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SUMMARY

Should you stop using LinkedIn Conversation Ads? After months of testing across multiple high-spend accounts, the answer may surprise you. In this episode of The LinkedIn Ad Show, AJ Wilcox shares compelling evidence that LinkedIn Message Ads are consistently outperforming Conversation Ads—delivering dramatically higher open rates and, in many cases, cutting cost per conversion in half. AJ walks through the data, the experiments, LinkedIn's explanations, and why he believes marketers should rethink their sponsored messaging strategy until the platform addresses the issue. If you're investing in LinkedIn Ads, then this episode is for you.

TRANSCRIPT

I've got a new favorite metric that I use to evaluate performance of all my LinkedIn ads. It's called CPRM. I'm sharing everything about it on this week's episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to The LinkedIn Ad 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 B2B marketers and their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status, before AI takes everything over. As I alluded to in the teaser, I have a new favorite metric that I use to evaluate all of the performance of every account that I run, and it has been absolutely crucial to me, and it's called CPRM.

It stands for cost per retargetable member. I'm going to share exactly how to calculate it and why it matters right after the break. 

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

B2Linked is the ad agency 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads, and we have been since 2014. You know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team. You won't get any sort of cookie-cutter approach or a standard account template from us.

Everything's custom. We've pioneered the strategies that we share with you here for free on the podcast, plus we use it 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 today at b2linked.com/discovery.

All right. First off, in the news, there have been several changes on LinkedIn that have been mostly really positive. I'm gonna walk you through everything we've seen this week. First off, a lot of people have been talking about this. LinkedIn finally let us target by device. It's amazing. If you go down into the targeting options, there will be one just called devices.

Under mobile, you can split it up between iOS and Android, so that would be pretty cool for app developers, I think. And then on desktop, you can break down by desktop, mobile, or tablet. I haven't had a chance to play too much with it, so I'm gonna be doing some A/B tests, some deep dives. So far, it looks to be that desktop traffic is obviously way lower, which is what you'd expect.

There's, you know, probably only 20% of people are using desktop on LinkedIn, and it looks like prices are slightly elevated, maybe, like, 20%, 30% to get desktop traffic, but that's just preliminarily what I'm seeing. I can't wait to do a little bit more testing. We also had a client bring to our attention inside of lead generation forms now, when you go down to the UTM parameter section, these are the UTMs, the parameters, the tracking that the form will pass through into your CRM.

It's always been static values. We had to hard code, like, a campaign name or a campaign ID or something, which really sucks because with every ad that we launch, we give every ad a unique tracking parameter so that when that ad converts, we know the exact ad, the exact ad set, the exact targeting that led to that. But when we use lead gen forms, we don't get that, at least we haven't until now.

So now we have some dynamic parameters that you can pass right through your lead gen form. I'll back up a little bit: the reason why this is so valuable is because you can have one lead gen form that multiple ads across multiple ad sets can all use. So it makes it a little harder where if you want, down to the ad set tracking, you would have to create a separate lead gen form for every one of those ads or ad sets, and we actually have done this.

We've got a couple of large accounts right now where we're running hundreds of ad sets with hundreds of different lead gen forms so that each one can have its own lead gen form. You get it. All right. So now that we can pass a dynamic parameter, we can have a single lead gen form that, because it's able to pass that parameter, like its ad set ID, or ad set name, or probably even creative ID, I haven't checked that one, but since that can be passed through, you can have a single form, and it can be shared across multiple ad formats, multiple ad sets, multiple even campaigns.

Very cool. I also saw that LinkedIn is testing granular company size targeting. I don't know if this is rolled out to everyone yet, but the way that it works is now between the company sizes of 1K and 5K, because 1K-sized companies and 5K-sized companies probably act very differently, they've now broken it up by thousands.

So we can target 1,000 to 2,000, 2,000 to 3,000, 3,000 to 4,000, and 4,000 to 5,000. I'm all up for this. The challenge is, of course, that the company sizes, we have to have the companies themselves who administer the page, they declare the size of their company. So LinkedIn can give us these buckets of, let's say, 3K to 4K, but if no one has gone into their company page and updated it, then they're still gonna be in that 1K to 5K range.

This may not be super effective for a while, but as soon as company page owners have caught up and actually registered their companies with the proper size, I'm really for this. I think this is gonna be a great change long term A shout-out to Kasper Hamann, who's one of our super fanatics in the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community.

He pointed out that we can now optimize, we have a new optimization type for video thought leader ads. You can now choose the optimization of video viewers, which is actually fantastic. I really like this. So the reason for it is when we run video thought leader ads, engagement is the objective that I tend to favor, and that means we only pay when someone creates an engagement on the video post.

But watching the video as it's auto-playing doesn't count as an engagement, so this really works in our favor. That means with LinkedIn targeting people who are more likely to watch longer in videos, we're still paying by the engagement, and that means we're going to get more people who make it [00:06:00] further into the video, and it shouldn't cost us any more.

In fact, it should cost less, at least in my mind. So I'm gonna be trying this out. I'm curious to see if it's in all of your accounts. Reach out to me and let me know. One nice little UI tweak that happened this week, when you go into your plan and then Audiences, it used to be that when you create a new retargeting audience, you would have to click into Matched audiences first, which didn't make a whole lot of sense.

If you don't know that your retargeting audiences are under Matched audiences, you may not know what to click. So now LinkedIn broke it out so there's a 3rd option. There's are you gonna create a predictive audience? Have no idea why that's the first, 'cause that's probably the last thing that we do in an account.

But whatever, it's predictive, it's matched, and now it's retargeting. That is a nice quality of life change. There's lots of other little UI tweaks that have happened this week. I would say nothing really monumental, but definitely enough to make me look like a moron when I'm sharing my screen on client calls and I can't find that one button has been moved You've heard me say this before, I'm wearing a different swag shirt every time I do an episode.

I'm shouting out whoever's sending me swag. I get a lot of these kinds of swag shirts from conferences, from stuff that I do, so I thought it'd be fun to wear it and shout you out. All right, so this shirt right here, this is from NoteGo.ai. It's actually released by Social Media Examiner, the same one, you know, Michael Stelzner's the CEO.

He runs the Social Media Marketing Podcast that is huge. He runs the Social Media Marketing World Conference that is awesome, I attend it every year. What this is, it's a tool where you can screen record, you can use tools to point things out, and make it really easy to send a link. For years, I've actually used Loom to do the same thing, but I've recently tried out NoteGo.

I love how you can use on-screen tools to point. I'm used to having to, like, move my mouse around something to call attention to it. Now I can just grab a tool and drag a box. So I absolutely love it. The Social Media Examiner team, and especially Michael Stelzner, are absolutely amazing, so I'm excited to shout them out.

If you're looking for some kind of a tool to make it really easy to send feedback, send details or examples, or even reply to emails over voice, that's what I use it for, definitely check it out. NoteGo.ai. All right, if anyone wants to send me your company's swag and I can talk about you on the show, DM me on LinkedIn.

We'll make it happen. All right, do you have a question, review, or feedback for the show? Message me on LinkedIn, or you can email us at podcast@b2linked.com. If you attach a link to a voice recording from you, that's awesome, 'cause I can play you right here on the show. I'm also happy to keep you anonymous or share your details as well, whatever you want.

I hope you know I want to feature you. Without further ado, let's hit it.

All right, so for this new favorite metric that I'm telling you about, CPRM, or CPRM if you wanna just spit it out there, let me set up the story for you and why this matters. 99% of our clients, if you really nail them down and ask them what they really want, 'cause if you don't nail them down, they're gonna say, "Oh, we want awareness for our brand with our target audience."

No. No, you don't. What you actually want is to line up booked meetings for your sales team. That's what you really want. We also know that if we go to a cold audience, and we ask them immediately for a meeting, it's not gonna go well. It's probably gonna be a very expensive lead, and it's not a very educated lead.

Do you think your sales team like getting on calls with people who are like, "So who are you again?" No. No, they don't. They're gonna hate your leads. They're super cold leads. So as marketers, we know that our job is going to be to run ads that nurture and educate the audiences until they know, like, and trust us, until the point where they're going to be actually much more willing to convert and hop on a call with someone in sales.

So here at B2Linked, we do that through a three-stage funnel process. In Stage 1, we show them assets to the cold audiences. We retarget them in Stage 2, thinking of them as like a warm middle-of-funnel. And then in Stage 3, we target them at the bottom of the funnel with ad sets that are actually driving a real conversion event.

Usually for us, this is a combination of single image ads and message ads. So if our goal is to get them to Stage 3, so that they can be as educated and nurtured as possible, then the focus for us really becomes what can we show them at Stage 1 and Stage 2 to most effectively and efficiently get them to love, learn to trust the brand?

That's when this new metric really kicks in. So CPRM stands for Cost Per Retargetable Member. That's an efficiency metric that allows you to measure how much do you have to pay at each stage in order to graduate someone to the next stage. As you'd imagine, every ad format has a different cost per retargetable member, and especially, you could even have the same ad format inside of different objectives, and that's going to change your cost per retargetable member greatly.

So I'm going to share with you my favorite mix of ad formats with their associated cost per retargetable member and talk about the mix of, you know, cost versus quality of that interaction. Leading off number one with my absolute favorite, these are thought leader ads in the video category. These are by far the best mix of cost and quality.

They're really low cost because they're video. Video tends to be really cheap, and they're really high in quality because by the time we retarget someone in a video, it's because they've watched 25% or 50% of a video. And usually, my videos are going to be like 30 to 40 seconds if they're a Stage 1 cold audience, and that means that if you watch 50% of that, you've been watching 15, 20 seconds of a video.

And if you've done it right with animated subtitles on the video, which we've talked about many times here before, you can get your cost per retargetable member down to $.50 to $1 US. If you're paying more than that, you're probably paying too much, maybe bidding too high, maybe using maximum delivery bidding, which is just gonna rake you across the coals, or maybe your video is not performing very well and people aren't sticking around.

My next favorite is thought leader ads, but static. So the way that we retarget people who engage with a static thought leader ad, it is by them engaging with the post. Now, the cost is gonna be a little bit higher because I'm gonna run my thought leader ads in the engagement objective, and in the engagement objective, I usually start out by bidding $1 per engagement.

So if I'm paying $1 per engagement, and it takes an engagement in order for them to be retargeted, that means that I'm paying $1 per retargetable member. And then you think about what did someone actually have to do with that ad in order to become retargeted, and how valuable and how deep was that interaction?

Well, an engagement on a static thought leader ad can be anything. They can click on the "... More" to read more of your post. That's where most of those clicks go, but it can also be a like or a comment or a click to your profile or a click to your company's page. Really anything that you do to that post is going to count as an engagement.

So I'd ask you, how much does someone know about your post, about your company, about you, when all they've done is click one of those things once? I question it. So if I'm paying $.50 per retargetable member from thought leader video ads, or I'm paying twice that for a single image ad, and as a video, I know they watched 10 or 15 seconds of video, maybe even 20, but on a single image ad, I don't know how much time they actually stuck there.

I'm gonna say that thought leader ad static is probably gonna come in second place. I still really prefer the video ones. So that takes me to my 3rd example here, are just normal vanilla video ads. That means video ads that you're running from your company page. Now, because it's video, you're going to get really good quality of interactions.

Again, you're probably gonna get someone watching 15, 20 seconds or more. They're gonna really get the gist of what your video is trying to communicate. And depending on your objective, your costs could be really good here, maybe even better than single image static. Of course, I love video ads as thought leader ads.

That's what I would prefer, but if you can't get them as a thought leader ad, I still really love video ads. And of course, you have several different objectives that you can run your video ad in. My absolute favorite, because it's the lowest cost per retargetable member, this is running your video ads on the website visits objective.

That's because lots of people will watch your video, lots will make it to 50%, but very few will click the link at the bottom, and it's only when someone clicks the CTA there to go to your landing page, that's only when you get charged. So you might be bidding $10, $15 per click, but lots of people are gonna watch that video, very few will click.

So you're gonna build up really cheap retargeting audiences, just because not very many people are taking the action that charges you, but a lot of people are taking the action that gets them retargeted, and that results in the lowest cost per retargetable member. Love it. Now, if you're running on the video views objective, you are going to pay a little bit for every person who watches up to two seconds.

And so for this to be inexpensive, you have to have a lot of people watching all the way to 50%. So if your video is really good at getting people to stick around and watch more, video views can be very inexpensive, but usually it's pretty expensive. Then you can also use the engagement objective. That's kind of in between.

I still prefer website visits when possible, but engagement is kind of my second favorite there. All right, if we've talked privately, you've probably heard me talk about our document ads hack. This is where you run document ads on the website visits objective. This creates your very lowest cost per retargetable member of every ad type, period.

We're getting our cost per retargetable member using document ads down to, like, $.02 and $.03 per person. It's crazy. The reason why I may not recommend this for everyone is because I question the quality of the interaction. So in order to retarget people on a document ad, the only way that you can really do it is by those who engage with the document.

So if you look at document ads, they are very engaging. It's actually really uncommon for us to get a document that has less than, like, a 10% engagement rate. So that means you show the document a hundred times, ten people are going to end up at least flipping to the next slide because they're so engaging. So when you are running documents on the website visits objective, your click-through rate is probably gonna drop to 0.1%, almost nothing, because People are engaging with the document itself.

They're not looking at the CTA at the bottom. So you may have to bid really high 'cause LinkedIn's like, "I don't wanna keep showing this," because no one's clicking on it. But if you're bidding, $20 per click, LinkedIn's gonna keep showing it, and 10% of the time, 20% of the time when LinkedIn is showing it, someone is navigating to the next slide, and they're getting retargeted.

So I question the quality because if someone just clicks through one slide, they may not have actually gotten the gist of what the document is and who we are. So yes, very low cost, really cool that way, but, if I'm running a [00:17:00] funnel just with document ads, I'm probably going to run 4, 5, 6 stages where they have to interact with a whole bunch of documents, so I can actually be sure by the time they got to the end, they actually knew who we were, they actually know, like and trust us at that point.

All right, so cost per retargetable member, how do you actually set this up and calculate it? If it's with any sort of video ad, it's really simple. You just go into your plan, Audiences, and create a video retargeting audience. And usually I'll do, like, 180 days 'cause I want this audience to be as big as possible.

But you can cut it down to 90 days or even 30 if you want. But what you'll do is you'll say, "These ad sets here that are my video ad sets, anyone who's watched at least 50% of the videos in one of those ad sets, put them into a retargeting audience." Then you can take that retargeting audience, and that becomes the audience that you're going to target in your Stage 2.

Or if this was set up for your Stage 2, that's the audience that you're now going to retarget in your Stage 3. And then at any time, you can look at your metrics, and if you just, you look at any video that is generating views, and you take your cost and you divide it by your 50% viewers. Or if you're targeting by 25% viewers, it's the same thing.

You take your cost, you divide it by your number of 25% video views. Usually, I will export my data from Campaign Manager into Excel, so I can do that as a, a quick, easy formula across lots of different ad sets or across lots of different ads. But that's how you can calculate and decide which videos, which ad types, which objectives are going to give you your very best cost per retargetable member.

If this is a static ad of any kind, that means your single image ads or your static or single image thought leader ads, you go into Plan, Audiences, and then you create a single image ad retargeting audience. You select the ad sets that are single image or static ad sets that you want to capture the engagers from, and it's actually the same process for document ads.

You'll just choose Document Ads Engagers and run it the same way.  So no matter what ad format you're running, I would suggest go in and create these retargeting audiences so that they are set up and they're ready, and then you can very easily create this funnel, a two or a three-stage funnel, anytime that you want.

Now, here's a bonus metric for you. This is one that I call Retargetable Member Rate, or RMR. So the same way that we calculate cost per retargetable member, it's also helpful to be able to calculate your RMR, or Retargetable Member Rate. So what this is? It's the percentage of the time that whenever you serve or pay for an impression of your ad, that it will turn into a retargetable member.

So for instance, if you're running a video ad, if you calculate how many video views or how many impressions does it take in order to get a 50% viewer, that is your retargetable member rate. This is really a reflection on how effective your creative is at getting people to do what it is you want them to do.

So you might have a video that has, like, a 20% RMR. That means 20% of the time where someone is a viewer, they end up watching all the way to 50%. That's amazing. Or you could have a crappy video that has, like, a 1% RMR. You could also call this your 50% video view rate. Then with single image or even thought leader static, you actually judge this one the same way.

You don't need to do a special calculation here. All you do is you go and look at your engagement rate. So under Columns, you choose Engagement, scroll all the way to the right, the second to right column, or the second to furthest column is your engagement rate, and that is your RMR. It's your engagement rate, and every engagement on a single image, static ad, or a thought leader static becomes retargeted.

Document ads, actually the same thing. It's your engagement rate. So it's also really important to know that if you go and actually look inside your retargeting audience as it builds, that number may not actually match up to the number that Campaign Manager shows. For instance, you might show that you have, like, 650 people in your video retargeting audience, and then you go and look at your video ad sets, and they have, like, 690 50% viewers.

What that means is 40 of those people were actually repeat viewers. So two people ended up watching all the way to 50% twice, so LinkedIn's not going to count them as two separate people, 'cause it's the same one person. So it's okay if there's a little bit of disagreement there in those numbers. What I love about calculating these new rates, your cost per retargetable member and your retargetable member rate...

That's actually really fun to say, retargetable. The reason why I really appreciate calculating this is because before we had such awesome retargeting on LinkedIn, we would have to build funnels by the click, usually by the website click, and that's already problematic because of cookies and lack of tracking.

But also the costs of getting someone to a landing page, they're usually, $7 to $14 currently. And so if you're gonna build a three-stage funnel, and you have to pay for the same person, you know, $7 to $14 in Stage 1, again in Stage 2, again in Stage 3, your costs are pretty crazy. But now when we have these ad formats that are generating cost per retargetable member of cents to even a dollar or thereabout, you can build really efficient funnels.

So I used to tell people LinkedIn Ads probably doesn't really make sense unless you have a lifetime value of your product over about $10,000. But now I'm starting to see really, really efficient funnels using all of this new retargeting, and you can get the cost a lot lower, really, really reducing your cost per acquisition.

I wanna give a shout-out to Resty Concepcion. He's our editor for the podcast. He's been doing this for years. Resty, thank you for always doing an awesome job of editing. I'm dropping his website and his LinkedIn profile into the show notes here, so just in case you've got a podcast that needs to be edited, Resty is a fantastic choice.

Now, if you're not already a member of our LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community, you've gotta check it out. There you'll find all four of my courses that are meant to take you from absolute LinkedIn Ads beginner to expert, plus it's the whole community, all the top minds in LinkedIn advertising, sharing what they're learning, and really coming together, answering your questions.

We also have the upgraded version where for $279 a month you get access to a weekly group call with me, and it's the lowest cost way for me to give you direct feedback on your campaigns, your ad sets, and your results. You can check that out by going to fanatics.b2linked.com. Now, if this is your first time listening, welcome.

We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit the subscribe button so you get to hear me in your ear holes every week. But if you are not a new member, please do me the honor of going to Apple Podcasts and rating and reviewing. It is by far the biggest favor that you can pay me. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at podcast@b2linked.com.

I would absolutely love to hear what you thought of this episode and anything I might have missed. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week, and I'm cheering you on in all your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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