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SUMMARY

Does the LinkedIn Brand Awareness objective actually build brand awareness—or just increase your ad costs? In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, AJ Wilcox explains why the Brand Awareness objective is one of the most misunderstood features in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. You'll learn why it often costs significantly more than alternative objectives, when it actually makes sense to use it (hint: CTV ads), and which objectives can deliver better awareness and engagement at a lower cost. AJ also covers the latest LinkedIn Ads updates, including campaign naming changes, new thought leader ad capabilities, personalized lead gen forms, and dynamic UTM parameters. If you're running LinkedIn ads and want to make every dollar work harder, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

TRANSCRIPT

I know you want brand awareness on LinkedIn ads, but please stop using the brand awareness objective. It doesn't mean what you think it means. We're discussing the least useful objective 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 advanced B2B marketers and their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. The first thing that you're asked to do when you're trying to create a LinkedIn ad set is what objective you're going after, and almost every advertiser I talk to says that they want brand awareness.

That's one of their objectives. Well, isn't that convenient that they have an objective called brand awareness right there? Of course, you're gonna wanna use that, right? Unfortunately, this objective has way more baggage than an airport carousel. We'll talk about why you may want to consider using a different objective instead.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you byB2Linked.com, the LinkedIn ads experts.

That's right, we are 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, and you won't get a cookie-cutter approach or a standard account template from us.

Plus, with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we 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 management, schedule your free discovery call today at  b2linked.com/discovery. B2linked.com/discovery

All right, in the news, it appears that LinkedIn has fully rolled out their new campaign naming, which has become extremely confusing for advertisers over the last year. I'm gonna try to clear this up. The easy one is the old campaigns are now called ad sets, which I have no problem with whatsoever. This is the level where your audience targeting lives, your objective is chosen, your ad type is selected, and your ads live at.

The really difficult one is the one that used to be called a campaign group, and is now called a campaign. If you've listened to any of the last 170 episodes of the podcast, you will have heard me talk about campaigns a lot. Also, if you've taken any of my courses, I refer to almost everything as a campaign or an ad.

Now, with this new nomenclature, all of the past content I've created has become a point of confusion. As you can imagine, after 15 years of running ads on the platform, it's become very difficult for me to start calling things that I've always referenced as something by a different name. I'm working hard at it.

My commitment to you is that I'm going to try to refer to them as ad sets as much as I possibly can, and I'm starting to do a pretty good job of this. But when I refer to what is now called campaigns, I'm probably going to continue at least for the next year calling them campaign groups, just to add an extra buffer layer between those terms, just to try to lower the confusion factor there.

So anything that you hear from me in my old content, whether it's podcast episodes, YouTube videos, courses, blog posts, my posts on LinkedIn, etc., you'll need to read them through the lens of a campaign actually meaning an ad set. And when I talk about campaign groups, those are actually talking about the new campaigns This is made a little bit simpler because on my stance on campaign groups, I don't like them.

I don't find them useful, and I've found them to actually create more confusion in an account than is necessary, so most of the time I'm not talking about them anyway. So I think if I just start calling them ad sets, everything else is gonna fall into place and you won't be so confused. In other news, there are a lot more CTV, or connected TV, features being brought into Campaign Manager.

So if you or your client, you're already running CTV ads on, like, Amazon, Trade Desk, or Google's 360 platform, your job is gonna be a lot simpler now, so watch for some of that new stuff rolling out. Also, in the past, thought leader ads have only been able to be used in two different objectives, brand awareness and engagement.

But now, if it's a video thought leader ad, you're also able to now use the video views objective. I sincerely hope that LinkedIn continues supporting additional objectives for thought leader ads, because I'm dying to get lead gen forms and website visits objectives associated with them. LinkedIn, I'm standing by for that.

Also, LinkedIn just started supporting personalized lead gen forms. We've had the ability to personalize newsfeed ads, at least most of them for a little bit, and we've had the ability to personalize sponsored messaging for a long time. These are things like inserting their first name, last name, their title, their company name, et cetera, into the ad fields.

Now, seeing your name in an ad does seem to weird some people out, but I would argue it makes a lot more sense when you're personalizing inside of a lead gen form. Because when the lead gen form opens, it automatically fills in everything it knows about you, including your name. So it's not a far stretch if they've put your name down below in the form fields, why couldn't they use it up in the text?

It makes perfect sense. It's a lot less creepy. I think this is gonna be pretty useful. So now lead gen forms will be able to call out to you by name. It's also really cool to see that lead gen forms are supporting dynamic UTM parameters now. If we wanted ad-level tracking or ad set-level tracking on a lead gen form, we used to have to create a separate form for every ad set or every individual ad to get that level of tracking.

But now, thank goodness, we don't have to do that anymore. We can pass dynamic parameters through them, so you can pass an ad set name, an ad set ID, an ad ID, all of those things. It's very cool in theory. I haven't had a chance to try this one out yet, but I've already seen it in several of my accounts, and I'm really bullish on the feature.

All right, I'm doing something new. I've got a lot of swag shirts and swag that I've been given at conferences and stuff over the years. I thought it'd be fun to wear a new one for each episode of the podcast. All right, so this shirt is from bigleap.com. They are an SEO agency, uh, here local to me in Utah.

We actually used to sublet from them, so the B2Linked office was right inside of the Big Leap office, and they're great people, good friends. The owner is Brian Phelps. He's my go-to for any time I have an SEO question that gets really difficult or technical. So if you're looking for SEO services, I recommend checking them out, and I sure like the shirt.

Thanks, Big Leap. All right, if anyone wants to send me your company's swag and I can talk you up on the show, DM me on LinkedIn. A huge thank you to Wyatt Bonacelli for leaving a review for us on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much. Wyatt said, "I've been using The LinkedIn Ads Show with AJ Wilcox to build out a paid social service offering from scratch.

Coming from an organic background, I was skeptical, but AJ makes LinkedIn advertising genuinely approachable. His episodes cover everything from campaign structure to bidding strategy in a way that actually sticks. The fact that he gives this level of insight away for free is something I don't take for granted.

If you're an agency owner looking to add a new service line, start here. Thanks, AJ. You've made a real impact." All right, that's Wyatt Bonacelli from Evolve Agency. Thanks, Wyatt. I super appreciate their view. If you've got a question, review, or feedback for the show, please message me on LinkedIn. My DMs are free and open.

You can also email us at podcast@b2linked.com, and you can attach a link to a voice recording from you, and I can play you right on the show, or just leave dumb text. That's okay as well. I'm happy to shout out your details or keep you anonymous. I hope you know I want to feature you. All right, without further ado, let's hit it.

Okay, the long and short of it is that the brand awareness objective doesn't mean what you think it means. There are so many limitations with this objective that it becomes really confusing for someone who sees a name like brand awareness, which of course every B2B company needs awareness, but it's actually used to describe an objective with very little use, in my opinion.

The biggest downside to the brand awareness objective is that the only way that you're allowed to pay is by the impression, and if you're a regular viewer of the show, you know that paying by the impression on LinkedIn is the most expensive way to pay for LinkedIn ads attention at least 95% of the time.

You can use maximum delivery, which I would guess that probably99% of advertisers who use brand awareness are, but you can also use cost cap bidding, which is still CPM bidding, but a little bit more controlled, and you can also use manual CPM bidding, which I would love to use more often. But in Campaign Manager, they have a stupid rule that you have to have a daily budget that's a- at least your bid.

So if I wanted to set an $80 manual CPM bid, I have to have a daily budget of at least $80, which is untenable for many of the advertisers on LinkedIn, and honestly, it's just ridiculous. LinkedIn can decide how many impressions it wants to show, so if you only have enough budget for, you know,200 views during the day, LinkedIn knows how to serve 200 impressions and then stop.

But whatever So here you have an objective that no matter how you set it up and how you're bidding, you're likely going to be overpaying. And yet this is the objective that's billed as for brand awareness, which should be the most basic objective to start your campaigns with. And yet the only time I would ever consider using brand awareness objective is when I'm running CTV ads, and that's because it's the only option.

Now, there is one redeeming factor of the brand awareness objective that you don't get anywhere else, and that's the ability to optimize by reach. You see, all the other objectives are showing your ads to whoever is available, but with brand awareness, you could say, "I want my ads to be shown mostly to net new people who haven't ever seen my ads before, and I want to reach more unique people."

So if you have two prospects who show up on LinkedIn at exactly the same time, one of them has seen your ads before, but the other has not, LinkedIn can make that conscious decision to show it to the net new person, allowing your ads to more reliably reach brand-new audiences. Very cool. You can't do this with any other objective.

Unfortunately, in order to get this, you have to pay by the impression, which is, again, the most expensive way to pay usually, and so not super worthwhile in my opinion. I would much rather get more efficient costs. When I talk to LinkedIn reps, they talk about running brand awareness ad sets to the broadest audiences, kind of like it's trying to address the whole buyer's committee from the beginning.

And since we've already established that the brand awareness objective is probably the most expensive way to reach those prospects, and the buyer's committee tends to be the least interested in your ads at this point, this isn't a great combination in my opinion. My recommendation would be advertise to your most interested and tightest audiences, and as soon as you see engaged interest from any of these prospects, like they filled out a form of any kind, I would then add the buying committee from that company to separate targeting, where I'm showing them my most engaging stuff.

This way, you keep your costs the very lowest. You don't start spending on the rest of the buyer's committee until someone from that company has already registered interest. I found this to be very, very efficient. All right, so I've been crapping on the brand awareness objective, and I can hear you all saying, "All right, well, what should I use instead?"

Well, you have several good choices here. If the purpose of the ad is leading someone to a landing page, I would almost always recommend website visits as the objective. If there is no goal of getting someone off of LinkedIn, then I would suggest the engagement objective. Engagement is very similar to brand awareness, except it has one very bright spot.

It allows you to bid by the click Now, the definition in the engagement objective of what a click is, is really any type of engagement on the post. So if you look at your cost per click here, it's going to be essentially measuring what's your cost per someone hitting See More to read more of your ad text, or cost per like, cost per comment, cost per clicking to your profile, clicking on your company name, all of those count as a click.

And this is a lot less valuable to you than someone going to your website. So of course, you would expect your cost per engagement to be alot lower than your cost per website visit. But recently, I've seen LinkedIn's bid recommendations on the engagement objective go absolutely nuts. Just yesterday, I saw an ad set where LinkedIn was recommending 4 to $12 per engagement.

For an engagement like clicking ... See More at the top of the post, sorry, that just isn't worth it I usually try to keep my engagement bids somewhere around $1 if I'm targeting anywhere in North America. We also have members of the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community who are paying 30 cents or less per engagement because they have such incredible engagement rates on their ads.

I feel totally uncomfortable bidding higher than about $1.50,or maybe even $2 per engagement, regardless of what the recommended bid range says. You have my permission to wholesale ignore it. It lies. So I have to ask you, when you say that you want brand awareness, what do you actually have in mind? Are you looking to serve as many impressions as you can at the lowest cost possible?

You can actually do this more effectively and cheaper with other objectives. It's very rare when I see the brand awareness objective be able to do this cheaper, and that's because when I see the maximum delivery option being used, I routinely see LinkedIn bidding $150 CPM or higher. I've even seen LinkedIn bid over $10,000 CPM, which is crazy.

Ask me about that privately. But if you take that exact same audience and the exact same ads and you run them on the website visits objective instead, this way, the only time that you'll pay your bid amount is when someone actually clicks on your CTA and goes to your website, which means that you get all of the engagements, all of the views for free.

So when I do this, I routinely see CPMs that are much cheaper, more like in the $40 to $80 CPM range. Much better. So I think a much better model for what you consider brand awareness would be trying to get your ideal prospects to engage in such a way that shows that they actually noticed your ad, and they cared enough about it to click on it in some way.

So I don't really care about CPM very much. I more care about my cost per engagement or cost per engaged user, which you'll definitely get cheaper with other objectives, but you'll even get lower cost per impression than you would with the brand awareness objective usually, so why use it? Butin measuring how valuable an impression is to me, I think someone who is actually engaged in some way is much more valuable to me than just someone that I know the ad crossed across their screen at some point.

The advertisers that I see running ad sets in the brand awareness objective tend to be some of the less experienced advertisers, so it pains me to say, but I feel like I also need to warn you, please, please, please, always uncheck the Enable Audience Network option and always uncheck the Enable Audience Expansion option as well.

These are table stakes to having success on the platform. So inshort, I can't think of a great reason to use brand awareness objective when Ican get so much more effective brand awareness from about every other objectiveout there. My advice, avoid brand awareness unless you're running CTV ads. Alright, if this is your first time listening, welcome.

We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button and make sure you're listening to us every week. But if you are one ofour veteran listeners, please do me the great favor of going to Apple Podcastsand leaving a review for the show. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for that. And if you're not already a member of our LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community, what are you waiting for?

Go over to fanatics.b2linked.com, and for a low subscription cost, you'll get access to all four of my courses, plus the community of the brightest minds in LinkedIn ads, and if you choose the upgraded option, we'll get on a weekly group call. With any questions, suggestions, or, like I need it sometimes, corrections, please reach out to us at podcast@b2linked.com.

With that being said, we'll see you back here next week, and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

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