Show Resources:

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Chandler Quintin’s episode on how to get incredible LinkedIn video ad performance

How LinkedIn defends against bot traffic on the LinkedIn Audience Network

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert

Follow AJ on LinkedIn

B2Linked’s YouTube Channel

LinkedIn Learning Course

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

Show Notes: Episode Summary:

This episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, hosted by AJ Wilcox, delves into the ongoing debate among B2B marketers about whether LinkedIn Ads is truly a Tier 1 advertising platform. AJ discusses the platform’s strengths and areas needing improvement to solidify LinkedIn’s place among the top advertising platforms like Google and Meta.

Key Discussion Points:

1. Platform Tier Classification:
   • AJ defines Tier 1 platforms as essential tools that B2B marketers must master, such as Google and Meta, due to their comprehensive features and widespread use.
   • LinkedIn is currently on the cusp between Tier 1 and Tier 2, with many key features missing or needing enhancement to reach true Tier 1 status.
2. Platform Generosity:
   • AJ introduces the concept of “platform generosity,” explaining that early-stage platforms like Google and Facebook succeeded by offering low costs and high value, attracting widespread use.
   • LinkedIn, in contrast, started with higher costs and lacked the generous features that help new advertisers achieve success, which could hinder its growth and perception as a top-tier platform.
3. Feature Wishlist for LinkedIn Ads:
   • Device Targeting: The ability to target ads based on the device type (mobile vs. desktop) is crucial for optimizing campaigns but is currently missing.
   • Time Zone Flexibility: AJ argues for the ability to change campaign time zones and schedule ads according to the user’s local time, improving budget efficiency and targeting accuracy.
   • Hourly Reporting and Scheduling: LinkedIn should provide more granular hourly reporting and allow for ad scheduling based on when the audience is most active, enhancing campaign effectiveness.
   • Daily Budget Control: LinkedIn often overspends on daily budgets, particularly with maximum delivery bidding, which feels like a “cash grab.” More precise control is needed to avoid overspending.
   • Improved Audience Matching: Enhancements like targeting by LinkedIn profile URLs could significantly improve the match rates for uploaded contact lists.
   • Custom Calculated Columns: AJ suggests allowing advertisers to create custom calculated metrics within Campaign Manager, eliminating the need for manual calculations in Excel.
   • Ad Type Transparency: LinkedIn should make it easier to identify the ad type within exported reports, helping advertisers better analyze campaign performance.
   • Expanded Objectives for Thought Leader Ads: AJ advocates for adding more objectives to Thought Leader Ads, including website visits and lead generation, to increase their utility.
   • Simplified Duplication and Management of Conversation Ads: The current process for creating and duplicating Conversation Ads is cumbersome; LinkedIn could streamline this to make it more user-friendly.
4. Additional Feedback and Community Suggestions:
   • AJ shares feedback from the LinkedIn Ads community, including suggestions for better dynamic UTM tracking, a more user-friendly Campaign Manager interface, and dark mode compatibility.

Conclusion:

This episode provides a comprehensive evaluation of LinkedIn Ads, highlighting both its potential and the areas where it falls short. For LinkedIn Ads to move firmly into Tier 1 status, it must address these shortcomings, offering advertisers more control, transparency, and tools to optimize their campaigns effectively.

By implementing the suggested features and improvements, LinkedIn could significantly enhance its value proposition, attracting more advertisers and solidifying its place as a critical platform for B2B marketers.

Show Transcript

Is LinkedIn Ads a Tier 2 or a Tier 1 platform? We’re discussing the changes that would make it undeniably a Tier 1 platform 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 the show for advanced B2B marketers. who are looking to evolve their craft and master LinkedIn ads, and of course, achieve true pro status.

I’m coming off of a week trip to LinkedIn’s Carpinteria campus. It’s near Santa Barbara, California, where I’ve been recording content.

I had great food and a lot of fun. I’m excited when I’ll be able to share what we shot.

Many of you may not know this about me, but I’m a huge fan of root beer. I want to try every type of root beer out there. One thing that got me really excited is I went to a store and I found two types of root beer that had been discontinued and I didn’t think I’d ever get to try them.

I brought 14 bottles home in my suitcase. It was heavy, and I was scared and praying the whole time that they didn’t break. I’m very excited to get them home to my collection.

Alright, so on to the topic at hand. I talk to members of LinkedIn’s product team quite regularly. And they have a question that they like to ask. If you could wave a magic wand and fix or change anything on the platform, what would it be?

I’ve hopped on countless calls to give voice of the customer feedback. on many of the things that me and my magic wand would get right to being busy fixing.

I asked members of our LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, and I put my own list together in hopes that this episode actually becomes a resource for LinkedIn’s product team. I want them to understand what their advertisers want and what they should end up prioritizing in their roadmap.

So a question for you, is LinkedIn a tier one platform or tier two? I’ve had some discussions recently with other advertisers about this question. I’ve been in the game long enough that I remember when LinkedIn was a solid Tier 3 platform.

So, let me define these tiers a little bit, because this is totally made up by me.

Tier 1 to me would be a platform that you absolutely need to learn to be proficient in your job. And I’m thinking specifically for B2B marketers, because obviously there’s no reason to learn LinkedIn Ads if you are a D2C, or an e commerce marketer. But for business to business, I think LinkedIn has a solid chance at being a Tier 1 platform.

Tier 1 platforms are those that have the features that you’d expect from one of the top platforms in the world. Google and Meta are both squarely Tier 1 platforms. I’m assuming no one here is going to argue with that.

Then we move down to tier two platforms. They might actually be useful, but they’re not crucial enough to be necessary to the majority of advertisers.

I’d put Twitter, X ads, Microsoft ads, and even TikTok in this category. They’re good platforms, but with limited usefulness and appeal, especially compared to alternatives that you could use that might be more accessible. Then you’ve got Tier 3 platforms that you probably only would consider if you have a very specific use, or maybe you’ve already maxed out and taken advantage of every other Tier 1 and Tier 2 channel, and you might just consider running a pilot test.

I’d put Quora ads in this camp, not that they’re bad, just kind of limited in usefulness. It’s also divisive, but I’d also put programmatic advertising in this category too. You can easily get by without them, it’s difficult to get past the learning curve, and, but, when you reach a certain scale, they do become really useful, so, not crapping on on programmatic, just, putting it in its order here.

It’s been really exciting to see how quickly LinkedIn’s product team is developing the platform. We’re seeing new features added often enough that I have a hard time keeping up, which I think is a great sign, considering I spend my entire life on LinkedIn ads, but there are many features that LinkedIn still lacks.

And if it could fix, I truly believe that LinkedIn would be cemented as a solid tier one platform.

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 ever since 2014. You know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You also get to work directly with me and my local team. You’re not going to get a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us. Plus, we’ve mastered the platform. We’ve developed the strategies that save our clients way more than we ever 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, schedule your free discovery call at b2linked.com/discovery.

So first off in the news, LinkedIn’s engineering blog has a new post from the product team, and it’s called, How LinkedIn Audience Network Protects Advertisers from Invalid Traffic. I’ve linked to it down in the show notes below if you want to check it out and get really geeky. But basically, they dissect the whole process that LinkedIn Audience Network traffic goes through before you actually get charged for it.

I won’t claim to be smart enough to actually understand this article, but in a quick run through, it sounds really good. I continue to test land traffic. I’m trying to figure out when it’s useful, when it could help.

If you go check out the article, I would love it if you’d send me a message on LinkedIn, let me know what you thought, if you have any ideas, or if it teaches you anything.

Also Chandler Quinton, who was episode 122, I interviewed him about how to get incredible video ad performance on LinkedIn. He tagged me in a post that he saw. This was the beginning of pre roll video. So, he found this post from the Wall Street Journal. It had a video that I think was like three minutes long, and he noticed that there was a pre roll ad, which we’ve talked about a little bit before in the news section here, talking about what was gonna come, and trying to understand what it was gonna be like.

He messaged me and said, oof, I just saw it, it’s real. There was a pre roll video on this video. The advertiser was the U. S. Postal Service, and it was skippable after a few seconds.

So there we go. Chandler has seen pre roll video in the wild. I’m really excited to come across this. I would imagine that this is going to be really good for us as advertisers, especially if we use video ads a lot. But I’m waiting to see, I want to get some experience using it.

I want to give a shout out to Jacob Juan Carlos Lundy. He gave me a review that I could share for the podcast. And so here we go. He said, "I was part of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community back in the spring, and I had switched jobs. The new team was hesitant at first about getting me a subscription. But after I received our 150th lead, with a 67 percent decrease in cost per lead, by implementing the things I learned from AJ in the past, they were sold on me joining the LinkedIn Ads fanatics group."

Jacob’s a growth marketing manager. He’s been advanced certified by us, which is something you can do in the advanced tier of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community.

Jacob, thanks so much for sharing such an awesome review. I hope you all go out and check out the LinkedIn Ads fanatics group. We have absolute gold happening there. You can check it out by going to fanatics.2linked.com, or if you can’t spell fanatics, just go down into the show notes.

So do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? Message me on LinkedIn. My dms are free and open. Or you could email us here at podcast@b2linked.com. Feel free to attach a link to a voice recording from you, and I would love to actually play you right here on the show.

And let me know if you want me to keep you anonymous or shout out your details. I want to feature you. All right, without further ado, let’s hit it.

I want to talk about a concept that I call platform generosity. I have a lot of thoughts here. I quote unquote grew up in the world of Google ads and then later in Facebook ads. And I got to watch something really interesting happen. Both of these were very generous platforms, especially when starting. When Google ads first started back when it was AdWords, they set a minimum bid floor of 5 cents per click.

Now the platform wasn’t amazing in and of itself. Usage and volume weren’t really there. It was growing as a platform. But, because they set the pricing so low, you couldn’t help but have success running Google Ads.

And what ended up happening is, if you were a business owner or a marketer, you would go out and tell all your friends, Hey, I’m killing it on Google, you gotta come try AdWords. Then people would go and speak at events and conferences about how using Google AdWords was the secret weapon. And that word of mouth, that grassroots growth, just took over. Now, Google Ads is quite expensive, depending on which keywords you go after, but it’s routine when I see costs per click that are $20, $30, $50.

But you know how Google AdWords got there? It got there by charging a very small amount, letting competition naturally come in, and naturally drive up the pricing. I remember early days of Facebook, where I could get clicks for a third of a cent.

Of course, the platform was hot garbage back then, it’s gotten a lot better, thank goodness. I squarely call MetaAds a Tier 1 platform. It’s really pushed the envelope.

Back then, it was not great. But, because the traffic was so cheap, again, you couldn’t help but get good performance from it.

These platforms ranked really high on platform generosity, and they only got expensive when they had to be expensive, because there was tons of competition. Everyone wanted to use them, and that’s when prices came up.

Compare that to LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn Ads started with a floor of $2 per click. So while I could get clicks for a third of a cent on Facebook, LinkedIn was always charging me at least $2. It’s always been expensive, and that hasn’t changed.

You’d think if you were a platform that charged a lot of money, you’d want to really give your advertisers great reasons to stick around. Lots of generosity, lots of help, lots of cool perks. LinkedIn at the time, none of that. The platform was a dumpster fire. They didn’t listen to advertisers. They didn’t have people, at least in mass internally, who’d ever advertise the day in their life. And so right from the beginning, LinkedIn has scored really poorly on platform generosity. But this has continued over and over, especially when you look at the defaults in campaigns.

When you go to set up your first campaign, you have several boxes that are ticked that are not in your favor. They’re going to ruin your performance right out of the gate, and yet LinkedIn is okay with these things being set as defaults. And having new advertisers who don’t know what they’re doing, Leaving those on and messing up their results.

So the biggest takeaway that I want you to have from this is LinkedIn should consider being a generous platform, scoring very high on platform generosity and trying to give advertisers as many benefits as possible. So even though costs are higher, we still get thrown a bone every so often.

Let’s jump into what features would make LinkedIn ads solidly a tier one platform. And I’ll tell you, these are in no certain order. They’re not prioritized in any way. I kind of keep my own notes on if these are like a priority one, priority two, or priority three. So LinkedIn product team, feel free to reach out and I will happily give you this list, but here we go.

The first feature is one that is just kind of embarrassing that it’s not here. It’s the ability to target by device. In the last year or so, LinkedIn gave us the ability to break down performance by device, which is great. But obviously, if we can’t actually target by device, there’s nothing useful there. There’s nothing actionable. Honestly, it’s really easy for the ad platform to know what device someone is using. That’s not a technological hurdle that you have to get over. Honestly, I don’t understand why targeting by device, at least the ability to say whether it’s desktop or mobile, why this doesn’t exist yet, it’s embarrassingly still not there.

Another one that I think is really important is the ability to change your time zone. So LinkedIn runs entirely off of the UTC time zone, which would make a lot of sense if LinkedIn were a London company, but it’s not. It’s based in San Francisco.

So that means the vast majority of advertisers all over the globe LinkedIn’s new day starts at a different time than their day. For me, I’m in the mountain time zone. So, depending on what time of year, it’s either like 6pm or 7pm when LinkedIn’s new day starts. And you can imagine, if you have a small budget on a campaign, let’s say something like $10 or $20 a day, The chances of being able to spend that $10 or $20 from 7pm all the way until, let’s say, 7am the next morning are really high. And there’s no way around it. You are just going to get traffic in the middle of the night, the people who can’t sleep. And it’s not going to be the best traffic you’ve ever gotten.

Not only do I want to report on the traffic by the client’s time zone, that way all of the traffic actually matches up with their analytics platforms. But I also want the new day to start at midnight in their time zone, not UTC. We’ll end up losing a lot less budget that way.

Now that goes hand in hand with my next ask, which is scheduling. So again, every other platform on the planet has scheduling. It’s an absolute mystery why LinkedIn hasn’t done this yet, but the ability to say I only want my ads to show during these times. This would be especially powerful on LinkedIn, because every other platform, usage probably stays pretty constant all the way through the day, but LinkedIn has very defined usage pattern. People, you can see very specifically, when people start to come into the office in the morning, you can see a lull when they leave, you can see a little spike at the end of the day after they’ve put kids down to bed or had dinner, it’s pretty intense. So because of those specific usage patterns, scheduling would be super powerful on LinkedIn. Again, pretty embarrassing that it doesn’t exist yet. I don’t know why it doesn’t exist. There are plenty of third parties who’ve now built software to enable you to do it. But honestly, this needs to be something that LinkedIn has internally. And this coming from someone who has built a scheduling tool.

Now with scheduling, there is a benefit that LinkedIn can provide that no one else could, no third party, and that is the ability to schedule in your prospects times out. So the way this would work, if I’m targeting North America, I have four major time zones happening here. So if I schedule my ads to start, let’s say, 7am, when prospects in New York and on the East Coast wake up, they start clicking through the ads, I start seeing their traffic, but in California, it’s 3am, and we’re not getting any of them. Imagine if LinkedIn had a scheduling tool where if you said, I want it to be 7am, they would schedule those ads only at 7am in Eastern Time, and then as soon as it hit that time in Central, it would also turn on, and all the way through the day. I’m not aware of any other platform out there that has this. If LinkedIn released this, this would be definitely Tier 1 platform status.

On the same line of thinking here, It doesn’t make sense to schedule your ads and your campaigns when you don’t know what’s actually happening within those hours of the day. So what I would love to see from LinkedIn, and this is something I’ve asked for before, I want to see hourly reporting. Right now we can break down performance down to the individual day, but we know there are certain hours of the day and certain days of the week that perform better than others. We would need to actually have reporting by hour so we could measure that.

All right, different topic here. LinkedIn has a problem staying within your daily budget. It didn’t used to be such a problem, but LinkedIn have over time given themselves more and more allowance to overspend your budget. And we routinely see if you’re bidding by maximum delivery, LinkedIn will just routinely every day overspend your budget by 50%. Help documents say that it’s supposed to underspend on other days to try to even it out, but I don’t know if you’ve seen it. I have not seen it. It just seems to overspend every single day.

Not only does it make it feel like the platform is not being generous, it feels grabby like it’s trying to grab money out of your pocket that you don’t want to let go of, but it also makes the platform look like it’s not smart enough. Now, I definitely get it if you’re 5 away from hitting your daily budget and you have an 8 bid. Sure, overspending by a click would totally make sense. And then you could always underspend by that much the next day to even it out. Makes a lot of sense. But here’s what I don’t get, when you’re bidding CPM, and this is with maximum delivery, that’s how most are bidding CPM, you are paying by every 1, 000 impressions. That means every 1, 000 impressions that LinkedIn decides to serve, it knows how much it’s going to charge you for each of those. How hard would it be for LinkedIn to actually stop serving ads the second you served an impression that pushed you over your daily budget? It would not be hard. You would have a thousand chances to not overspend that budget. And of course, LinkedIn controls when it serves an impression. So it’s not like it’s a, there’s so many out there. You never know how many clicks are going to come in. If there’s multiple people seeing an impression, no LinkedIn knows every single time it serves an impression. So I feel like there’s no excuse for overspending a CPM bid. It just feels like a cash grab. It’s just one more thing that’s telling me that LinkedIn does not score high on generosity of a platform.

Separately, have you ever uploaded a contact list and looked at your measly, like, 20 percent match rate? And then unlike a company list, if you click into it, it won’t give you any sort of feedback that would help you actually up that match rate.

This is really problematic, especially because when we upload lists of emails as a contact list, that should let us narrow down on the exact person that matches. But the vast majority of users are logging in with their Gmail, their free email, but then they’re going to sign up for your white paper or whatever on their business email address. So LinkedIn has a huge match rate issue. If what you’re relying on is an email address. But, what if that contact list had a field for someone’s public profile URL?

We have this with company upload lists. We have a field where you can put in a company page URL from LinkedIn and those match, no surprise, at 100 percent match rate. So a contact list, if we had a field and we could upload LinkedIn’s profile URLs, that would again give us 100 percent match rate. We wouldn’t have to worry about the email matching problem.

I also really like to be able to target someone’s individual connections or followers on LinkedIn. Especially if you have something like a thought leader ad, being able to target the followers and connections of that individual could be extremely powerful. Alright, so how do you actually target someone’s connections and followers? Well, there’s an easy way to do this with connections. You have the person go into the back end of their LinkedIn settings, and they can export all of their connections to a CSV. So it takes a little bit of massaging, but you can then upload that CSV back to LinkedIn as a matched audience. And voila, you now have a list that you can use as an audience of their direct connections. But you can’t export your followers.

And this is a problem for someone like me, who, I’m really choosy about who I connect to, so I have something like 9, 000 connections, but I have 40, 000 followers. How powerful would it be if I could target my followers? But I can’t unless I use scraping, which is against LinkedIn’s Terms of Service and endangers my profile. So LinkedIn, how hard would it be to give us the ability to target the connections and followers of a specific user? Even if we had to get permission from that user to be able to do that, this would be an incredibly powerful feature.

The next one is in Website Actions. I don’t know how much you guys have used Website Actions for tracking conversions and creating retargeting audiences, but I absolutely love it. It’s so powerful. This ability to say, when someone clicks this button, that’s when they’re submitting a form, and I want you to call that a conversion.

But I am having some trouble with website actions, and it really comes down to how often does LinkedIn come back and index, what are the different buttons and links on this page.

And also, when you go in and you select a, the name of a button, it’ll say, used on this page, and three others. But there’s no way to drill down deeper and find out what those other three pages are. That would be so valuable for trying to narrow down if I’m trying to find a specific button on a specific page and I’m not seeing it, wow, how cool would that be?

So what I really want here, I want the ability to tell LinkedIn with a button, please go re crawl this page and see if the buttons have changed. Because if you make a change to your website. I’m actually experiencing this right now, where with a client, they’ve changed the website, and I go back every day, waiting for that button to appear, and it hasn’t appeared yet. It’s been over two weeks now. So, maybe website actions takes more than two weeks to re crawl a page, or maybe there’s a problem with the page, and I don’t know, and I can’t go and fix it, because I don’t know what the problem is. So what I would love, if there was some sort of a visual of like, Can I click something and see how LinkedIn’s website actions views the page? That would really help me in troubleshooting. Otherwise, if everything’s up to date and website actions recognizes all your buttons, super powerful, I love the tool.

Next, I want to be able to create custom calculated columns inside of Campaign Manager. We can rearrange different columns and give ourselves the view that we want. But there are some calculations that I do, that LinkedIn does not do natively, are things I care about, my own metrics, my own calculations, but I can’t get them unless I export my data to Excel and run a calculation there. This would be things like, I love to calculate for video ads, my cost per 50 percent view. I don’t think that would be that hard to just be able to say this field divided by this field plus this field or whatever. , I would just love to see this from LinkedIn.

One major weakness in LinkedIn’s reporting is no matter what sort of report that you export, LinkedIn will never give you information about the image that you’re using or the video file that you’re actually playing, other than they’ll tell you like the file’s length.

I would absolutely love it if LinkedIn would give us the ability to export the name of the image as it was uploaded to LinkedIn or some other signifier, something that we could pull up. and do a VLOOKUP to find.

Also inside of reporting, when you generate an ad report, there’s no single column, no single field that tells you what the ad type is that’s being used. Your campaign type field, it will say sponsored update, whether it’s a single image or whether it’s a document. So when I go to audit an account, and if they haven’t put really good nomenclature in the campaign names, I’m looking at it going Geez, I don’t understand, like, what ad type is this? I have to look over to see in the video views column if there’s like a number greater than zero that tells me that it’s a video ad.

Oh good. Now I know that this is a video sponsored content post. I don’t feel like this would be very hard. LinkedIn knows there are, you know, 19 different ad formats and counting.

Now on to thought leader ads. One major ask that I have for LinkedIn here is I want thought leader ads with additional objectives. Right now, we can only use brand awareness, which is total garbage, or engagement, which is really expensive.

I especially want thought leader ads with the ability to run as a website visits objective, so I’m only paying for those who click on the link, and I would die for thought leader ads to have a lead generation component.

Now this recommendation here is more of a plea. LinkedIn, Please, please, please stop charging us for clicks on the See More link. If I’m bidding 10 for a click or more, I do not want to pay 10 for someone to read more of my ad and then keep scrolling. It’s not worth it. It’s absolute garbage. This happens in the lead generation objective, which is crazy because in lead generation, we don’t get charged for clicks on the social pill, like likes and comments, but we do get charged every time someone clicks the See More.

Same thing with the engagement objective. I realized that a click on See More is what you would call an engagement. But boy, it’s not a valuable enough one for me to say, yeah, I’m willing to pay for that. Most advertisers that I talk to don’t realize that they’re paying for clicks on See More. So please, please, please LinkedIn, stop charging us for those Seymour clicks.

Now, for those of you advertisers who are running conversation ads, Ah, I love conversation ads. If you listened to the last episode, you’ll know exactly why. For conversations, they’re really manual and really difficult to build.

Now, what would be really cool is if conversations were like lead gen forms. Hear me out here. You create one lead gen form and you can attach it to any ad, any format you want, pretty much. But conversation ads, you build a conversation ad once, and it lives by itself, and it’s unduplicatable. You can’t do anything with it.

What I would love, we already have conversations in the navigation for using click to message ads. This might already be on the roadmap, but what I would love to see, let’s go into conversations and let’s build a conversation once. Then, when we go to create a conversation ad, we can just say, I want this to be the ad’s name, this to be the sender, and then boom, I’m going to grab this conversation that already exists and attach it to it. And then the kind of, like I mentioned before, please let us duplicate conversation ads. The only way that you can actually duplicate them is by duplicating the campaign, which is a huge pain.

What about dynamic UTM parameters? This is kind of a new feature, so I don’t know how many of you are using it, What I would absolutely love is if the dynamic UTMs would allow you the insertion of something that we actually control at the ad level.

We have tons of really valuable fields that you can pass at the campaign level. Things like your campaign name, your campaign ID, your campaign group name, so much valuable stuff. But then at the creative level, if we want to tell what’s the actual ad that’s driving this performance, for the actual creative, the only dynamic parameter that we have is creative ID. Now, this is not an ID that we create, we define, and can say it looks like this, and this is something I’ll recognize.

No, it’s a machine generated number that started incrementing from a certain level, and LinkedIn knows what it means on the back end, but it means nothing to us. So if dynamic UTMs could allow us to output our ad name, or some other parameter that we could define That would be amazing. That would give us the ability to use dynamic UTMs and track all the way down to the creative level, not just the campaign level.

And further about dynamic UTMs, what about being able to track on a boosted post of some kind? So a company boosted post or a thought leader ad? These were content that already had a post that had a link. When you turn these into an ad, there’s no way of Editing them and making sure that when that traffic gets to your website, analytics or your CRM can tell that traffic came from this particular campaign and this particular app, the traffic is indistinguishable from organic right now.

What I would absolutely love is, what if our dynamic UTMs could take those links as they go out, even though they were set organically before, and just append tracking parameters to the end of them. It seems super easy, technically, to get away with.

This next one is one that I’ve heard a lot, and I actually know LinkedIn is working on this. This is where multiple ad types can run under a single campaign. I can’t tell you how annoying it is when I have to double the number of campaigns in an account just because I want to try a different ad format. I don’t know what the stall is. LinkedIn has been working on this for years. Maybe there are some really heavy technical challenges that are keeping this from coming to fruition. But I hear this from advertisers all the time. This would be huge for us.

The next one is also one that I get asked a lot about, and this is a change history. So, every ad platform I’ve ever used has an easily accessible change history. This is where you can click one link and see every change that’s been made to an account, with the timestamps, who made it, all of that.

Now you can go to your rep and ask them to pull a change history. By the amount of time and effort that it takes, it sure looks like it’s not easy for them to pull. And the results that they get, it’s all in JSON. It’s basically code that you have to decipher and try to figure out what happened.

Change history is so valuable for advertisers, especially those who work with agencies. Because if you’re an agency that isn’t doing very much, you deserve to be fired. I’m sorry. Companies need to be able to see the change history and audit and know that who they’re entrusting their ad account with is actually making changes, is actually doing some work.

This change history already exists. It just needs to be able to be pulled from our side.

Alright, I’ve talked about platform generosity a lot. This next suggestion I have would be incredible for generosity. This is what I would call best price bidding. So as background, if you use maximum delivery bidding, this is where LinkedIn will bid as high as it needs to on CPM to spend your daily budget and actually now overspending it by 50 percent every day.

On the other hand, manual CPC bidding, especially bidding low on it, is the cheaper way to pay for your LinkedIn traffic 90 percent of the time. We’ve talked about this several times on the podcast.

I’ve figured out that if my landing page click through rate is higher than 1%, then paying by CPM, especially maximum delivery, is usually the cheapest way to pay for that traffic. And if my link click through rate is less than 1%, then bidding low manual CPC bidding is usually the best method.

This is the rule of thumb that I’ve put together after analyzing millions of dollars in ad spend, but it’s different for every audience and it’s different for every ad. But of course, LinkedIn knows the exact performance and how that performance changes hour by hour. It knows how it changes ad to ad. It knows how it changes throughout the day. So LinkedIn could definitely dynamically switch bidding models to maximize your budget and get you the lowest costs. Because we do this manually, LinkedIn could do it faster because it’s on the inside, it knows when these shifts happen. The question you would ask is, why would LinkedIn do this if it loses them money? Simple. It’s the long game. When your customers have lots of success on the platform, they’re going to bring more budget, and then they’re going to tell everyone they know, you’re an idiot if you’re not advertising on LinkedIn. This is an absolute game changer for us. And that is the level of conversation that you want happening off of your platform, driving people to come and spend more money, bring their budgets, and become lifelong fans. Boom.

My next suggestion should not even have to be a suggestion.

When you go to bid manually, LinkedIn is going to show you a suggested bid and a suggested bid range. And not only are these ranges wild that it suggests, you’ll see recommendations for like a, a $20 to $90 cost per click bid. I’m sorry, if you’re paying $20 to $90 per click, you’re doing something wrong. But LinkedIn will make it look like that’s what everyone else is doing. It makes me feel like these bidding ranges are just pulled out of nowhere. And my recommendation to LinkedIn, these need to be based on historical data. If there’s a campaign that has a $10 per day budget, you do not need to pay $20 to $90 per click to spend that budget. You should be bidding down to like 4 or 5 and get your two clicks for the day. LinkedIn has access to this. It knows what our budget is. It knows the historical performance of our ads. So if I launch an ad that has a 0. 2 percent click through rate in the newsfeed, I know that’s bad. LinkedIn would look at that and say, man, you’re going to have to bid really high to get anyone to actually see these ads. But if LinkedIn can see my historical ad performance, that I routinely have click through rates over 1%,

I don’t think that’s too much to ask for the suggested bid ranges. In fact, all of the suggested everything inside of a campaign, to actually be based off of your historical performance and your actual performance, not based off of someone else’s average that does not pertain to your ad performance and your budget level.

Another thing that would be really cool, you know how we have lead gen forms? That outperformed the forms that are on your website. What if LinkedIn had landing pages that loaded immediately? They were trusted because they stayed on LinkedIn, but they were still customizable by the advertiser. We wouldn’t have to send traffic to a website at all. We could keep everything on LinkedIn. And if the building of these pages and the navigation were easy, were powerful, we wouldn’t have to send traffic anywhere. It’s my understanding that If you use LinkedIn Recruiter, they do have this, and it’s obviously for like posting job positions. But I would love to see this kind of a landing page builder, for all advertisers, not just LinkedIn Recruiter customers.

You may have already noticed this, when you go in to look at previews of your ads, some ad formats have a really bad preview experience. Especially, I’m looking at you, text ads. document ads, and sponsored messaging. I want a standard preview experience across all ad formats. That means right from the view of the ad, I want to have a preview button that shows me that ad, no matter what ad type it is, looking exactly as it’s going to look when it’s being served as an ad.

When I export data from LinkedIn, LinkedIn includes columns, but only the columns that are necessary for the ads within it. So, let me give you a scenario here. For a client, if I export the first two weeks of the month, and the last two weeks of the month, and then I want to combine those data sets to do some sort of an analysis on, what I’ve found that’s really annoying is that if I were running a different ad type in the first half of the month compared to the last half, my columns are going to be different, they’re going to have changed order, and they’re going to be different altogether.

What I would love is for the ability to export all columns, all the time in the same order. So no matter what I combine, it’s going to be easy to combine into Excel.

Now, I know you’ve experienced this. When you go to get permissions to an account, it’s really difficult. Not only do you have to know where and how to get permissions to the ad account, but then if you ever want to create your own ad, you have to get permissions to the company page. And there’s so many different kinds of permissions. It’s mind boggling to understand. It takes basically a college degree to understand what the permissions do and what you actually need. I would love if we had really good permissioning where it doesn’t matter if you’re connected to someone or not, you could always send them a request to use their post as a thought leader permissioning If you have their email address, or if you have their profile URL. And that also doesn’t matter when you’re wanting to choose someone as a sender for your sponsored messaging ads.

We should have simple permissions. A single place to grant someone access to both the company and the ad account together. Make it really easy to give them the permissions they need to be advertising. And also to make it really easy to get the permission from people to use their likeness or their posts.

A somewhat recent change that LinkedIn made is in order to be granted super admin rights to a company page, And You have to follow the page. That is really, really annoying, especially as an agency, when I get a message from my team saying, Hey, can you go follow this page? The client is trying to give you access. LinkedIn, please don’t make us do things like follow the company’s page before we can get rights. Just make it so we can invite the right person.

Have you ever used the A B testing feature inside of Campaign Manager? No, me neither. What happens is it makes you create ads in separate campaigns. That is not an actual A B test. That is two separate audiences in LinkedIn’s eyes with two separate ads. They’re both going to get their own relevancy scores.

They’re both going to be treated differently in the auction. LinkedIn, please allow us to create an A B test where two ads go into a single campaign. And please let us actually serve them equally. That’s going to be a way better test.

Now, this suggestion is one that’s been in beta for a while. So I know we’re eventually going to get it, but this is the connection between sales navigator and campaign manager. We want our sales teams to be able to tag people and send them to create a dynamic audience to be able to either advertise to or exclude from our ads.

And this is all within the LinkedIn universe. It makes perfect sense. This should be so easy, but it’s been in beta now for probably over nine months. This is a feature I want. I want you to break through the walls and get us this feature.

My next wishlist item here is for simpler boosting of thought leader ads.

Right now, you have to choose the perfect cocktail of things in a campaign to make it so you can actually boost your post as a thought leader ad. You need to get one of the two objectives right, and then you need to make sure you choose the exact ad type. And only then will your post actually show up as being eligible.

What I want to see is a wizard where you can start from the post that you want to boost and then LinkedIn will walk you through. Here are your choice of objectives. Here are your choice of ad formats to get there. This would make the process of sponsoring a thought leader ad dead simple.

A major annoyance that I have is that when I upload lists or create retargeting audiences, if they don’t actually get attached to a live campaign within 30 days, they go inactive. This is not a problem for engagement retargeting lists, like people who watched 50 percent of a, of a video ad. Okay, no big deal. You can always get that back. But if this is a website visits retargeting list, when that audience goes archived, that list is no longer building. LinkedIn has forgotten about it, and if you go to restart it, it starts from ground zero.

Please, LinkedIn, even if you have to bug us by asking us, like, Hey, are you still planning on using this list? Should we keep it active? Yes. Please just give us the option so that these aren’t going inactive and we’re losing valuable audiences.

Something else going way back. I don’t know how many of you have been advertising on LinkedIn long enough to remember the Bizzo acquisition. Back when LinkedIn bought Bizzo, they had a product called LinkedIn Lead Accelerator. The whole value behind it was creating very simple build sequences. And the major value that you had with the LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, or LLA, was that you could build sequences of ads. So, show someone this first, and then after they interact with it, show them this, and then show them this.

We still build those kind of funnels here at B2Linked, but it’s incredibly manual. We have to build so many different retargeting audiences and remember to go and exclude them at certain stages of the funnel and target them at others. It’s a huge pain. LinkedIn, you already created the technology in LinkedIn Lead Accelerator. Bring that technology back. Make it dead simple to build funnel sequences. We would love it.

And LinkedIn, please stop making the worst performing options defaults. These are things like in the geographic targeting leaving it as a Recent or permanent just make that permanent. Please turn off LinkedIn Audience Expansion by default. Please don’t suggest LinkedIn Audience Network by default. That’s a more advanced option. Let someone test into that. Don’t make maximum delivery the default option. Or if you do, don’t hide the manual CPC option behind an option that says click for more options just to reveal one.

If you can help newer advertisers have success, Not make mistakes when they launch their campaigns. There are so many more who are going to come back with budget again next month and say, we had success. We have more budget. This is going to be better for you and for all of us advertisers.

Something other ad platforms have is the ability to annotate inside the account, putting notes in the account really easily to see when certain things happen. It would be super easy, I think, to add the ability to annotate and say on this date, these ads launched, on this date, we made a bidding change, whatever that is, we would love something simple just to be able to attach notes inside of your account.

Now, if you’ve run conversation ads, you know, how effortless it is to go and choose your calls to action because you just have to stay under, I think it’s 25 characters. And you can make that call to action, whatever you want. But when you run a different ad format, you have to use one of the preset calls to action. How hard would it be to let us customize all of the calls to action buttons, just like you can on conversation ads?

For advertisers who are using LinkedIn’s audience network. What I would love, and I don’t feel like this is a big ask is I want pacing. What you’ll notice if you’re bidding decently high on a LinkedIn audience network campaign. You can spend your whole day’s budget in 10 or 20 minutes. LinkedIn has pacing algorithms right on LinkedIn. It should have them on the audience network as well. We should be able to pace it out and say, Let my ads show all day long. And you shouldn’t have to control that by bidding super low. Because we have noticed when we bid really low on LAN, we do get worse quality.

I mentioned before how maximum delivery bidding is the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90 percent of the time, and manual was the cheapest 90 percent of the time. And the whole reason that we have to have these kinds of heuristics, is because LinkedIn programmed originally the cost per impression to not match the cost per click, like they do on other platforms.

So for instance, early days on Google, it didn’t matter whether you said I want to pay by the click or by the impression, if you had an ad that was performing about average, no matter which of those options you chose, you would pay about the same price.

LinkedIn though, it’s weighted against cost per impression bidding. And maximum delivery bidding is the easiest bid to choose, but by choosing it, you end up getting punished by paying too much.

I’ve got a YouTube video explaining all the math behind this, but basically LinkedIn, if you could have your cost per impression and your cost per click be equal, the average click through rate, boom, we’d be right there at a tier one platform. When we are bidding manual

When we are bidding manual CPC, you’ll notice that little box that says, allow bid adjustment for high value clicks. Thanks. It doesn’t seem like we’re actually getting higher value clicks. It just looks like my CPC is being increased by 50%. I don’t know if there’s an adjustment that needs to be made there, or maybe you’re a little bit more choosy about which clicks you call high value, but either way, it doesn’t look like it’s working.

I love the Saved Audiences feature. When I build an audience inside of Campaign Manager, I’ll save it and be able to use that for all of posterity. But the challenge that we have is that when you use a saved audience, it totally overwrites everything within that campaign. What I would love to do is create a saved audience of the standard exclusions that I want to have across my campaigns.

Maybe this is excluding current customers and competitors. I want to be able to apply that saved audience to a campaign, and not have it overwrite all of the job titles and all of the skills that I’ve already selected for that campaign. This seems like it should be an easy option to add, Let me create saved audiences and then choose to append rather than replace.

Currently some of our clients are having a challenge getting people who fill out lead gen forms to actually book an appointment on a sales reps calendar. I would love it if there was a calendar integration within lead gen form. So imagine someone fills out the form and right within the form itself, you could have a calendar picker. Maybe it integrates with something like HubSpot or Calendly, whatever that is. I would love it if they could choose a date right within the form while they’re thinking about it, because it can be really difficult to get someone to fill out the form, then go check their email, click on a Calendly link, and then go and book.

Now I’ve mentioned Anthony Blatner a whole bunch of times on this podcast. He’s a super fanatic in the fanatics community. He’s also the host of the LinkedIn Ads Radio Podcast. So if you haven’t checked that out yet, I highly recommend it. But he gave me some really thoughtful improvements that I wanted to share. As I read these, I was like, yes, I need to include these and I need to give you credit.

He said dynamic UTMs should not only be applied to the links, but also to the links in the body copy. This seems like a total no brainer. No matter what link leaves that post, it should contain the dynamic UTMs.

He also said that in Campaign Manager, the columns are so wide and it makes it really hard to see everything you want to see on your screen. He said make them resizable and make the column headers wrap so that we can have a lot more data on the screen all at once. He also suggested better filtering for ads and campaigns. On Facebook and Google, you can do something like contains or does not contain and add several filters. But on LinkedIn, we only can filter by what it does have. That would make it extra powerful. He mentioned how bulk actions doesn’t work with many ad types. So it’s kind of useless unless you’re already working with just a certain kind of ad type that is supported. He suggested a mobile app or at least a mobile friendlier version of campaign manager so that we can manage ads on the go. I love this idea.

He also said, dark mode is a must. For those of us who have LinkedIn set up as dark mode, we want LinkedIn ads to be dark mode as well.

So thank you to Anthony Blatner for those awesome ideas. And thanks for being an awesome member of our LinkedIn ads fanatics community.

Now, if you guys are not part of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, you need to get there. You’ll get access to all four of our courses that take you from beginner to expert. Plus you’ll get access to so many of the top minds in LinkedIn Ads, being able to ask questions, get feedback, and hear what it is we’re testing and what we’re learning. Plus there’s an upgrade to get on a weekly group call with me so I can give you direct feedback and answer questions. You can check out the LinkedIn ads fanatics community by going to fanatics.b2linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we’re excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button. So you get to hear more geeky LinkedIn Ads content next week. But if you’re a regular listener, please do me the favor of going to Apple Podcasts and leave a review so other LinkedIn Ads fanatics can find the show. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at podcast@b2linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week, and I’m always cheering you on in all of your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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