Ep 131 – LinkedIn Ads Feature Releases in 2024 | LinkedIn Ads Product Roadmap Updates

No matter how much of a LinkedIn Ads rockstar you are, I guarantee you didn’t know about all of these product updates. We’re talking all the newest features you didn’t even know were released on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey, hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I’m A. J. Wilcox. I’m the host of the weekly podcast, The LinkedIn Ads Show. I’m thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers who want to evolve through mastering LinkedIn Ads and achieving true pro status. I wanted to apologize for those of you who are waiting on an episode and haven’t seen one in the last three weeks. I apologize. I got really busy, then was traveling for speaking engagements, then got sick. And so all of that put me back in recording. I apologize. I’m going to try to do a lot better about making sure that these are coming out absolutely weekly.

Alright, so I wanted to do a quick recap of the newest features and updates on LinkedIn Ads so far, mostly in 2024. And as you know, I pay a lot of attention to the platform and at least two of these features, they totally blindsided me. So I’m really excited to share them with you.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

B2Linked is the ad agency 100 percent dedicated to LinkedIn Ads. And we have been since 2014. You know, back before it was cool. We’ve mastered the platform and have figured out how to get you the very best traffic at the very lowest costs. Which on a platform like LinkedIn that charges a significant premium, we’ve found that this is the best way to increase your ROI. We’ve even built reporting capabilities and tools that LinkedIn themselves can’t provide, so we can always give our clients the very best insights. If that sounds like it could be for you and you’d want to explore potentially working together, Schedule your free discovery call at b2linked.com/discovery.

Alright, do you have a question, a review, or feedback for the show? You can either message me privately on LinkedIn, that’s free even if we’re not already connected. Or you can email us at podcast@b2linked.com, and you can attach a file or a link to a voice recording, and I’ll aim to play them right here on the show. And of course, I’m happy to keep you anonymous, or share your details and shout you out as well. So, go ahead, record yourself asking a question, commenting on something from a past episode, calling me out for being absolutely full of BS, and I’ll aim to include you right here in the show. Today we’ve got a voice recording from Daniel Monici. He’s a head of channel activation at an agency called Imaginarium, and he’s based out of Bogota, Colombia.

So AJ, first of all, thank you very much for being a passionate individual. You not only teach us, but uplift us, with your energy and your attitude and just cheering everyone on in our LinkedIn Ads efforts and I have to say that I really got to know your podcast because of the fanatics community.

And it was funny because if I have found that like two years ago or something like that, I would be a much better LinkedIn Ads marketing today. I want to tell you what I’m doing is just reviewing every single new episode that you put in front of us, but then I’m going down, like every night I listen to 10 or 15 minutes of your podcast. Every time I finish what I do is just go to the previous one and to the previous one and to the previous one. I think I’m on January of this year and I have a lot of episodes to go through, but also thank you very much for the totalness, for the interviewers that you bring to the table, not only from LinkedIn, but I also remember, on this Video Brothers podcast interview that you made and every episode is packed with value and actionable insights.

Hey, Daniel, I’m so grateful for the recording. Thanks for sending that over. So awesome to have you in the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. I love what you share, the questions that you bring and all of the value that you, you offer there. And thanks for being a loyal listener of the podcast.

All right, without further ado, let’s hit it. We’re talking about the new features, the new product releases for LinkedIn that are at least new for 2024. Some may be a little bit of a spillover from the end of 2023, but let’s talk through them.

First off, we have what LinkedIn calls their seamless shutterstock integration. So when you go to build a single image campaign. What if the biggest challenges that we had for a long time was the visual creative? We’d have to talk to the client and say, what imagery do you have rights to, and what do you want to use? Well, now LinkedIn has this partnership with Shutterstock, which is one of the biggest image houses in the world. And you get access to this for free just by being a LinkedIn advertiser. So this is actually pretty cool. I tend to not really like using stock imagery, but it is nice to know that we’ve got access to this and it’s free. Nothing’s stopping you from taking a peek at it.

All right, next are some upgrades to the sponsored messaging ad formats. For the uninitiated here. Sponsored messaging has two different ad formats that fit underneath it. The old one is Message Ads, and the new one is Conversation Ads. And I would say that there’s actually no benefit to still running Message Ads. You can actually do exactly the same thing now over on Conversation Ads. But you get some pluses, some upgrades here, but we’ll touch on that in a minute. The first upgrade here is that LinkedIn just barely released AI generated subject lines. So when you go to actually write a subject line on either a Message Ad or a Conversation Ad, LinkedIn’s going to show you a little star that it’s AI generated, and you can get some ideas for great performing subject lines.

I actually just saw it today for the first time, and it was inside of a conversation ads campaign. If you’ve been using Sponsored Messaging Ads for quite a while, you’ll know that you could only pay on a cost per send basis. And that is still the way that it gets charged, but we didn’t have maximum delivery bidding. We only had a manual cost per send bid. Well, now LinkedIn released maximum delivery bidding for the Sponsored Messaging ad formats. I haven’t used this yet, I do think it’s kind of cool, because sometimes, no matter what, you want to make sure that you capitalize on that audience. If someone is bidding higher than you, you may want to Boost above them and bid to have your message show up in their inbox, because with Sponsored Messaging, when we send one of these out, we monopolize the prospect’s inbox for 21 days.

So you can see why your competitors might want to bid you out so that they get that inbox delivery before you do. So this is kind of cool. If you need to send to an audience at all costs, maximum delivery bidding is probably the right way to go. I’m going to test it out, and I’m sure I’ll have more to share with you later. Now, it used to be that I would suggest Message Ads because Conversation Ads didn’t have the same open rates. And that’s because in a Conversation Ad, you didn’t have that subject line to draw people in. It was just the first words that you started to say in that short conversation, and it was very short. I think you only got something like 200 characters or something to, to ask right up front before you gave them additional options. Well, all of that’s been changed now. Conversation ads actually get a subject line the same way that message ads do. So again, conversation ads are now catching up to everything good about Message Ads, meaning you may not need to run Message Ads anymore.

The other weakness was that Conversation Ads, you had to have at least two calls to action. So it was like a, a choose your own adventure, do this or do that. Well, now you can run Conversation Ads with only a single call to action. Just like Message Ads. So all of a sudden now your Conversation Ads can look exactly like a Message Ad with no way to tell the difference and Conversation Ads have more features. Very cool. I know they’re a little harder to set up, but trust me, we started migrating all of our Message Ads over to Conversation Ads, and we’re actually really happy with it. And the final nail in the coffin to me for Message Ads is that you can’t re-target anyone who either opens or interacts or clicks on a message ad. But now, in 2024, we have this ability. We can re-target anyone who interacts with a Conversation Ad in one of those ways. So next time you think about launching a Message Ad, take it from me, try a Conversation Ad instead.

The next new feature are Live Event Ads. Now, if you listen to episode 129 all about LinkedIn’s B2Believe event, you heard me shout this out. This is one that totally took me by surprise. LinkedIn’s Live Event Ads. Now, it used to be that when we used an event ad, they were very one dimensional. You’re advertising a LinkedIn live before it happens. And then as soon as it happens, your event ads are really useless. But now with these live event ads, we do have to create them from scratch. You can’t use an existing event ads campaign. You have to build it again. But once you’ve built this, you get to use the new format, which plays three roles. Before the event, it’s trying to get people to register for the event. Then when the event starts, and it’s during, it shows like a, hey, come join now. So you’re getting people even still during the event, which is great. Because if you’ve ever run a LinkedIn Live, you may have been disappointed by how few people actually showed up. This is a great way to bolster that. Now that the event is over, it doesn’t mean that your event ads are done. They might just be getting started, because now your event ads can point people towards the replay of the event, and try to get more people to watch on the replay. I think it’s really cool. I don’t use event ads a whole lot just because I don’t use LinkedIn events a whole lot, but if you are, if you do a lot of LinkedIn live streams, I could see this being the perfect ad format for you.

Okay. We did get the ability to sponsor LinkedIn articles. Now I’m not quite sure why anyone would do this. I thought for a little while that this was the way that we could advertise newsletters on LinkedIn and newsletters are great. I love our own LinkedIn newsletter. If you’re not already subscribed to it, go check it out. You just go to my profile, look for the link about the newsletter, and come and subscribe. I’m absolutely in love with it, it’s such a cool feature, and there’s just no downsides to running LinkedIn newsletters. Well, so I figured that these LinkedIn sponsored articles were probably just a way of bolstering your newsletter subscribers, but I actually looked at this today and from an individual newsletter article, I actually couldn’t find the link to subscribe to the whole newsletter. So maybe this is just a temporary glitch. I don’t know. But if sponsoring LinkedIn articles was not created for helping advertise someone’s newletter I’m not quite sure what the value is behind it. I would love to hear from you, anyone using this, anyone really excited about being able to, to boost a LinkedIn article, I’d love to hear the use case.

Now I’m sure lots of you heard about this announcement. I made it right around April 1st. I was the one who actually broke the news that Thought Leader Ads, as of April 1st of 2024, were going to be able to boost the post of a non employee. I was really excited about this. Such a cool use case for if we want to get influencers involved. Or promote posts that maybe one of your, your customers have posted about your company, and you can share a little bit of love there. We’ve been doing a lot with Thought Leader Ads recently. And more than anything, I love them, but I do have to say there are some serious weaknesses in how far back you can go to get posts from individuals on LinkedIn. It totally seems random. Sometimes you look at a profile and you can go back like six months or a year. Sometimes you can’t even get a post that was more than two months old. So, I really hope the LinkedIn product team fixes this, because it’s totally unreliable right now, but I absolutely love Thought Leader Ads. I’m probably going to be using them until the day I die.

Alright, one release that happened recently is Dynamic UTM Parameters. Now, this is something that I’ve asked for for years and years. I was so excited. I told people like, hey, when this feature comes out, I’m This is all I’m going to use. What I found in the way that it released, your dynamic UTMs actually live at the campaign level.

And the way that we do our own UTM parameters, every individual ad gets its own unique tracking code. Now, I love this because this is how we can go to a client And when they have a closed deal happen, we can point to the exact ad that influenced and drove that deal. It’s really powerful, but what that does require is every single ad having its own unique tracking parameter on it. And with LinkedIn’s new dynamic UTMs, it’s really only helpful if you don’t track down to that ad level. If you’re only tracking to like the campaign level, this is great. So for those of you who don’t track every individual ad individually, props to you. You get to use this feature. But unfortunately until there’s a way for us to inject a custom code for every ad, into the dynamic UTMs, we don’t have much of a use for it.

All right, the next feature is also one that totally took me by surprise. All of a sudden, I found out you could associate a lead form in LinkedIn ads with a company page post that you’ve boosted. So we’re talking about a post that you’ve put out organically that was never intended to have a lead form associated with it. But now, and of course this makes sense, we can pair a lead form with it so that as people interact with it, we get to use our Lead Form Ads. I really am a fan of this. I think there’s no downside. Anytime that you have a need to collect information and you want it to have the highest conversion rate possible. Oh, I love LinkedIn lead forms for that. Incredibly high conversion rates makes the job so much easier for the prospect because most of the time they don’t have to fill anything in. There’s very little typing they need to do. Now, I really hope in the future, we’ll be able to get this for font leader ads. So, a, an organic post from a user, and then we can attach a lead form to that. That’s what I’m waiting for, so LinkedIn, I hope this is in the works.

All right, if you’ve been listening since episode 70, all about the cookiepocalypse, what’s happening to cookies and how our ability to track is really being hampered by, you know, now Google’s talking about having Chrome ignore cookies, iOS, you know, all Apple devices have been doing this for some time now. This was a real concern and if you listened to that episode, I was saying, Hey, all these other platforms have a conversions API. LinkedIn, why are you not on this? Well, luckily we have it now. LinkedIn has the conversions API. This is so cool. This is the future of cookie less tracking. In

We’re in the process right now of implementing, conversion tracking through Google Tag Manager. So this is a fully cookie less way of reliably firing conversions and by doing this all of a sudden you see like oh, I’m getting 20 to 30 percent more conversions No, what’s actually happening? You’re getting the same conversions you always had but now you can actually tell Oh, that was LinkedIn that was driving it and give LinkedIn the credit it deserves but there are lots of ways of using the conversions API. You can have a CRM system that’s piping all of your leads, contact information back to LinkedIn and saying, Hey, whatever you did to get this person here, they ended up converting. That’s a great way of making sure that LinkedIn is getting the credit it deserves. Conversions API is very powerful. Please expect an upcoming episode on this as we’re trying it out. We’re coming up with some really cool ideas for you to help you implement it as well.

All right, next release is one that we didn’t make a big deal about, but honestly, every time I get a chance to shout about it and rave, I will. The feature is called Website Actions. Now what this does is it allows us with no code whatsoever to attach. Either a conversion or a retargeting audience builder to a specific button or a specific load of a page. Alright, so we’ve been able to do this with loads of a page before, no big deal. But with website actions, oh my gosh, building conversions off of form fills is so much easier. For years I’ve told our team and our clients, When someone fills out a form, please, please, please, have it redirect to a thank you page, because that is by far the easiest way for us to create a conversion. If someone lands on this thank you page, call it a conversion, because there’s no other way that they could get there.

But we would get pushback from clients all the time, like, Oh, our web developers, they have a little Ajax form submit window thing pop up, where the page doesn’t change, it doesn’t go to a thank you page. Like, okay, if you want to track this with conversion tracking, you have to go and give this tracking code to your developer, and instruct them to fire this little piece of JavaScript whenever this button is pressed. And because I don’t know JavaScript, I can’t actually verify that it’s working well. Or at all.

So website actions actually came from a, an acquisition that LinkedIn made back in February of 2023. It’s a company out of Tel Aviv, Israel called Oribi, O R I B I. Now, when I first heard about this, I was like, Oh, Oribi is a, an analytics provider. It looks like you can create some sort of funnels there. I didn’t quite understand what the play was going to be, but they have something called plug and play or magic events, and that’s what website actions became.

So, LinkedIn, props to you on finding a great acquisition to make, and such a cool technology, because with all of the different ad platforms out there, it’s very rare when LinkedIn is leading the charge and owns technology before others. If you’re advertising on Google and Facebook, you’re still doing this the old way. And with LinkedIn, we have these magic actions built right in, where anytime someone clicks a button that would submit a form, boom, we get to call that a conversion. Or anytime someone clicks a button and we’re like, yeah, we want to retarget every time someone hits that button or visits a certain page. We can do that very easily.

All right, the next feature here, we have Document Ads get some pretty serious upgrades. So we’ve had Document Ads for quite some time, but now we can actually retarget anyone who interacts with a document. And that’s already really impressive on its own. But then LinkedIn recently released the ability to run Document Ads across multiple objectives. The one that most excited me was the ability to run a Document Ad with a website visits objective. Meaning that someone can scroll through and interact any way they want with the document, and I never get charged until someone clicks the button to actually go to the web page.

This is what you want to do if you have a document that is really just supporting an idea of wanting to get someone to a landing page. But the last upgrade that LinkedIn made to these document ads is now we can actually run them on the LinkedIn Audience Network. That’s interesting. I still haven’t seen one on the LinkedIn Audience Network, where I do occasionally see ads there. But I’ll be on the lookout. And if you see one, please send me a screenshot. I’d love to see one in the wild.

This year, we also got the ability to schedule organic posts. I’ve already used this feature lots of times. I think it’s great. I don’t know why LinkedIn was against scheduling to begin with, but I will say, and I get this from Mark Williams, who we’ve had on the podcast before, he said, make sure whenever you are scheduling something, make sure that you are ready to start responding to people when it goes live. So for me, scheduling a post is something that I do just out of convenience, but I always make sure that as soon as people start interacting with the post, I’m ready to start interacting with them. And I would advise you do the same. All right, we also got access to something called Click To Message Ads.

Now, I feel a little sheepish saying this, because I’ve actually been talking about Click To Message Ads for some time. I really have not had a chance to use them yet. There are lots of great reasons, I think, to use them. If you have conversation ads running, and you find them to be a little bit too expensive, or you’d like to save some money on them, Or you need repeat exposure. And when you’re running these conversation ads, you know, you can only reach your audience once every 21 days. If those are limitations to you, definitely check out Click To Message Ads. This is where you get the power of a Conversation Ad, but the ability to have that triggered just through a Single Image Ad in someone’s newsfeed.

So, of course you know, you can have even multiple times per day, a Single Image Ad show up in someone’s newsfeed, and then when they interact with it, that’s when it sends them a message, and they get to interact with you through their messaging box. If you’ve used these and if you’ve had success with them, please reach out to me either personally on LinkedIn or on podcast@b2linked.com, our email address. I would love to hear about your experiences to see if I should be rushing to try these out or not.

Alright, before you hit skip to the next episode, I’ve got some important information for you. Come and join the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. This is where you get access for a very low cost to all of our four courses that take you from beginner to expert. Plus you get access to all of the great minds of LinkedIn Ads that are all firing back and forth about what’s working for them and getting each other’s ideas. It’s the best place for mindshare. Access this by going to fanatics.b2linked.com. And next time I launch a community, maybe I’m going to choose a word that’s a little easier to spell than fanatics, but it’s F A N A T I C S. b2linked. com. If this is your first time listening, welcome. We’re excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. We’d love to have you back here again next week. But if this is not your first time listening, if you’re a loyal listener, please do tell your friends about the show, because that’s what we need. We need all of our LinkedIn Ads experts, all understanding the best things to do on the platform and the best ways to get the best performance for everyone. But I would also ask, if you’ve been getting value out of the show, the biggest favor that you could pay me is to go and review the podcast. Specifically on Apple podcasts. That’s the best place to go and leave a review. So other LinkedIn ads fanatics can find us and hear about the show. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, even reach out to us at podcast@B2Linked.com. Links to more information about all of the product releases you’ll find right down there in the show notes below. So check those all out below if you want more information on any of the releases. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. I’m cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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