting that you get when you are paying for ads from their network, you can see the same types of demographic reporting for just any website traffic, regardless of what channel they came from. And you can get pretty custom about how you split these things up.

38:13
So for instance, you can see, hey, my website, I have the majority of people who come our VP or C level, or Hey, I have a lot of sales people or CEOs visiting my site. A lot of people from small companies or large companies. That’s the level of data that you can get from the website demographics. So I highly recommend install that tag on every one of your web pages, and get that while you’ve got access.

38:37
Then the next thing is you really want to understand who your audiences are. So come to the platform with an idea of who you want to go after and know what roles at what types of companies maybe come with lists of email addresses or company names that you might want to target or exclude. Just have your audience defined so that you’re not thinking really hard as you’re creating the campaign. Come with a good plan.

39:01
And then finally, you really want some imagery or video to accompany your ads. My recommendation is to go with static imagery. And in sponsored content, the size here is 1200 by 627. So 1200 pixels wide by 627 tall, you have an image that is of these proportions, it will be really easy to write an ad, place the image and launch your first ad.

39:28
So that’s really the basics of what you’d need to know in order to start advertising on LinkedIn. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

39:48
Before you go, I’d love to share just a few quick resources. First is that checklist that I mentioned below. Just a quick reminder, go download it if you’re not already advertising on LinkedIn because this will give you a serious leg up. It’s the same checklist that we use with our clients. And I hope you find it valuable. You can get that at B2Linked.com/checklist.

40:10
Also, please do subscribe on whatever podcast player you’re listening. Because this is a brand new podcast, you’re listening to episode one. And I would love it if this was valuable to you. I would love to be in your earholes wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, so definitely subscribe. I’d love to have you learning from what what I’m going to be sharing.

40:31
And then of course, this is a huge ask, but I would love it if you would rate and review this podcast. Now I know I probably truly suck because this is the first episode. But since yours may be the only review right now. I would love it if you’d leave a review and leave it optimistically, maybe not grading based off of how I am now, but maybe what the podcast could become in the future. So if you have any questions, definitely hit us up: Podcast@B2Linked.com and I will see you back here next week.

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