NOTES

• Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert.
• Subscribe/Rate/Review 
• Contact us with any questions, suggestions, or corrections: podcast@B2Linked.com

SUMMARY

In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, AJ Wilcox breaks down a major LinkedIn Ads targeting change that’s been causing advertisers to receive leads and engagement from people who don’t match their company size or ABM targeting criteria. He explains how LinkedIn’s new “fuzzy matching” behavior works, why it may be expanding the platform’s ad inventory at advertisers’ expense, and how it can lead to wasted spend and higher costs per qualified lead.

AJ also shares a practical way to check whether your accounts are affected and what advertisers can ask LinkedIn to do about it, including giving them the option to opt out of fuzzy matching.

TRANSCRIPT

LinkedIn has quietly changed how it matches members to companies, and it's letting a huge chunk of off-target traffic into your campaigns. I'll show you exactly how to check if it's happening to you and what LinkedIn needs to fix 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 in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. So starting back in March, we and a bunch of other advertisers started noticing leads and ad interactions coming from people who flat out didn't fit our targeting: wrong company size, wrong company entirely on ABM lists, etc.

Today, I'm gonna expose exactly what LinkedIn changed, why they did it, and how you can check if it's hurting you, and of course, what we need to demand they fix.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.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, way back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account that 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, with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we 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 at b2linked.com/discovery.

All right, first off in the news, Christian Downer from the Fanatics community noticed a couple weeks ago two new options that were available inside of ad sets. The first was for scheduling, or what we know as dayparting. He got a screenshot of it, but then a few minutes later, the option disappeared. So it must have been a mistaken early rollout.

We knew that LinkedIn was testing scheduling. It was in an alpha or a beta, but this is the first look that I've personally gotten at it. What it looks like is a grid of days of the week and hours of the day, and you can click which ones that you want the ads to be on and which ones to be off during.

Christian also pointed out the right rail alpha in the placement section, and I don't think we've talked about it here on the podcast yet If you go down into Placements, you'll see this new option ticked. I don't know how many accounts have it versus how many don't. I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to it.

But my take on this is that so few people are actually using text ads and dynamic ads now that LinkedIn's looking to put newsfeed ads in the right rail just to make use of the inventory. So while it's in alpha, all the traffic it says is free, so we might as well make use of it. I've seen it in my accounts, but I don't know if it's in all of them.

I'm really curious to hear what you guys think and especially how they're performing. So Christian, a huge thanks for bringing those up in the community. We always love to see screenshots of what's upcoming. And for those of you who are not already in the community, this is where we're passing around what's new, what we're spotting, and you get to see it immediately.

You don't have to wait weeks to hear it on the podcast.

All right, every week I shout out a company that I'm wearing their swag. This one is the Guru Media Hub. If you can see the shirt here, says, "I like marketing and maybe 3 people."

Guru Media Hub is owned by Jay Schwedelson, who runs subjectline.com and hosts the Do This Not That podcast.

Proud to call him a friend. Also Mason Cosby, who heads up Scrappy ABM, he and I have gotten to share a couple stages together before. He knows everything there is to know about ABM marketing. He's a great one to talk to, and he's a great follow as well. Although I don't consider myself antisocial, I do love this shirt because it signals that I'm a marketer, and it's fun being out in public having people start up conversations.

All right, if you want me to shout your company out and wear your swag on a future episode, reach out to me over DMs on LinkedIn. They're free, and they're open, and I'd love to chat with you. I want you to know I want to feature you here on the show. All right, without further ado, let's hit it.

Back in March, we and a bunch of other B2B advertisers, we started seeing something weird. Leads and ad interactions started coming from people who clearly did not fit our company criteria. That means the company size was off, the company name was off, if we were targeting them with an account-based strategy, and not a little off, wildly off. On one client, we were targeting only very senior people at companies of 5,000 or more employees.

Over half of our leads started coming from people at much smaller companies, usually one to two-person companies. We added exclusion after exclusion to try to fight it. In the end, a third of all the leads from that account were coming from people who didn't fit our company size criteria at all. And if a third of your leads don't match, it's a safe bet that a third of the impressions and a third of the clicks are also not matching.

We reached out to LinkedIn Support to figure out what was going on. Their answer, "This is expected behavior." So back in March, LinkedIn rolled out a new change where they started doing what I'm calling fuzzy matching. They would match members to companies who, even though they weren't actually linked to their company page, they would type in the name of their company, and then LinkedIn would say, "Hey, does this closely match a company that we already have a company page for?

Maybe they just didn't select the right company, or forgot, or whatever." And even members who have not attached themselves to an actual LinkedIn company page are now being targeted as if they did. If someone just types a company name into their profile employer field instead of linking to the real page, LinkedIn is now going to start to try to match that to the closest company name it can find, and then it treats that member as if they worked there at that specific company.

So if you typed Acme as your employer and never linked a page, LinkedIn might now decide that you work at some large well-known company that also has Acme somewhere in its name or a similar name, and then boom, you're suddenly being counted as an employee of a 5,000-person company for ad targeting.

LinkedIn's own reported demographics will back this up, too. If you actually look at the demographics, it'll say people are coming in from 5,000 and above sized companies, and you can actually only catch this mismatch by opening up that person's actual profile and evaluating yourself. It's pretty obvious when you as a human look at the profile.

You can tell like, "Oh, they definitely don't fit our targeting criteria," but obviously this is very hard for LinkedIn to catch. And this isn't just a company size problem either. Just this week, we had a client running ABM lists where the only thing we're using is account-based lists for targeting. They started getting leads and interactions from people who are not employed at any company on their list.

We've checked everything, but the best explanation we can find, those people typed an employer name into their profile that LinkedIn fuzzy matched as being similar enough to one of the companies that are on the ABM list. So why would LinkedIn do this? It's actually really simple. When members don't link themselves to a company page, they wouldn't be eligible to be targeted by advertisers who are using company size and company name targeting, maybe even industry.

So matching these members who are likely at very small, usually solo companies to more established companies, LinkedIn suddenly gets to create more inventory that they can sell to us advertisers It's inflating the reach and impression volume that LinkedIn's reporting to you, and you can only catch it if you're watching the quality, which most advertisers don't have time to deep dive on until it becomes a huge event that they have to answer for.

And this is showing up in the numbers. We have a high-spending advertiser in the Fanatics community who's been tracking this really closely. They've raised it directly with their LinkedIn rep. They've mentioned that 30% of their leads starting in March suddenly were not aligned with their targeting.

They were total trash. They had to be thrown out. That caused their cost per qualified lead to increase by 30%. Now, if overall costs on the platform have dropped by a similar amount over that same stretch, it would be a wash. The problem is they haven't. Costs, CPCs, CPMs are actually rising. They've gone up over this time period.

So advertisers are paying more for a larger share of traffic that doesn't even meet the targeting criteria that we're already paying a premium for here on LinkedIn. All right, so here's how you can check if this is affecting your accounts. If you're targeting by company size and/or company name, I want you to pull up the most recent 10 profiles of people who have either been a lead or are interacting with your ads, and you can quickly pull up their profile, and take a look at where they work, and then compare that to your targeting criteria If close to 30% or even more of what you check doesn't actually match what you're targeting, then you have been affected by this.

The most important thing I want you to walk away with today, go check your own accounts using the method I've talked about, and if you find that you've been affected, which most advertisers probably are, I want you to go straight to your LinkedIn rep and let them know this is a bad change that needs to be fixed, and you're not happy with it.

The more advertisers who are noticing this and raising it, the more likely that LinkedIn is to actually address it. Hopefully, we can still turn it back and reverse what they've done, but I also have some other potential recommendations of how LinkedIn could make this okay for advertisers. I want us to be able to specifically opt out of this fuzzy matching on our own ad sets.

This could be an exclusion segment that shows up in traits that we could just easily add. Most advertisers can still use the fuzzy match, but if you're being affected in a very negative way, you can go and opt out. This could actually be a custom segment that LinkedIn reps have access to, so as soon as someone complains, the LinkedIn rep could add that as an exclusion to their ad sets.

That could be another way. And if we can't opt out of this, at the very least, we could get a 30% discount on our traffic. I'd be okay with that, too. And of course, another option is just revert the change that was made back in March. It's obviously not good for advertisers, or really needs to be made sure that it is matching the exact company, and it's not fuzzy matching so many companies.

This was not good for advertisers. We, as advertisers, we've done the work to define really tight company size and company list targeting. We should get what we paid for. All right, if you're a LinkedIn Ads fan and you're not already a member of our private LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community, what are you waiting for?

We've got all four courses designed to take you from LinkedIn Ads beginner all the way through LinkedIn Ads expert. Plus, the top minds in LinkedIn Ads are all there sharing what they're learning. Plus, there's an upgrade to get on our weekly group call. I try to answer all of your questions that I can on LinkedIn, but I always prioritize the Fanatics community.

So if you wanna get direct feedback and support from me, please come join us. That's at fanatics.b2linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button so you hear us again next week. And if you're a loyal listener, I would love it if you would do me the honor, go to Apple Podcasts and rate and review the show, and of course, I would love to shout you out for your review.

With any questions, suggestions, or 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 all your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

‍