What Video Format Performs Best On LinkedIn Ads? Vertical, Horizontal, or Square?

Is Vertical Video Best?

May 22, 2025

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Amazing video ads performance with Chandler Quintin
Chandler Quintin on LinkedIn or funb2bads.com
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Summary:

In this surprising episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox teams up with guest Chandler Quinton of Video Brothers to bust a long-held belief: that vertical video outperforms other formats on LinkedIn. After analyzing over $140,000 in ad spend across multiple campaigns, they discovered that horizontal (16:9) video significantly outperforms vertical (9:16) and square (1:1) in view rate, completion rate, and cost efficiency—by as much as 2x to 4x.

Show Transcript:

Vertical video performs best on LinkedIn ads, right? Or is that just a myth? You'll never believe what we found on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey, hey, 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 want to evolve their craft and achieve true pro status. All right, so I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. We know that 80% of LinkedIn users are on mobile and we know that vertical video looks best on mobile. Ergo, of course, vertical video ads are going to perform best on the platform, right? That's why I was floored that today's guest and I found significant evidence to the contrary. We're diving deep into what video aspect ratio is going to give you the very best performance. I would love for you to reach out to me through a message on LinkedIn and let me know if you're doing the same tests that we are and what your findings are. Now you may remember Chandler Quinton from one of our most popular episodes. It was episode 122. He dropped serious knowledge on us about how to engage users with video ads and it literally changed my life. We got together to uncover today's mystery. We'll dive in right after the break.

The LinkedIn ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn ads experts.

That's right. B2Linked is the ad agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been ever since 2014, you know, way back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team and you'll never get a cookie-cutter approach or a standard account template from us. Plus we've pioneered the high performance LinkedIn ad strategies that we use to 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, schedule your free discovery call at B2Linked.com. Discovery. If you have a question you want us to review here on the show or a review that you want to leave or any feedback, please message me on LinkedIn. My DMS are free and they're open. And you can also email us at podcast@B2Linked.com. If you'll attach a voice recording from you, I can play it right here on the show and I'm happy to keep you anonymous or you can just share text. That's fine too. I hope you know I want to feature you. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it.

Chandler, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast again with me. One of our most popular episodes ever was when I interviewed you about your content strategy and I still keep getting people telling me all the time. We love Chandler's episode. It was so awesome. So we had to bring you back for an encore.

Chandler

Awesome, AJ. Great to see you. Happy to be here and I appreciate that feedback. I'm just a LinkedIn ads nerd, just like all the listeners out here. And it's always fun to join you. So thank you for having me.

Well, I had to have you for this one because this was a joint discovery. You and I were kind of stumbled onto. So we'll explain more about that. But so much of this finding is because of your abilities and the content that you create being so good with video. So super excited to get to riff on this and kind of walk through what we found together and why it was so shocking.

Chandler

Yeah, I can't wait. This is going to be awesome.

For those of you out there who don't know us personally, Chandler and I are good friends, but we never met in person. But I happen to be traveling to Boston here a couple months ago. And while I was there, Chandler, you came down from Rhode Island and we were like, hey, let's get together, go grab dinner and stuff. And that was our first time getting to meet in real life.

Chandler

Yeah. And we also went on a root beer scavenger hunt. Don't forget that we went to the Cheers bar and you actually purchased some Cheers branded root beer. So yeah, that was an awesome time meeting you, by the way. It was really fun up in Boston.

And that was fun. We went to like five or six different places looking for root beer. The Cheers bar was, I think, the only success we had, which is totally fine. Yep. Came home with like four bottles of Cheers brand root beer.
Very cool.

Chandler

Well, everyone knows your name there. So it was a good place to go.

It's true. All right. So as we were having dinner, I remember you saying like, hey, AJ, I wanted to ask you a question. I've been digging through the data in my ads account and I saw something that was weird. Tell me what it is that you brought up.

Chandler

Okay. I love this story because I really didn't know if I was seeing something, like my brain was tricking me or if I was going crazy, but I was noticing the counter to what everyone talks about in terms of vertical video being the cat's pajamas. Everyone talks about vertical is better. It shows up more often. It's, you know, it gets more engagement, you know, all those things. And when I was looking at the stats in our ad account, as well as a couple of our clients, I was noticing something that was completely opposite from what everyone was talking about. And that was potentially, and we'll find out if this was true or not, was that vertical and square were not performing as well as horizontal. And not only that, but it was the stats like view rates, completion rates, and even dwell time was not supposedly as good as everyone talks about it is. And I didn't know if I was seeing things or if I was crazy and I brought up to you and we went from there.

And we're out at dinner. We open up the laptop on the table and you're showing me through some of these things. And I went, wow, you're right. This is totally unexpected. And then it gave me the idea where I was like, hey, maybe this isn't just about different devices, how they're interacting with the video. Maybe it has something to do with the actual dimensions of the creative as well. And you and I talked about what a methodology would look like to go figure this out. And I went and got straight nerdy on it and dove way into the data. And then you and I have been riffing on this now for weeks and talking about it. And it's been really fun.

Chandler

Oh yeah. It's been awesome because we just went down the rabbit hole and what we found, I think will surprise a lot of people and will be really interesting to see how it impacts people's strategies moving forward.

Yes. Huge game changer. So before we actually get into that, where did the idea of vertical is better come from? We just all know it's conventional knowledge of vertical video performs better. But tell me about it. Like, where does that actually come from?

Chandler

I think, you know, you see a lot of these hacks and tricks and tips all over LinkedIn all the time and some of them are good. Some of them I think are snake oil and some of them are just straight up bad. And it's really hard to know what's actually valuable and what's not, you know, what's worth paying attention to and what's worth ignoring. And I'd say last year and certainly the year before, we saw just a lot of talk around vertical in square video with the idea being that you get more impressions on mobile because that's where the app is. And a lot of people use the mobile app. You might also get more real estate advantage because a vertical video takes up more of the mobile screen. Same thing with square. And there was a lot of talk saying how horizontal is dead because it just takes up such a little bit of the screen and it doesn't show up on mobile at the time. So we just saw this huge influx of everyone seeing that, promoting it, commenting on it, sharing it, doing it. And all of a sudden, no matter where you looked, everyone was putting out square and horizontal content, not just videos, but also images. In fact, I mean, I was doing it. You were doing it. Everyone was doing it because it was one of those trends that just kind of gets said so much that it must be true. And I think we might have poked some holes in that.

And I think one of the reasons here is that it makes sense for the reasons you shared, like vertical takes up more space on a mobile device. We know 80 plus percent of the traffic that we're going to get on LinkedIn is going to be on mobile. It's one of those things you don't have to think about too hard. Like is Santa Claus a nice guy? Yeah. Is vertical something that takes up more of your screen going to be more engaging to 80 percent of your viewers? Absolutely. So I totally agree with that.

Chandler

AJ, I want to ask you. So before I even brought this up to you, was there anything kind of seeing, feeling, you know, smelling a little bit different when it came to ad performance? Did you notice anything was afoot? Did you feel anything behind the scenes that there might be something to this? Because it was not something that happened overnight. I just started noticing this over time, you know, costs going up, performance going down. And I just felt like something was off. And I kind of suspected this might be the case. But did you notice anything? Did you see anything? And what did that appear to you as?

I absolutely noticed nothing. And the reason why is because in order to see something as fishy here, you have to have a really distinct kind of test. You have to have creative in all different formats, all running against each other and then being able to evaluate that performance. So for most of our clients, yeah, sure, we'll run video, but we're not running a vertical and a horizontal and a square, all exactly the same video content. And so because we didn't have that continuity, you can't actually compare and see which one's working better. First of all, can you tell us about video brothers? Like, what do you guys create and what's your output that enabled us to figure this out?

Chandler

Awesome. So a little bit has changed since I was first on the show, but video brothers, we're here to make high quality kind of that super bowl advertising accessible for as many B2B businesses as possible. And we do that with the productized version of advertising. We call that the ad suite. And the ad suite is a cinematic universe of ads that take the audience along a journey from top of funnel to bottom of funnel. And it's all designed around video ads of different links and different formats, starting with the teaser ad, which scoops up the audience is very cheap, brings them into the hero ad, which kind of gives you a full story. That's also the ad you want to put on CTV. And then the follow up ad, which solidifies that positive transformation. And then we have reminder ads, which is the short six second kind of CTA focused video components. So we have so many different assets that we run for every client, the 15s, the 30s, the sixes, but part of the whole idea behind the ad suite is data testing. So we didn't really know this in the past going in that this would be part of the mix here, but we have 16 by nines, nine by 16s and one by ones for every asset we deliver with the thought that the client is going to want to test and learn which asset works better for which audiences, which part of the funnel and all those things. So luckily, we've been providing clients this for a couple years now, all of these assets. So I think when we were talking about it, we kind of realized that we actually have way more data about this than ever possible. So hopefully that kind of encapsulates the audience, what we do. But I think what we're talking about here is a collection of assets that represents all of these potential data points to test and learn from.

Yeah, it's perfect. So as of right now, we've gotten to work on four accounts together where I get to build and optimize the ad creatives as they are on LinkedIn that you've provided. And with most, we have three spots. So there'll be three different versions of an ad. And then you'll give it to us in all 16 by nine, one by one and nine by 16. Of course, many of you know our methodology. We get really geeky about breaking out micro segments. So we're going to run this same test across 15 or maybe 20 different campaigns. And this is what was so shocking when I remember us sitting at dinner and we opened up one of these accounts and you just said, let's sort all of the ads in this account by view rate high to low. And we did it. And all of a sudden over in the left hand column, you just saw horizontal, horizontal, horizontal all down the page. And then you scroll down and all of a sudden a whole bunch of one by ones. And then you keep scrolling. And then we go to the verticals and we went, why?

Chandler

Yeah, wait a second. What is going on here? I remember that too. And then we jumped to another account, did the same thing. And we're not just looking at a day or a week. We're looking at months and months of data, thousands and thousands of dollars being spent, thousands of impressions, if not hundreds of thousands and some accounts up in the millions. Same thing. Yeah.

Horizontals, squares in the middle and then verticals. And then I think we looked at view rate. You can look at completion rate. You can look at dwell time consistent across the board. Maybe an outlier here and there where a square is worse than a vertical, but there was never a square or a vertical in the top spot taking out a 16 by nine, which was I think shocking to both of us. I think we were both getting like visibly, you know, excited about what we're finding here.

Chandler

Yes. And getting so excited because I mean, it's literally as I can get this is heresy in the advertising community to tell people that horizontal is going to outperform their vertical. Like it just never occurred to anyone. And they're in campaign manager. The only ways we could evaluate this was like, all right, completion rate and view rate. And I went, all right, I have to understand this more and I need more metrics. The metrics there are so many I care about that I evaluate things from that you can't get from campaign manager. Things like I want to understand 25% view rate, 50%, 75, as well as completion. I want to understand costs per 25, 50, 75% and cost per completion. And that's where I went. These two metrics look like they're really lining up, but I need to go and look at this under a microscope and make sure that it checks all the way through.

Oh yeah. And so, you know, one of the things that I wanted to ask you because you have access to so many different accounts and you're really deep in the weeds with the data and you have all your reporting tools that you use. How deep did this actually go? You know, at dinner, we can only look at so much, but I know you went home and I know you dug into the data because you texted me a few days later and you're like, oh my gosh, man. I need to check out what I'm learning here. So tell me and tell the audience how deep does this actually go? What does this mean? What's the scope of this and what did you find?

Chandler

It went all the way deep. So we have our four accounts that I get to run. We were able to name them in really like good naming structure that made it really easy to pull this kind of report. We had your creatives that all come in in the right format that we could really AB test these all against each other. And what I did is I combined all of this data from all four accounts. This represented over $140,000 in ad spend across these accounts. So we're not talking about just small, small numbers. This is really robust. And I broke out all of the formats of our video ads with really robust naming conventions. I have columns for how long it was and what format it was and which spot it was ran through all different kinds of pivot tables through all of my different metrics. And I found there was without a single exception, every single one, vertical was the loser, horizontal was the winner. And one by one square was totally in the middle to the point where I would not even recommend it in most cases. It goes all the way deep.

You know, it's interesting to add to that too. I think when you told me that I took a look to just kind of get a sense of how much cost was being spent towards the verticals and squares.

Chandler

And one example, one of our client accounts, 40% of the spend went to the squares in verticals and they performed about four to five times less efficient than the horizontals. Meaning if you are to start weighting your campaigns towards horizontals, assuming this data is true for you as well, you could save a significant amount of money on LinkedIn distribution. And I thought that was incredibly exciting to hear because one of the biggest complaints about LinkedIn advertising, as we all know, is that it is very expensive, comparative to other platforms. Now, of course, the audience is better here on LinkedIn and we all love it, but we do need to combat the rising costs. And this feels like something that could really ladder up into a cost saving strategy for the long haul.

Oh, 100%. So many different ideas here on how do we actually use this information to make our advertising more effective. If you go back and listen to the last episode that Chandler and I did, he was talking about the same kind of creative and the huge discounts that you get from LinkedIn because of how high performing the creative is. So to give you an idea, all of the ads that we've been analyzing down to a cost per 50% view, we are in the like 20 to 30 cents on average. Whereas with any other kind of creative that I've tested on LinkedIn, it's not uncommon to see between two and $4. So Chandler, shout out to the way that your whole creative process, the very professional output. It's so good. It performs so, so well. Anyone who's curious, I would suggest like go back and listen to that episode. We'll link to it in the show notes. But as we started down this road, I started thinking, all right, what holes can we poke in this? Like what could be a reason why we're seeing this? Is it possible that it's a difference in maybe the audience targeting? Is it possible that we're bidding differently and that's causing some aberrations here? Is it possible that it's budget? And I went through all of these cases with so many different target audiences, isolated that. Audience makes no difference. Bid level makes no difference. Budget level, aside from giving us more or less data, did not make a difference. And what this turned out to tell me is like you mentioned, we see more of our spend naturally going to horizontal. And so that tells us that LinkedIn is serving this more than they're serving the other formats. And then we're also seeing from the consumption metrics, we're seeing this behavior from LinkedIn members that the way that they're interacting with the videos, they are consuming it more on 16 by nine. So it seems to be both a LinkedIn is favoring it and people are favoring it. And that's pretty wild, right?

Chandler

Oh, it's insane. And I think one of the biggest draws to vertical more specifically was that people would watch it more and longer because it fills up more of the screen. It's capturing their attention more. But in all of our data we're looking at, we're seeing the completion rates of the 16 by nines be 8, 12, 15% or higher. Meanwhile, the vertical where you're supposed to have an even better completion rate is sub 3%. Some not even cracking 1%, meaning people are just scrolling right on by not getting to the end of these videos. And that also dovetails into the view rates themselves. The average view rates that we're seeing on video brothers ads on the accounts you're running are 40, 55%. They're up there almost a 50 50 shot of stopping the scroll, even better on desktop. And then when you go and look at the verticals or squares, you're half if not a third of all that. And it's just mind boggling because this is just so different than what everyone is saying. And I think the amount of costs that are going into verticals and squares is hitting that point where something is going to break here. And I think we might be like seeing the evidence of that in the data is that the trend is either shifting or my theory is that there's so much inventory on vertical and inventory on square because of all the UGC content, all the thought leadership content that it's actually harder to stand out with that format than it is the 16 by 9. And maybe we're making old school cool again with the 16 by 9, but perhaps there is not enough inventory of that. So that's why it's working so well. I mean, there's no way for us to know the exact why's but something big is going on here. And that's why we're even talking about this. People need to know, right? This is in the weeds of the data. I know not everyone has the time for that, but that's what AJ and I are here for is to get nerdy and figure it all out for you.

Yeah. When I'm looking at these pivot tables here, we broke it out by objective. Is it possible that one objective throws it off over another and no, like very, very few variations off of that? We looked at stage of funnel. Does it matter whether it's a first touch, second or third touch, or even a fourth or a fifth slight variation? I'll say we did see some metrics that were looking pretty good from one by one when you get down to stage three, like a third stage of retargeting, but yeah, across all this is amazing. So we have to ask them like, how can you as the listener right now, you're hearing us be really excited about this finding. How can you actually go and evaluate this and test this yourself? Chandler, if you were tasked with this, how would you go and start running this test yourself?

Chandler

Well, the first thing I would do is ensure that you run an experiment the way, you know, science in the scientific method taught us to do right. That's why every video brothers asset that is the variation is the same asset. So the 16 by nine ad is the same as the one by one. It's the same as the nine by 16. The contents all there. So we have a little bit of a kind of a control, right? We have this constant and in any experiment, you talk about this all the time, AJ with AB testing, you got to only be testing one variable at a time. So if your ad is the same, you can run this test by running the square horizontal and verticals as long as the ad creative is the same. So when you go to run this, you have to make sure you have some sort of constant because if you have a horizontal video, you know, XYZ video, and then you have a one by one that's ABC video, and then a nine by 16, that's one, two, three video, they're all different. It's really not going to give you an apples to apples because the ad creative itself is different and we both know that creative significantly matters in your LinkedIn ad performance. So you want to make sure you're running experiments with constants and making sure you're not trying to test too many variables at one time. Now the way we implement it for clients, and I say we because you helped me come up with this strategy and you deploy this for our clients is we run campaigns with six ads within them. So we're going to switch off the box for LinkedIn's algorithm to have enough ads in the campaign to serve evenly per their suggestion. But between those six ads, two of them are verticals, two of them are squares, and two of them are horizontals. So this gives us a nice equal shot to see if this data plays out. Of course, we are setting these to even rotation to give everything its equal shot. And that definitely helps kind of streamline and even out the data a little bit. So we'll run these ads for a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month. And with enough data coming in, we'll be able to actually see how that experiment played out. Just like AJ said, you can sort by view rate and see visually where the thumbnails show you it's a square vertical horizontal, where that all stacks up. You might be just as surprised as we are to see that same thing. Now to put this into practice and what the principles are to kind of take this information and do something useful with it. What we've been doing, again, you and I AJ is we've been not throwing away the baby with the bathwater. We do know that square and vertical do show up on mobile. Some users do like it and we don't want to, you know, shoot ourselves in the foot and just remove them because this data is telling us that it doesn't work as well. But what we want to do is take those six assets and we want to turn off one of the squares and one of the verticals and then replace those two empty gaps with what's working the best. That way now the waiting is towards the 16 by nine and that hopefully will raise all the stats in terms of performance and be way more cost efficient. But we're still giving the opportunity for squares and horizontals to have their day because there might be a click or two, there might be some engagements and those are very, very valuable. But we want to reduce the amount of costs that are being spent on these other aspect ratios that just are simply lighting money on fire for lack of a better phrase.

And then to kind of enlighten on this, too. So you've talked about putting six ads in a single campaign and we know that the way that LinkedIn serves these, if you were just to run that one campaign, you might have some sort of an aberration from it just being a single sample point. So what we've done is we've taken the same test and rolled it out across many campaigns. So if campaign one ignores ad C campaign two, campaign three, campaign four, they all have a chance to give that same creative a chance to live.

Chandler

Absolutely. And the other thing too is I wouldn't take this information and put it into practice right away. I would actually extend this experiment across your whole funnel because one of the things that I think might still be up for debate is do these other aspect ratios perform better down funnel? Now, our evidence is suggesting no. All the data we're seeing is suggesting no, but it's still worth the test because there are surprises. There are things that happen and there could be shifts in consumer behavior on the ad map. There could be shifts in the algorithm. So the idea of taking that experiment and then extending it across your whole funnel is a great way to look at the whole ecosystem holistically and see if that trend continues. Bottom of the funnel too, you'll have a smaller audience and so you'll be getting more impressions potentially depending on your budget. So it might be a good idea to keep them all on because bottom of the funnel clicks are the most valuable to you. That's a personal opinion, but if we're talking about cost efficiency to capture audiences and bring them into the funnel and facilitate their journey on down, your number one objective should be to be as efficient as possible because your cold audience will always be the biggest and you want to make sure every dollar you spend is going as far as it possibly can go. So you got to look at the micro, you got to look at the macro, you got to look at the big picture altogether and see what your data tells you, but I'm going to almost guarantee that you'll find very similar findings to what we found and you're going to be very surprised because again, everyone was talking that vertical was the cat's pajamas and here we are with evidence that suggests otherwise.

That's right. And when you're setting up this test, like Chandler mentioned, we set it to even rotation. If you've been listening to me for a long time, you may know that's borderline heresy. What I would suggest is set it to even rotation. Just take away any possibility for LinkedIn's algorithm to over favor something over another for a week or two and then I would switch it to optimized rotation just because you tend to get better efficiency there.

Chandler

Great advice. That's awesome.

Okay. So then as you actually go to implement this, have the end in mind. If you're going to evaluate it like I did, you need to get the data out of LinkedIn and into an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheets, whatever you're using. If you think about when you export data from LinkedIn, what do they give you? You'll notice they do not give you the dimensions. They will give you the video length, but they don't give you the dimensions. So what I would recommend to you, the easiest way to do this is to use the add name field in all of your ads and use some sort of a convention in your ad name to signal to yourself which version of the video it is, what aspect ratio it is. You could say the length if you want, but have some sort of a convention where then in Excel you can parse out these values into their own column. And then that allows you to very quickly evaluate like, does one of these things matter more than another?

Chandler

That's great advice and naming conventions, you know, in and of itself could be a whole other episode because you are the master at it. I learned everything about naming conventions from you, but that's as simple as putting a underscore SQ for square underscore HZ for horizontal and underscore VT for vertical. But AJ is absolutely right. If you can't tell which ad is which, you're not going to be looking at the data correctly. And that's one of the most important things is to make sure you're not only doing the test correctly, but also labeling everything properly. So you can look at the data the clearest and most accurate way possible, because that's where you actually going to find the results. And if it's a mess, if it's not labeled properly, you might have a different problem.

Totally. And then what I would do, you are going to run a pivot table based off of all of your ad data for however much you have the dimensions that you're breaking out. You want to break out your aspect ratio. And then what I would do is I would line up all of these calculated columns that you create. I would do view rate, which is what percentage of your audience watched two seconds when they were served it. Then there's a 25% view rate, 50% 75, and then your completion rate. LinkedIn will tell you by default view rate and completion rate, you're going to have to create the 25, 50 and 75% view rates through a calculated column. And then I would do the same thing with the costs. So cost per view cost per 25% view cost per 50% cost per 75 cost per completion. And then because we know video consumption is not everything, you also want to look at what is my cost of getting someone to take the action I want, like to get them to my website. Then I would do a cost per link click. And if you actually have conversions to speak of, do a cost per conversion and a conversion rate. And then you want to take into account dwell time as well. That was how I created this report. And the nice thing is that once I've done this once, and I have the same naming conventions for my ads, as I get more data or as I plug in a different account, the pivot table stays. You just tell it, use this other set of data and you can very quickly come up with this report and learn the same things we are.

Chandler

Just looking at some of your tables here in front of me on my screen, one of the most interesting things that I think could be further extrapolated is looking at the overall costs. Right? So, you know, for example, this campaign sample we're looking at, there was $22,000 spent within this sample. $11,000 of that was spent towards the 16 by nine, seven ish being on the one by one, three, almost four on the nine by 16. So it's a really interesting because it's about half, right? About half of that went to the one by ones and the nine by 16. And then you look at the things like view rate being about half of the 16 by nine. So you could have spent that $11,000 that went to the verticals and squares, had those go to the 16 by nine and got double the efficiency, meaning you're capturing twice the amount of audiences for the same exact costs. And over time, that savings of thousands and thousands of dollars that are going to scoop up more audiences for you at a much more efficient rate. And again, cost efficiency and cost savings being one of the number one goals of advertisers. That's pure gold right there. You'd have to go into the weeds and kind of figure out what your efficiency could have been. I don't think we've done that math here, but you can just look at it almost like a black and white example and see that the money might have been well spent with the 16 by nines.

Oh yeah. Take the rest of the budget that was spent on one by ones and nine by 16s and extrapolate based off of that, what would your results, your total completions, total views, total clicks, what would they have been? And I think you'll be greatly surprised like we were.

Chandler

The other thing that's popping out too, I'm just looking at this data and just finding things that are still surprising to me, but the cost per completion is way cheaper on the 16 by nine, almost double the cost on the nine by 16. So again, a completion is really high intent audience behavior on LinkedIn. If someone is completing your ad, whether it's 15 seconds long or 30 seconds long, that's a really good sign. You've captured their attention and you've really sucked them in. And that is an awesome thing for a marketing accomplishment right there. But when you're paying twice as much just for a little bit more real estate on the screen, that's just not sustainable and it's not financially sound idea, nor do I think it's an effective strategy because cost and attention, those are things we got to balance pretty carefully.

Yeah. I'm looking across the whole dataset across the board, the cost per completion by each of these aspect ratios, 16 by nine is between two to two and a half times cheaper blows me away. Wow.

Chandler

Oh, for sure. And actually that trend continues down funnel as well. In this sample, your stage three, which would be probably around the time they're seeing the follow-up ad. Some of these completions are multiple dollars. This is a $11. Now that might be an anomaly because not enough budget was spent there. But when the completion of the 16 by nine is 65 cents, you go, hmm, I could be saving a lot more money than I anticipated just by doing this quick little trick. So very cool stuff.

Yeah. So the advice that we then have to marketers, number one, you have to test, do this test yourself and find out. Don't just rely on our words here. Go and test your different aspect ratios of the same ads. See if you get the same results. If you do, or if you don't, I don't care. I want you to reach out to me and please let us know because we are racking our brains. Is there any hole we can poke in this? I mean, we're here ticks saying that 16 by nine is best here. Like please give us feedback. Let us know if you see the same thing or if you didn't. We would love to hear that feedback.

Chandler

Yeah. And to be completely fair, and we did talk about this before the show and we are trying to poke holes in this as well, because that's what we have to do. We have to be objective. This experiment is based off of high quality video ads made by video brothers. So we aren't sure if this works or if the data is the same on UGC content or thought leadership content. We would need help from the audience to let us know your findings there. And AJ and I plan to run a very similar experiment with that type of content where it's not very highly produced and very flashy content. So we do need to be fair that we're only looking at produced ads, but I'm willing to bet that the data is consistent simply because I think the inventory is just so high and square and vertical that a lot of content creators, brands and marketing teams are kind of fighting an uphill battle trying to stand out in a sea of vertical content. So we'd love someone out there to reach out with the data, doing the same exact experiment, but with less highly produced content. I think that would be a great way to maybe put the final nail in the coffin on this big experiment here.

Yeah. And please anyone else who's running this, the way I would suggest setting this up is when you record talking head content from one of your executives, maybe those are some of the highest performing ads we're seeing on LinkedIn. As you produce it, just ask your editor or if you're editing yourself, just create the same content in all three aspect ratios and then run all three of those as tests. It's a little hard as a thought leader ad, because you're going to have to ask the thought leader to post the same exact post three different times. So you get all three of those, but you don't have to. You could run those as just normal video ads, but that's the next test. But we want to hear what are the results you're getting. Is this revolutionary to you as well as it was for us?

Chandler

And one last thing to help support that experiment forever wants to take it. Not every video needs to be native, a vertical or native square. What we do here at video brothers is we actually create a graphic frame that the 16 by nine video lives within. And that has actually a really great sub benefit that not a lot of people realize, but you have the space above the video and below the video on the square and vertical that you could put your logo, you could put a call to action, you could put your URL. So that's how our ads are served. They're not true native and true vertical because our content needs to be shot nice and wide. And for thought leadership content, it might be the same format. So if you're struggling to figure out how to make those variations, just use the 16 by nine within a graphical frame, throw your logo on top and your URL below. It will look really nice and it will perform and serve the exact same way because the final video itself is in that proper format.

Amazing advice. I sure appreciate that. And I second it as well. Just one shout out to video brothers here at the end. If you want ads that will get you the same performance as what you're getting now, but at one fifth of the cost video brothers, they make incredible cinema quality ads that are hilarious, that are engaging, that are shocking. And I have not yet found a case where your ads are not the absolute highest performing video ads across any advertising I've ever done. So shout out to you guys. Talk to Chandler. If that's something that you think would be amazing in your LinkedIn ads initiatives this year.

Chandler

I appreciate that. Yes. Find us on LinkedIn or at funb2bads.com. We are happy to help. And I will chat with anybody personally about what we're finding here. I'm here to help. And so is AJ. And we are so excited to team up and continue bringing so much value to our awesome b2b clients, SaaS clients, AI clients. And it's going to be an exciting year as we maybe bust more myths about LinkedIn advertising. We'll see what we come up with next.

Awesome. I look forward to every myth that we get to bust. Thank you, Chandler. I sure appreciate your time and expertise and helping me find something that is straight up heresy and amazing that we were so excited to announce.

Chandler

Sounds great.

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