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SUMMARY

In this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, AJ Wilcox delivers a strong warning for B2B marketers: stop using LinkedIn Conversation Ads. After months of testing across multiple high-spend accounts, AJ reveals surprising evidence that Conversation Ads consistently generate significantly lower open rates than Message Ads—even when the audience, sender, subject line, and content are identical. He breaks down the data, shares LinkedIn's official explanations, explores possible causes behind the performance gap, and explains why the promised benefits of Conversation Ads may not outweigh the hidden costs. If you're running Sponsored Messaging campaigns on LinkedIn and want to maximize conversions while reducing wasted spend, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

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TRANSCRIPT

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If you are using LinkedIn conversation ads, you need to stop right now. This is what we're talking about 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 you 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 in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. Who don't like to be pro? I've been cooking on this one for a little while. I've seen some drama with conversation ads in the last six months, and I wanted to really make sure I understood the crux of the issue really gave LinkedIn a chance to solve it on the product side. Basically they came back and there is no solution. So I need to tell you with a sincere warning, do not use conversation ads. They are not worth it. We'll go into exactly why right after the break.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2LINKED.com. The LinkedIn ads experts.

We're the Ad Agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been since 2014, you know, back before it was cool, we built a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team. You won't get a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us whatsoever. Plus with the strategies we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients 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 with me today at B2LINKED.com slash discovery. All right. So I'm doing something new. I've got a lot of swag shirts that I've been given at conferences and stuff. I thought it'd be fun to wear a new one for each episode of the podcast. So this one right here, if you can see, it says work smarter, not harder, smarter queue. All right. They are a scheduling tool for social media. The team is awesome. They are heavily invested in LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to when they become very invested in LinkedIn ads so we can talk about their product more, but I have used the product for scheduling. They're super cool. So if anyone wants to send me your company's swag and I can talk about you on the show, DM me on LinkedIn. And if you have a question, a review or feedback for the show, message me privately on LinkedIn, or you can email us at podcast at B2LINKED.com. You can attach a link to a voice recording from you. That's always awesome. Or if you just have text, that's okay too. I'll just read it aloud. I'll play you right here on the show. Happy to keep you anonymous or shout out your details as well. I want to feature you. All right. With that being said, let's hit it.

So to the crux of the issue, conversation ads are one of the two different ad formats that we have under sponsored messaging. The other one is called message ads. Then about two years ago, I ended up switching over from message ads to conversation ads entirely. The reason for that was conversation ads, every time someone opens or clicks, that's a retargetable event and it's not on message ads. So I was like, yeah, of course I want to use conversation ads. Also, conversation ads are a lot more flexible. You can include multiple calls to action. You can just do more with them. So those were all the reasons why I put the final nail in the coffin and said, all right, no more message ads. They're dead. I'm going to start using conversation ads.

So that all changed about six months ago when we're working with a client brand new. They used to be running a lot of heavy message ads. Then we started running exactly the same thing, but it's conversation ads. And we noticed a little bit of a head scratcher. We noticed that all the message ads from the past had open rates that were in like the 55% range, but conversation ads, we could not get them above 35%. Now with the amount that this client is spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on message ads, this became a really big issue. So we decided to do a test. We said we're going to take exact copies of what we're running as a conversation ad. We're going to turn those into message ads. Now these are very simple, the same sender, the same subject line, only one CTA, same audiences. So basically, if you're following along here, the message ad looks indistinguishable from the conversation ad. They are effectively the same thing. So we launch and what do we see to our surprise? Absolutely blew my mind. The conversation ads, again, getting 35% open rates max, the message ads getting 55%. Now that doesn't seem like a huge difference until you realize that based off of the same Click Through Rate in both of those scenarios, we were getting twice as many conversions for the same cost from a message ad. So what that meant is by losing 20% of our opens, it costs us twice as much per conversion, which is just insane. We of course bring this up to LinkedIn. We escalate it to the product and engineering and support teams. We're spending a lot of money here. So we're putting a lot of force behind the support request. LinkedIn comes back and goes, we see no reason why these ad formats should be performing so different. That's actually not true.

They came back with a lot of different reasons, but we went through each of the reasons and how that couldn't be what's causing it. The main argument from LinkedIn's engineering side, they were saying that, hey, because conversation ads are targeting the people who are more likely to engage with a conversation ad, not the same people that are in the auction for message ads. That's the reason why there's such a difference. I just don't buy it. I mean, these are the same audiences, same sender, same subject line. And so to the user, they look identical. Yes, the conversation ads auction could be trying to optimize towards a certain kind of person, but over the long run, when we've sent enough of these things, we should see those metrics start to even out.

So what about this issue of retargetability? The reason we love conversation ads so much is we can retarget the engagers. Well, to me, retargeting is one of those things that is really important to build retargeting audiences in our stage one and our stage two, our top and middle of funnel. But we tend to use sponsored messaging in stage three in the bottom of the funnel. So we're not actually retargeting many of the engagers here because they're already in our stage three. We're not going to keep retargeting them into like a stage four or stage five usually, unless you have tons and tons of money. So because of that, I actually don't care about moving back to message ads and losing that retargetability. No problem whatsoever. So was it just this one account? No, it's not. We went and performed exactly the same test across like 10 other accounts who were all running conversation ads. All of them except two saw exactly the same thing. And in those two, what we saw is that message ads had a faster open rate while the conversation ads eventually got to the same rate, but it took longer. Not quite sure why. We also posed the same question to the fanatics in the LinkedIn ads fanatics community, which if you're not already a member, what are you waiting for? And sure enough, lots of us there all performed the same test. All of us came back and said: "Wow, message ads just performed better". All right. So if I'm going to put my tinfoil hat on here and try to come up with a reason, like why is this happening? Here are a few different potential reasons that I could think of. LinkedIn engineering said these are not happening, but this is just the only way that I can think of explaining how this could happen.

Number One, I think maybe conversation ads could be falling into a different mailbox. So when you're looking through your messages, you'll notice that you have an other inbox that's kind of for spam and your main inbox. It's possible that maybe the message ads are landing in the main box while some of the conversation ads, maybe 20 percent of them, maybe they're getting rerouted to the other box. I don't know. This one would actually be worse. What if there's a delivery bug? What if LinkedIn is reporting that they sent a conversation ad, but 20 percent of the time they don't actually deliver it? That would be obviously a huge problem. But then again, LinkedIn engineering, they investigated this and came back and said, no, we see no reason why we could assume that any were not being delivered. All right. What about if they look fundamentally different? What if the conversation ad does not look right, doesn't look like someone would want to open it as much as it does on a message ad? All right. So we've done as many tests as we could here, sending ourselves previews of both kinds of ads. We can't tell any difference before opening the ad before the open. They look identical. Now, after the open, I could understand if there was some kind of an issue like a difference in click through rate because conversation ads, they have that inherent CTA built in that says: "Not Interested", and you can't get rid of that or change that. So the message ad is going to have only one CTA while the conversation ad will always have at least two. So those are all the scenarios I've been able to think through. I can't come up with any reason.

I would love to hear from you. Have you done this test? Do you have any ideas for why these open rates would be so different even when the content is exactly the same? All right. So I went really deep with LinkedIn support on the Sponsored Messaging ad formats. I found out some stuff that I thought you might be kind of excited about or vaguely interested. So let me just run through this with you. Now, the frequency caps on sponsored messaging are not published out there anywhere, and they're also really, really confusing. So here's how it works. There is a 7 to an 18 day dynamic frequency cap for all members. So based off of their level of activity on the platform, LinkedIn is going to give them a score and decide whether they want to be closer to a seven day or closer to an 18 day frequency cap. If they're really active, they might be able to receive a sponsored message from anyone. But once they receive one of these, the frequency cap is in effect and they can't receive another one for that period. So there is some competition for these users. But if you're really active on the platform, you might receive one of these every seven days. If you're not very active, let's say you only log in once every 18 days, then you might only receive one of these every 18 days. But there is a catch here. There is a 30 day frequency cap from a sender. So that means that members won't get any sponsored messaging from the same sender for 30 days.

So let's say you have two or three senders on your account. Maybe one is your brand and then one is your CEO and one from a Head Of Product. That means that if they've already received one from the brand, they're not going to receive another one from the brand within 30 days. But once they've received one from the brand, they might get another one from the CEO, let's say within seven days to 18 days. There is also a 30 day frequency cap for the same creative ID. So if you only have one ad running in your ad set for your sponsored messaging, then they will only be able to receive one of those every 30 days. But if you have multiple from different senders and then multiple variations, then you may actually be able to deliver one of these every seven days. All right. So when LinkedIn was sharing their thoughts, their explanation of why conversation ads were performing so much worse, here was their explanation word for word. So, it says: the open rates between message ads and conversation ads, even with identical audience, subject line and copy often reach different subsets of members at send time because of dynamic frequency and eligibility rules.

Conversation ads carry unique, "Not Interested" signals and retargeting options. These factors plus sender differences and reporting windows commonly drive open rate divergence. Also, the not interested CTA that's required on conversation ad messages, when members click that LinkedIn uses that signals to suppress future deliveries of that creative. Repeated disinterest can pause ads from that advertiser for 30 days. Over time, this reduces conversation ads eligibility and can depress opens relative to message ads. Okay. So what they're saying is basically: If people are engaging with the not interested, it might suppress the delivery of conversation ads to them while message ads could still continue delivery. This actually doesn't make sense to me because if they're saying not interested to conversation ads, then those are the people who would not be wanting to open it anyway because they've already reported it saying they don't want more of this. So wouldn't conversation ads deliver more to the audiences who are less likely to be clicking not interested? That's what it seems like to me. So these don't really hold all that much water to me. I'm still looking for a good explanation as to why these ad formats are performing so differently. I would love to hear about your experience. Please let me know. Have you tried this test? Have you tried testing between conversation ads and message ads? If not, if you're still running conversation ads, make sure you run the test. Please shoot me a note. Let me know if you're seeing the same thing that all of us in the fanatics group are seeing and all of our clients are seeing. And then I plead with you, please, please, please do not launch conversation ads anymore. I promise it's not worth it. Keep your messages short. Keep them simple in the end so that they can be a message ad. Run them to bottom of funnel where you don't care about retargeting. And that's going to give you the very best chance of success using the sponsored messaging ad formats. And please LinkedIn, if you're listening, fix the conversation ads delivery. Do whatever sort of investigation you need to do to actually get to the bottom of it. Until then, I refuse to use conversation ads.

All right. If you're not already a member of the LinkedIn ads fanatics community, get over there and check it out. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com. Now, if this is your first time listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button so you get to hear me in your ear holes every episode. Now, if this is not your first time listening, if you're a loyal follower, one of the people who reaches out and says, I love your show, please do me a favor. Go on to Apple podcasts and rate and review the show. With any questions, suggestions, or occasionally we need it corrections. Reach out to us at podcast@b2linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. And as always, I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

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