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Organic Content Posting through RSS Feed

Great example of an engaging document for LinkedIn

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Show Notes: Episode Summary

In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox dives deep into the world of LinkedIn document ads, exploring why they’ve become one of his top recommended ad formats and sharing expert tips on how to make the most out of them. AJ also covers the latest LinkedIn updates and offers practical advice for getting the best performance at the lowest costs.

Key Discussion Points:

1. Introduction to Document Ads:
   • AJ explains why document ads have become one of his favorite formats, highlighting their ability to generate high engagement and deliver strong results when used effectively.
2. Lessons Learned from Initial Tests:
   • AJ shares his early experience with document ads and why he initially dismissed them due to poor performance. He revisits his approach and explains what he missed, leading to a renewed appreciation for the format.
3. Best Practices for Document Ad Creation:
   • Focus on designing documents with minimal text and high-impact visuals to attract attention on mobile devices.
   • Use bright colors and large fonts to make each slide engaging and encourage viewers to keep scrolling.
4. Objective-Based Performance Analysis:
   • AJ breaks down the three objectives available for document ads—Engagement, Website Visits, and Lead Generation—offering insights into when and how to use each for optimal results.
   • Engagement Objective: High click-through rates but potentially higher costs due to paying for all types of engagement clicks.
   • Website Visits Objective: Best for driving traffic, with lower overall costs and free engagement clicks.
   • Lead Generation Objective: Can be effective for gated content but may incur unexpected costs for interactions like “See More” clicks.
5. Testing and Metrics:
   • AJ shares results from various A/B tests comparing objectives, revealing that website visits often yield the best cost per lead and overall performance.
   • Metrics to track: Cost per 25%, 50%, 75% view, and cost per completion to evaluate document engagement.
   • The importance of exporting data to Excel for more detailed analysis and comparisons.
6. LinkedIn Updates:
   • Content ingestion via RSS feeds for LinkedIn company pages, allowing for faster and easier organic content posting.
   • AI-generated ad copy suggestions for single image ads, now available to over 50% of ad accounts.
   • New ability to send test leads directly from the lead gen form in Campaign Manager, streamlining the testing process.
7. AJ’s Pro Tips:
   • Use square designs for document ads to maximize visibility across different ad formats.
   • Include arrows or prompts in the design to encourage users to scroll through the document.
   • Choose the objective that aligns best with your campaign goals, rather than defaulting to LinkedIn’s suggestions.

    Call to Action: Listeners are encouraged to join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community to access in-depth courses, expert advice, and weekly group calls with AJ. Subscribe to the podcast for more LinkedIn Ads insights, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or send in an audio review for a chance to be featured.

Review and Connect: AJ welcomes questions, suggestions, and feedback via email at podcast@b2linked.com or through LinkedIn DMs. He looks forward to featuring listener reviews and advice in future episodes.

Listeners interested in learning how to harness the power of document ads on LinkedIn and get insider tips on achieving the best ad performance for your campaigns.

Show Transcript

I didn’t go to medical school, but I do find myself spending a lot of time with docs recently. We’re talking about document ads on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I’m AJ Wilcox. I’m the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show. I’m thrilled to welcome you to, if I don’t say so myself, the show for advanced B2B marketers, who want to evolve and master LinkedIn ads, and achieve true pro status. By the time you listen to this, the 2024 Summer Olympics are over, and I hope if you’ve been watching it, you’ve all thoroughly enjoyed it. My family has been loving it, and I personally discovered rugby. I was so entertained and so thoroughly confused, like, I come from the background of watching American football. Of course, every down, every play, they all line up, and over time you can kind of catch on what’s actually happening. But, not with rugby. I couldn’t ever predict what was gonna happen. But it was so fast paced and I loved watching it, even if I had no idea what was happening.

So many of you have asked me recently what my favorite ad formats are, or what’s working best on the platform. And I’ve shared with many of you that document ads are some of my top recommended right now. I’m going to talk about why that is and share my secrets for how to get the lowest costs and the very best performance from document ads.

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 build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You’ll get to work directly with me, plus my local team. You won’t get a cookie cutter approach, or a standard account template from us. Plus, with the strategies that we’ve developed, and our mastery of the platform, we save our clients way more than we charge, so it’s kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you’d like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads management, schedule your free discovery call at b2linked.com/discovery.

First off in the news, there was an announcement that it’s actually more applicable to organic LinkedIn, but I actually thought it was really cool. So I wanted to share it with you. LinkedIn’s calling it content ingestion via RSS feed. And what it does, you can hook the RSS feed from your, website, let’s say your blog into your LinkedIn company page. And then every time you publish something on the blog, it lets your LinkedIn company page know, and then company page admins can get a notification. And it apparently makes it really easy to immediately create a post about that same content.

You’ll see a link down in the show notes for more about the announcement. I think it’s a really cool concept, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, just because I don’t have access. But I love the idea of hooking up an RSS feed, which is pretty standard with most blogs. And I’m really excited to see how customizable these posts are when they make it into LinkedIn. If this could be a great way of speeding up organic content creation.

LinkedIn’s also in the process of ramping out AI generated ad copy suggestions. It’s currently only for single image ad copy, but the way it works is that LinkedIn’s going to make recommendations for both your intro text, and the headline fields during your campaign creation workflow. It’ll suggest up to five options per text field. And of course you can edit them. You don’t have to take what it gives you, but you can also provide feedback on the suggestions before creating. And you’re kind of training the model about what works best for you.

As of the time of recording, this is currently ramped up to more than 50 percent of all ad accounts. So chances are, if you go in to create a single image ad, you’ll probably see this. But if you don’t, no worries, you’ll have it really soon.

I think this is a really cool concept. I would love to hear if any of you LinkedIn Ads fanatics out there are using the suggestions, and if they’re good.

Something that’s really bugged me about lead gen forms in the past, is that when we set one up, the client obviously needs to go into their CRM and check and make sure that the leads are flowing properly. That requires sending a test lead. Test leads have been a huge pain in the past. That’s because when you create the new lead gen form, you can’t test it until you create an ad that’s attached to that form. So usually that means that we end up creating a dummy ad, one that is not meant to ever run. And you can create this in a dummy campaign, or actually in the campaign you want to run, just realizing that this is now going to be a waste of space. It’s a dummy ad that’s just taking up room, and it’s kind of a waste of time.

Well, thank goodness, now we can send test leads right from the lead gen form itself. Inside of Campaign Manager, if you go to Assets, then Lead Gen Forms, go pick your new form, and hit the little three dots menu right next to it, and there will be an option there to just send test lead. It’ll ask you all of the fields for this form, and you can fill it in with exactly what you want there to be, and then just hit send. A big thanks to Anthony Blattner, one of our super fanatics in our fanatics community for spotting this new way to send test leads and letting me know about it. So thank you, Anthony.

Now, do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? You can either message me on LinkedIn privately because my DMS are open and they’re free. Or you can email us at podc@b2linked.comast. Bonus points if you attach a voice recording from you, and that way I can play it right here on the show. I’m happy to keep you anonymous, or shout out your details, but I would love to feature you right here.

Alright, let’s hit it. Now, I’ve got my tail between my legs a little bit on this one. Because LinkedIn released document ads back in October of 2022. And I first tried them right after they came out of beta, and performance was terrible. I considered it a failure of an ad format launch, and as it turns out, I was the failure, they actually perform great.

When I first got to try out the ad format, I tested specifically with gated content on single image ads versus document ads, and I wanted to know which one performed better. The single image ads were talking up the gated content about how good it was going to be, and then presented them with a lead gen form so they could download the content.

The document ads were using the same lead form, and I set the lead form to pop up after someone had gotten to view, like, three pages of the guide. So they were past the title page and well into the content before we popped up that box that says, Hey, if you want to read more, then you got to fill out the form. The result for me in my first test is that single image ads actually had a lower cost per lead. And because single image ads are so easy to build, why would I go through the extra trouble of creating a document ad just to get worse performance? So it was settled. I didn’t recommend document ads until, well, about six months ago. I noticed that there were a lot of documents in my organic newsfeed. They were going viral, they had tons of engagement. And I started to think again, like, there’s something I missed. If they’re performing so well organically, Then, wouldn’t they also perform well as an ad? And of course, there was something I missed. There was a big difference between the documents that I saw that were so engaging on the platform, and the type of documents that I tested when I first tried document ads. All the high performing organic documents I saw had one thing in common. They weren’t a wall of text. Let me explain. 80 percent or more of LinkedIn users are going to be scrolling through the news feed on their mobile device. So, your content window is already small. But then, when one of your ebooks is inserted into that already small window, it looks like a giant, insurmountable wall of text. When there’s a ton of text, there’s nothing that draws you in and makes you hungry to flip to the next slide. And I know that until someone knows that they’re actually going to get value out of the document, they’re not going to click to view it larger on their screen. They’re just going to keep scrolling.

So these high performing documents that I’d seen, they weren’t full of text. They had one major point on each page with bright colors and large fonts. There’s no fine print. It’s just quick hits of interesting value on each slide. And it’ll make you want to keep scrolling.

If you stick around to the end, I’m going to share my secrets for how to create really engaging document posts that turn into ads. Plus, I’ll share with you the metrics that let me evaluate the performance in the very best way possible.

So, when you go to run one of these document ads, you first have to choose an objective. And there were three objectives that I’ve tested. There’s engagement, there’s website visits, and there’s lead generation.

If you go with engagement, you might be shocked to see huge engagement rates, like 8 to 12 percent on average click through rates. And that turns into like a $1 to $3 cost per click. And that looks and sounds amazing. But realize that when you’re in the engagement objective, you pay that $1 to $3 cost per click for every kind of click. And boy! When you realize that 8 12 percent of people who see this end up at least flipping to the next slide, you’ll realize that these costs really add up. I suggest using the engagement objective only if your goal is to actually get people to consume the asset and not go anywhere else.

Alright, so then you have website visits as an objective. Now, this came later for document ads. We couldn’t actually run document ads in website visits objective until quite a bit later. But I love them. Your engagement looks tiny, but the results actually turn out way better in most cases that I’ve evaluated. So if your document is what I call a decoration asset, meaning that it’s meant to get attention, but the goal is actually to send them somewhere else, then this is by far the best objective to use. Because website visits will only calculate your cost per click and your click through rate based off of people clicking to go to your website. What it means is you end up getting a ton of other engagements for free. That means every time someone hits a like, or comment, or the dreaded see more, or visit your company, all of those clicks you didn’t have to pay for. You might find that you have to bid a little bit higher, more like 10 to 15 per click. But because I found that I’m getting all of these other engagements for free, and we’re still getting the engagements. When you track all the way down to a cost per landing page visit, and a cost per lead, all of a sudden these metrics start to look really good for website visits.

Alright, what about lead generation? The thing I absolutely hate about lead generation, and I didn’t realize this until a few months ago. Someone brought it up in the fanatics community. That with lead generation, you do have to pay any time someone clicks the See More. Which I absolutely hate. Any interaction that happens with the social pill, as LinkedIn calls it, like likes, comments, shares, all of that you get for free, but if your ad copy goes longer than that, about 160 characters in the intro, and someone wants to click to read more of your ad, you pay your click cost every time someone hits that. I’m really disappointed to learn that this is the way that LinkedIn is charging.

What you can do with lead generation, though, is you can show a document that is really engaging, the most engaging form of the e book, with big stats and big takeaways. And then, when they fill out the form, you could actually send them the full document. You can also gate the content, so after someone has had a little taste of the document, you can pop it up and say, Hey, fill out the form. But I haven’t seen this to be any more effective than just describing the content asset as a single image ad of like, here’s what you’re going to learn. Here’s what you’re going to get out of it. And then getting the conversion right there through the lead form. So most of the time I let people view all the way to the end of the document before popping up the lead form. If you do this, this does mean that you have to add an extra dummy page onto the back of your content because LinkedIn always makes the last page, the same crappy, uncustomizable page of like. Now you need to fill out the lead form to read the rest.

Now I’m going to guide you to create a document that’s going to be really, really engaging. Step one, go through your actual document and find the top stats or interesting tidbits. If it’s like an eight page guide, You might find one interesting stat or takeaway from each page, and now you have like, oh, here’s eight stats that I could put one per page. You’ll want to create it as a PDF, but think of it like a short, punchy PowerPoint presentation. I highly recommend designing it square, because square tends to perform the best across all the different ad formats, and in the process, and in your design, it doesn’t hurt to include an arrow pointing to the next page as part of your design. That way, you’re prompting people to go to the next slide, even if they don’t notice that LinkedIn is telling them like, hey, you can scroll over on this.

Don’t try to stay on brand here. Remember, you want the text to stand out as much as possible and pull people in. So use lots of bright colors. Oranges, reds, greens, purples. Those are the very best to get people’s attention on a platform that’s very much like blues, grays, and whites.

When testing document ads recently, I ran three different A B tests across objectives to see if I could understand what is working better and what’s not. The first one I did was comparing engagement versus website visits. And I was really disappointed because when I evaluated this, I looked at the difference in click through rates and I saw my website visits campaign had a .13 percent click through rate. But my engagement campaign had like a 6 percent click through rate. So immediately I was like, okay, I know what’s going to win here. Engagement really is going to work better.

But then I did the full analysis, looking at all of the different metrics, and I found that if I actually tracked my click through rate, meaning a click to the landing page, I had an astronomically high cost per landing page click, compared to my website visits, which was just my cost per click. Website visits was charging me $13 a click to the landing page, but when I calculated my engagement one, it was $104 per landing page visit. What that tells me is I was paying for a lot of people to click see more or click to the next slide. I also tracked cost per 25 percent view, cost per 50 percent view, cost per 75 percent view, and cost per completion, and in all cases, website visits won.

Cost per 25 percent view was $4.30 for website visits. But it was almost $12 for engagement. This got a lot worse if you track all the way to a 75 percent view. I paid $17 with website visits for a 75 percent view of the document, but engagement was charging me $277.

Another test I ran, I actually started as website visits, but I went back after the fact and calculated what would I have paid if this were in the engagement ad format. But then I went back afterwards and calculated what my costs would be like if I would have used the engagement objective. I had a .11 percent landing page click through rate, which sounds awful, and of course, we had to bid a little bit higher, so I was paying like $17 for a landing page click. But if I calculated it based off of an engagement rate. LinkedIn would have showed me that this ad had a 5.1 percent engagement rate. With website visits, I calculated that I actually ended up paying 36 cents per engagement. But if you were bidding by the click in the engagement objective, you probably wouldn’t be able to get much if you’re bidding less than about a dollar, so doing all that math with the website visits objective I ended up paying $17 per website visit, but with engagement, assuming like a $1 cost per click which would even be low for that I would have ended up paying about $48 per landing page visit.

Then for a different client, we actually lined up and tested all three objectives back to back. Website visits, engagement, and lead generation.

Website visits had the lowest cost per lead because this was a gated content asset, and it also had a lower cost per 25%, per 50%, and per 75%. And website visits also had a lower cost per 50%, view cost per 75% view, and cost per completion, and it wasn’t even close. It was half the cost for each of those as it was for engagement and lead generation turned out to be much, much more expensive than that.

So I’ll share the evaluation metrics with you that I create in order to compare all of these tests, apples to apples, in case you want to do it on your own. It’s really easy to calculate a cost per test. Any kind of view. Cost per 25 percent view is your costs, divided by the number of 25 percent views. And also realize that if your document is 4 pages or fewer, just by having an impression, you’ll see that LinkedIn counts that as a 25 percent view. You’ll only want to calculate a cost per 25 percent view if your document has, five or more slides. , So I like to evaluate on a cost per 25 percent view, cost per 50, cost per 75 percent, and cost per completion. I also really like to compare my cost per landing page click. And I should mention that you do need to export your data out to Excel in order to do these calculations because LinkedIn doesn’t have these baked right into the campaign manager. At least not yet. I hope someday LinkedIn lets us do custom metrics, custom calculated columns, but for right now, I do all this in Excel.

For the cost per landing page click, it’s obviously costs divided by, and I have two things here in parentheses. I have landing page clicks, and I also add lead form opens. The reason why is because if you’re evaluating lead gen form ads, when someone clicks, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to see the lead form. Because like we’ve talked about, a lot of the clicks go to see more if your ad copy is longer than like 160 characters so if I add my landing page clicks, plus my lead form openers, that’s going to give me the number of people who made it to somewhere that I wanted so that they could have an opportunity to convert. So again, that’s cost divided by, these are added together, your landing page clicks and your lead form opens. Sorry, it’s really hard to express like mathematical formulas over audio.

I’ll mention that if you’re using the other objectives, it’s also really important to calculate your engagement rate the same way that LinkedIn’s engagement objective would, so that you can see like when I was showing a client, here’s one campaign that has an 8 percent click through rate, and another with .11 percent, of course they were going to say, oh, yep, we know it’s going to win as well. But if you calculate it the same way that they do, which is, all engagements divided by your impressions. Now, all of a sudden, all three of these tests, your engagement versus website visit versus lead forms, you’re all going to be comparing apples to apples. So if you’ve been listening to me for a while, this advice will probably feel very familiar, but please don’t use the objective that LinkedIn suggests just because it has the right name. Use the objective that gets you the lowest costs and the best performance.

If you’re not already a member of our LinkedIn ads fanatics community, you have to go check it out. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com, and for a very low subscription fee, you’ll get access to all four of our courses that take you from LinkedIn Ads beginner to LinkedIn Ads pro. Plus you’ll get access to all of the top minds in LinkedIn Ads. We’re all sharing what’s working for us and what to avoid. It’s all but guaranteed to ensure that your ad performance gets better over time. Plus there’s an upgraded option in there to become a super fanatic that gets you on a weekly group call with me and the other superfanatics. So check that out, again, that’s fanatics.b2linked.com. If this is your first time listening, we welcome you. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure to hit that subscribe button, so you can hear us talking really geeky about LinkedIn ads next week as well. If this is not your first time listening, let’s say you’re a loyal listener, please do me the giant favor of going to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a review. Or like I said at the top of the show, record yourself leaving us a review as an audio file, and I’d love to even play it right here on the show. With any questions, suggestions, or, sometimes I need it, corrections, reach out to us at podcast at b2linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week, and as always, I’m cheering you on in all of your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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