Category
Podcasts

Ep 53 - LinkedIn Ads Top Challenges and Solutions | Community Feedback Session

AJ Wilcox
February 18, 2022

SHOW RESOURCES

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Episode 51: Boosted Posts

Episode 7: Account Organization

Episode 36: AB Testing Strategy

Episode 17: Leadgen Forms

Episode 20: Audience Sizes

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

What are the top challenges that LinkedIn advertisers face? How do you get around them? Well, we’re tackling them directly from the community this week on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we asked you, the LinkedIn Ads community, for the top challenges you face on the platform. And today I’m going to share our recommendations, explanations, how to overcome them, work arounds, anything like that that would be helpful to your largest challenges. I think it goes without saying, but a huge thank you to those of you who responded by providing your challenges. We always love to hear from our listeners and we certainly love to explore all the different areas of LinkedIn Ads. Alright, let’s hit it.

Okay, longtime listener of the show Maninder Paul says, “I want a schedule feature! It would save so much hassle. Is there another way to automate ad scheduling, say only on weekdays, just trying my luck, smiley face.” She followed that up by saying, “Curious, do you let the ads run over the weekend, or keep them strictly for weekdays.” So lots of questions specifically about scheduling. And we’ll definitely have an episode about this in the future. But this is super, super important to be able to schedule on LinkedIn. We know that the majority of the traffic patterns are going to follow the patterns of the general work day, which is not something that we see on the other ad platforms. And the fact that LinkedIn has never released a scheduling feature is actually just kind of embarrassing. For lots of years, I did things like waking up early to make sure I unpaused campaigns at certain times and pausssed at the end of the day and pause before I left for a weekend. I’m pausing when I came back. So even if you can’t really schedule your campaigns, at least automatically within campaign manager, there are lots of different things that you can still do to test everything that you’re asking about. So it is manual, but you can test different days of the week. That’s actually pretty easy because even if you’re just letting your ads run, you can still analyze your data by day of the week. And LinkedIn lets us do that pretty easily. When you start pulling in data from your analytics platform, and CRMs, that’s when you can start to figure out what times of day certain leads, or certain lead quality is occurring. So I would highly recommend, you know, at least to start out, go ahead and run your ads across all days of the week, but go back and analyze and if you find that your weekends are bringing in a higher cost per lead, or a lower quality of lead, that could be a clue to you that you might want to pause on the weekends. But as fair warning, we’ve had several clients who actually perform better on weekends and less on weekdays so we end up bidding them up over the weekends, or even trying to fully exhaust their monthly budget based just on weekends. So totally depends on the strategy, the audience, the offer the client, all of that. Like we’ve mentioned before, ad scheduling is definitely a challenge. That’s why we came up with our own internal scheduling tool. So if you partner with us, you get free access to the tool, along with access to our full team of experts. So little bit of a plug there. But yeah, we’ve felt exactly the same painn, and we turned to technology to solve it because LinkedIn obviously wasn’t gonna do it. Another longtime listener of the show and friend, Leonardo Bellini says, “Hi, AJ, I have some questions or issues.” And he lists three points here. Number one, “As you know, it’s now impossible to use message ads here in Italy. What’s the best LinkedIn ads alternatives?” Number two, he asks, “When is it meaningful to use message or conversation ads?” And then number three, “Speaking about follower ads, I have noticed are not performing and are a bit expensive, which is the best campaign or approach to increase a LinkedIn page follower count?” So this is something that we haven’t talked about on the show before. But in Europe, because of GDPR, LinkedIn basically took all of the sponsored messaging ad formats, message ads, and conversation ads just off the table. And I certainly hope their lawyers are hard at work trying to figure out how they can make these work, because they are certainly helpful ad formats. That being said, I’ve talked about in the past how they are LinkedIn’s most expensive ads on average, and they probably only work well in about 5% of the cases that we see. They work best when you have a personal invitation. So Sponsored messaging looks like it comes from a person. And if it’s just saying, Hey, I thought you’d like to download this white paper, or I thought you’d like to talk to our sales rep, those things don’t feel personal and because you pay for the sand and not for the click, if you have an offer that doesn’t get clicked on the overall cost per click and therefore cost per lead becomes insanely expensive. Here in North America, we see an average of like $28 to $58 per click on these message formats. So most of the time, I would say, not a big loss. But if you do have a really good personal invitation type of offer that would work well, and you happen to live in Europe where we can’t use them, my recommendation would be, if you can’t use the sponsored messaging ad formats, use sponsored content ads, instead. Most of the time these perform better anyway, they will feel less personal. But most of the time, they’ll have a lower cost per click, and therefore a lower cost per conversion. And because they’re right there in the newsfeed, which as we know, is the default experience for both desktop and mobile users of LinkedIn, you’ll definitely reach quite a few people. It won’t be quite guaranteed delivery, like the sponsored message ad formats are, but as good as it comes. Then, for your question or point on follower campaigns, there are two ways through advertising that we can increase followers. The first is, like you mentioned, follower ads. Now follower ads are a variant of a dynamic ad. And we see dynamic ads usually costing anywhere between about $6 to $8 per click. Well, one of these variants, the main call to action is to follow the company. So they’re not high in volume, it’s really hard to get a lot of followers from these ads, just because they’re over in the right rail, which is only on desktop so immediately, you’re cutting out like 80% of your your possible users here who could see the ads, and we find that they have about a 50% take rate. So on average, you’re gonna end up with like a $13 to $16 cost per follow, which, if you ask me across any other platform, I would say that’s insanely expensive, but if that’s your goal is to get more followers, that’s by far the the most cost effective way to do it on LinkedIn. The next way that you could do it is by using sponsored content ads. And specifically by choosing the engagement objective. When you use the engagement objective, it puts in the upper right hand corner of the ad, a company follow button. So what we’ve tried in the past is put an ad together where the main call to action is to hit that button, like, make sure to follow us for more like this. The cost per follow on these are much higher, because the call to action isn’t nearly as easy, not nearly as direct, but it can be because it’s in the newsfeed, meaning it’s going to be seen by people on mobile as well. It could be a good combination effort in conjunction with your dynamic follower ads to work together. We’re running this for several clients currently who their main objective is to get new followers. And yeah, definitely the cost per follower are higher from sponsored content. But when we use them in concert with each other, we can get a higher volume of followers in the timeframe.

Another longtime follower and fan of the show, Lindsay Beaulieu. Lindsey, I hope I’m pronouncing your last name right, feel free to correct me. She listed four challenges to her on the platform. Number one, “The ability to easily change campaign objectives without having to duplicate the entire campaign. Other platforms enable us to change objective depending on what we’re optimizing for.” Alright, Lindsay, I’m going to tackle this one straight up, and then we’ll move on to your other ones as well. You’re right. If you go to a campaign and you tell it to duplicate, there’s no way to change the objective. So if you are duplicating a video ad campaign with a video views objective, oh, sure, you can change the name of the campaign and the targeting. But it’s going to be a video views objective and a video views campaign when you’re done, which really isn’t all that helpful, especially like you’re intimating here, that you’re testing and changing different objectives based off of your actual business objective. Imagine that, it’s smart practice. So the way that I do it is I go into the campaign that I want to duplicate. And when you scroll down right below the targeting, on the right side, you’ll see view audience summary and save audience. So if you hit save audience there, it lets you basically make a copy that sticks to your personal LinkedIn profile. It’s not in the account, you as the ads manager now have this saved, and you can reuse it on any account that you have access to. So you save a copy of this audience and then you just go through the normal campaign creation process. And basically right as soon as you start creating the campaign, right next to audience, you’ll see a drop down that says saved audiences. When you click that, now you’ll see the one that you just created are saved. So what you’re doing is rather than duplicating the campaign, you’re creating a new one and you’re just bringing the targeting over. Of course, that means you still have to name the campaign, you still have to set your objective, you still have to set your bid and budget, but at least your audience, if this is a group campaign, and you’ve gone out to go find 100 groups to fill up your targeting there, this is helpful, it’s at least a time saver. So she lists two challenges here, “A low number of lead form submissions”, and “High costs per conversion”. So these are definitely challenges on the platform and from what we found, there are several contributing factors here. So the low number of lead form submissions, we find that most of the time, it’s because the offer is not attractive enough to make people actually want to fill out the form. And so our job then as advertisers is to find out what is it that our audience actually really wants? What would they be willing to sacrifice, their email address, and first name and last name for. If your offer is truly great, people will jump over any hurdle to get access to it. So I know that puts a lot of pressure on us as marketers to research and find something that our audience likes. But really, everything hinges on your offer being actually attractive. Some other contributing factors that add friction to this, though, are things like asking for too much information or excessive fields. Just because you’re using LinkedIn lead generation forms, and everything gets auto populated into the form, it doesn’t mean that you can ask for 9, 10, 11 pieces of information and expect that it’s going to have a great conversion rate. Anytime that we are asking for more information, even if it’s auto filled, people get a little bit suspicious and protective of their data. Also, if you add what we call high friction fields, so fields like forcing them to put their work email address in rather than just taking their login email address, or adding their phone number, these fields are high friction, because the user actually has to type and its information they usually try to guard really closely. They’ve got to really want that offer that you’re presenting in order to fill out those fields. So if you’re using too many fields, or any of these high friction fields, that will cut down on on your conversion rates here. Something else we’ve noticed, if you’re using LinkedIn lead gen forms, the form itself, at the very top, you’ll get an opportunity to give them a little bit more information than the ad itself was giving them. I like to think of this as like a cheerleader step, when they get here, you can be like you’re one click away from getting access to these awesome, amazing insights that our researchers come up with basically telling them you’re on the right track, you’ve made the right decision to open this form. Keep filling it out. Now, of course, if you’re not using LinkedIn lead gen forms, and instead you’re sending people to a landing page, the biggest element we’ve seen here that leads to low form fill rates, aside from the offer just not being inherently interesting, is page load speed. So if you’re sending traffic to a landing page, and you have a redirected link, so LinkedIn automatically will create an lnkd.in shortened link. Or if you’re using your own bitly links, that probably takes a full two seconds right there to just work through that redirect, especially on 3g connections when someone’s not by Wi Fi. If your pages taking 3, 4, 5, 6 seconds to load, when you’re talking about eight seconds all ina and people when they click on an ad are like, yeah, I didn’t really want it that bad and they bounce. So LinkedIn will report the click, they’ll say you’re paying for this, these 16 people clicked. But you look at your analytics and you’re like, analytics only says four people made it here. Well, that’s not because LinkedIn is cheating you, it’s because they came to the page, but left before analytics was able to track the visit before that tag was able to fire. And of course, low conversion rates lead to high cost per conversion. So Lindsay, that takes care of your third point there. And your last one here, “Creating a look alike audience off of detailed targeting”. So for anyone who doesn’t know, you can create a look alike audience inside of LinkedIn’s matched audiences based on pretty much any audience that you have collected there. So you can do a look alike based off of your website retargeting or lists that you’ve uploaded. And what LinkedIn is doing in this case is looking at the original list and trying to find people it feels like are similar but not on the list. So we can’t create a look alike based off of LinkedIn’s native targeting specifically using matched audiences, but you can by the feature that they’ve added in there that’s auto checked all the time called LinkedIn audience expansion. Now in general, we do advise against using audience expansion in about 100% of cases. For several reasons, performance has never been great. From our experience, it tends to muddy our audiences. And we can’t actually analyze this audience separately from the native audience that we’ve selected. So basically, our campaigns targeting gets dirty, and we have no way to tell like what parts dirty and what parts clean. So that’s why we don’t like audience expansion. But if you’re trying to find a lookalike version of native targeting that you’ve done inside of a LinkedIn campaign, then audience expansion is your best way to do that. I would absolutely love to hear from any of you who have had a really good experience with LinkedIn’s look alike audiences. Because in every case that we’ve ever tested, our explicit targeting beats the look alikes every time. When we do use it, though, we always make sure to layer additional native criteria on top of the look alike audience to put some guardrails on it, like we’ll usually put a geography and securities or usually not something like job titles, it’s too restrictive, but things like that to just put some guardrails on it to make sure we’re getting the right people in. But again, anyone who’s had really good experience with lookalikes, please do write us in the show and let us know. I’d love to see an example of this.

Abby Kelsey mentions a really, really good one here. She says, “Strategies for ABM campaigns, organizing audience sizes, key offerings, stages of the funnel, etc. It can be hard to do tailored content and offerings for different ABM campaigns and balanced audience size and personas”. Abby, you’re so right, this is a huge, huge pain. And it definitely requires a lot more of a deep dive. So as a little bit of a hint, we have an upcoming episode on ABM I would imagine here in the next month or so. There’s too much in this question to simply answer here. But stay tuned for that episode, because we’ll dive really deep. But thanks for that awesome question.

Efrat Dekel mentions, “Hi, AJ, my questions are about boosted posts. What’s the best practice to mix them with the overall LinkedIn ad strategy? And how do you demonstrate their ROI to clients?” Thanks, Efrat, I have one really, really good answer for you. Actually, if you go back and listen to episode 51, it’s pretty much all about boosted posts. So go and check that one out. All of your questions will be answered there as well as anyone else who has that same question.

Longtime follower of the show, Felicia Gheorghe, says, “I’ve been testing out different ad formats for the same audience and I find it particularly annoying that you need to make a new campaign for let’s say, a lead gen form with an image format, and a new one for lead gen form with a video format, same audience and same offer. Plus all the waiting in between to gather data for each format. Of course, I wouldn’t run them at the same time to compete against myself in the auction. Would be cool to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you.” Alright, Felicia, I have really good news for you. At least I think it’s good news. What you’re experiencing here is something that that we as advertisers have faced for a long time, and LinkedIn have heard our concerns there. So last I heard they were working on being able to have multiple ad formats within the same campaign. And so if it works, the way that I think it’s going to, we will have a campaign that represents the audience. And then underneath that campaign, we’ll be able to insert different ad formats. So you can have a video ad and a single image ad, and maybe even a sponsored message ad going to all the same audience. I think that would be super, super cool. I love the concept, I would definitely use it, it would definitely cut down on the number of campaigns that we have in accounts. You did mention, of course, we wouldn’t run them at the same time to compete against myself in the auction, I do want to clarify something here. As long as you’re within the same ad account, you’re not going to compete against yourself in the auction. So when a new piece of ad inventory opens up, LinkedIn is going to look at your account and find maybe you have several campaigns that are all ready to show an ad in that one slot. So certainly LinkedIn auction is going to have to decide which of your campaigns and which of those ads get to show there. But it’s more like cannibalization, where they’re taking an impression from one area of the account that could have gone to the other, but less of actually competing against yourself. When I think of competing, I’m thinking like bidding yourself up in the auction and making you pay more. That will happen if you’re running two separate accounts for the same client gets the same audience, but as long as it’s all within the same account, don’t worry, you’re not actually bidding yourself up. I know it’s annoying, but at least for the time being, what we do is just go ahead and create a separate campaign for every objective, every audience, and every ad format. And what we do is we put a naming structure in place to make it really easy to sort out which objective is being used, which audience is being targeted, and which ad format it is. And because of that naming structure for our campaigns, it makes reporting a lot easier. So if I were you, until we have that feature of being able to put multiple ad formats in the same campaign, I would take a really good look at your naming structure of your campaigns, and see if you can put something together that makes it a lot easier to measure, analyze, and watch. Alright, here’s a quick sponsor break. And then we’ll dive into more of the challenges and possible solutions here from the community.

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

If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the ad agency you’ll want to work with. We’ve spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us at getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the most scale of your ads. Were official LinkedIn partners and you’ll deal only with LinkedIn ads, experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We’d absolutely love to work with you. All right, now let’s jump back into the additional challenges.

Again, we have a loyal listener of the show, Alex Panchuk. He says, “Not being able to target or make adjustments by device. In 2022, it’s so 2000ish”. Alex, I totally agree. And not having any scheduling options like running campaigns Monday to Friday and not Saturday to Sunday. Even far newer Quora, Reddit, Tik Tok, etc. all have them. Alex, I totally agree with you, I think it’s pretty ridiculous that we don’t have scheduling. I know I mentioned it in a previous answer here, but I do hope at some point that LinkedIn realizes the value and importance of doing that. I know they’ve gotten the feedback. I know I’ve given it to him. So hopefully they’ll take it to heart. Again, that’s why we created an internal tool to do it. We needed the functionality, so we just had to build it.

Brett Creed asks, “Is there a way like on Facebook where you can do social interaction retargeting for anyone who has clicked on your ads, page, or engaged with you in any way minus the people who have completed the lead gen form? Seems so simple on Facebook, wondering if you have any secrets you could share?” Really good question. So LinkedIn does have the same type of thing where they have these engagements that they can retarget, but the engagements are so much more limited than what Facebook allows. We can’t retarget people who’ve liked or commented or anything like that. The best that we do have though, we can retarget those who have opened a lead gen form. So at least if they’ve shown enough interest to click on the ad, you can retarget them that way. The most effective way though to get people into your retargeting audience is to target 25% video viewers. So what you can do is basically upload a video ad that’s less than 10 seconds long, call it something like eight seconds, and then retarget anyone who has watched at least 25% of that, that way, anyone who passes the two second view mark, which is like a quarter of everyone in the audience, usually you can at least get them into your retargeting audience. But I really, really hope we get this in the future. LinkedIn has rolled out so many more of these engagements that you can retarget, like a company page visitor, for instance, there’s so much more they can do here. And this is especially valuable because website retargeting across all the platforms is just it’s drying up, it’s dying, with the death of the cookie.

Tom McAllister asks, “Do you have any thoughts on campaign organization? Recently came into a new business that just started running LinkedIn Ads with an agency. That agency created top of funnel and middle of funnel campaign groups with about 19 campaigns in each of them.” Tom, really good question. Check out episode seven of the podcast about account organization, I go into a lot more detail there. We don’t like campaign groups, they tend to not do much at all, they just take up space and make you have to click through more levels. So we’d probably end up doing something similar to that other agency where we’re creating, like, significant numbers of campaigns at different stages of the funnel. We just do it all in one campaign group, usually, unless we absolutely had a reason to split it up by campaign group. Hopefully that agency is doing a good job. It sounds like if they’re willing to go in and create 20ish campaigns per campaign group, hopefully that means that they are pretty good at what they do. But, certainly come hit us up if you ever want a quote.

Mark Nelson says, “Hey AJ, I love the show. I’m struggling setting up an ABM campaign with limited audience sizes on LinkedIn, Google Display, and Facebook. Say that you have 200 target accounts for your ABM campaign and you upload your contact audience, say 1000 contacts, averaging five per account, and assume LinkedIn matches 90% plus. If 25% of the audience interact with my ads, and I create a new audience for this, so as to target to the next stage, I’m stuffed as my audience isn’t large enough. Could you come up with some specific pointers to address the issue?” Mark, this is really, really good. I love the way that you’ve laid this out, I will have the ABM episode coming up in the next probably month or two. But in short, LinkedIn is absolutely amazing for account based targeting. But it is terrible at being able to customize the messaging by account, you always have to have at least 300 people in an audience for it to be able to serve, period, which is a huge limitation. My suggested strategy here is add as many accounts as you can, you obviously want these audiences to be as large as possible. And don’t use job title to match on these accounts. Try to use something that’s a little bit more broad because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. So if you can use something more like job function with seniority to narrow in on those five contacts per account, you’ll match a larger amount. But then even getting 25% of your target audience to interact with the ad, it would be hard to count on that and especially all of that happening within the timeframe that you’re allowed to create a retargeting audience, which is 180 days. So my recommendation would be to flight your messaging to that audience, to that ABM audience. So rather than relying on having two separate campaigns, one being the original audience, and then one retarget, anyone who interacted, I might suggest, and you could actually do both of these strategies concurrently. I would suggest run the brand awareness messaging to that first audience and then once those ads have run their course, then show more of like a middle of funnel or bottom of the funnel type of ad and work them down. What you’d be doing is hitting the same audience and saturating them over time, in hopes that they would naturally be ready for the next step in the funnel. And then hopefully, by the time you’ve done this a few times, the engagements that you did get on those ads, hopefully, things like a 25% video view or a lead form open, you could get an audience that’s larger than 300, to be able to retarget them at the next step.

Next challenge. Laura Conti says, “Hi, AJ, thanks for your precious podcast. It would be amazing to go into depth with optimization. I listened to your podcast and it was interesting. How to optimize step by step? What is statistical significance? How long to run a campaign to decide to stop and optimize? Thanks.” All right, Laura, great questions, great requests. But I definitely can’t fully address all of those aspects here, Episode 36, which you’ve probably already listened to. That’s a really good resource on how I think about optimization and testing. But this is really good feedback. I’ll plan a future episode to go through more of this.

Addison Witt says, “The quality of lead generation forms. Any recommendations on manual fields to add to the form?” Addison, check out Episode 17, where we go into a lot of depth on the lead gen forms and we do touch on quality. This isn’t what you’re asking, but basically, anytime we use lead gen forms, we do get feedback from sales teams talking about how the lead quality dropped. And that’s kind of unfair to say it’s not because the people in the audience are any less quality. But it’s usually because we’ve made it so easy for someone to convert that more of the people who didn’t decide to convert, end up converting, and they may not be as committed or have the need you solve. The classic answer here is to add a work email field because most sales teams and most lead scoring algorithms will look at an email address that’s like a Gmail or Yahoo email address and they’ll call that low quality. But it’s still problematic if you add the work email field, because it’s not going to autofill in the vast majority of cases. And so now you’re telling users who are on their mobile devices, that they have to stop and type in their work email, with their thumbs on their mobile device, which is a lot of effort, and we will see the conversion rates drop from doing this. But then there is no way to validate that it actually is their work email, they might still type in their Gmail. And so because of this, there have been a lot of companies who are big spenders on LinkedIn, that can’t use the lead gen forms, they have to send to a landing page where they can actually validate and qualify the email that’s being written is not one of the free services out there. If you’re ever in that circumstance of where you have too many leads for your sales team to work with, you can always add a little bit of extra friction to just further qualify them so that sales is only dealing with the cream of the crop. But, most of the time I would say I hear marketers talking about how they just want more leads and more scale. We had an example of a client who they needed to collect someone’s net worth. And obviously, we can’t target by net worth on LinkedIn. So what we did is we created a net worth drop down manually. And we’d give ranges would be like $0 to $200,000, and $200,000 to $1,000,000 and then all of those different ranges, and then that’s a manual field that they have to fill out. And so if that is a requirement that they have a high net worth or a low net worth, you do get that data from the form field. So I hope that answers your question. Hopefully, it’s helpful.

Ben Milsom asks, “Dynamic URL parameters. Facebook ads has a ton of quality of life features that blow LinkedIn out of the water. I know it’s a larger platform. One feature I miss the most is dynamic UTMs.” Ben, I totally agree with you. I have been wanting dynamic URL parameters for so so long, I hope I’m not breaking any sort of confidences by saying this. But the good news is, this is coming. LinkedIn knows that it’s a high priority and they’ve reassured me on several occasions that this is on the roadmap, and it’s coming. I don’t know if that means it’s two months out, or two years out. If I had to predict I would guess something like six months.

Then Nayan Prakash says, “If I take an example of sponsored Inmail ads, the only challenging part is to identify those audiences who have opened the message ads. I know LinkedIn doesn’t give any option to populate a list based on openers. What’s your thought?” Nyad, I hope I’m saying your name right. You’re absolutely right, we get opens from message ads and conversation ads, but we don’t have the ability to retarget people by whether they’ve done that or not. And honestly, an open is something that is so low in commitment that I don’t expect them to ever give that to us, I would sure expect something like if they clicked on anything, like within a conversation ad if they clicked on any of the options, I could see that or at least clicked on a positive option, or clicked on the call to action from a message ad. I mean, the more engagement retargeting options that we get, the easier it’s going to be to justify using LinkedIn campaign manager for retargeting. The more audiences the better, which is really going to help when cookies are dead here in the next year. One little bit of warning here is that message ads in general have something like a 55% open rate. But my gut tells me that a large portion of them and I don’t know how many, but a large proportion are opening it just to mark the messages read so that it’s not calling their attention as they’re looking at their inbox. Probably the best thing you could do in this case, if you’re trying to build a retargeting audience of those who’ve engaged is probably use a conversation ad, and then try to trigger the lead generation form to pop up because you know, you can retarget anyone who triggered a lead gen form opening. Obviously not in a tricky or a spammy way, but that’s probably the best way to do it. I wish we could insert a video into one of these ads and then retarget video viewers, but lead gen forms are probably the best you’re gonna get.

Okay, Quentin Clair says, “Targeting efficiently, small audiences in niche markets versus needing critical mass to perform.” Quentin, these are great points. For the bit about audience sizes, go and check out episode 20 of this podcast. But the bit about critical mass to performance totally depends on your definition of performance. For example, for us, we probably wouldn’t be very happy with an account that was spending less than like $5,000 a month. But to some marketer, if they had a $1,000 or $2,000 a month budget, they would be fine spending that over the course of three months and being patient, and they would call that performance. So for us, we would suggest if you’re targeting in North America, making sure that you have a budget of at least $5,000 a month. We find that usually your AB tests become statistically significant to the conversion level so you get a statistically significant cost per lead, and a conversion rate after spending $5,000. We also recommend audience sizes of 20,000 to 80,000 per campaign. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a much smaller or a much larger target audience size. It’s just if you have a really large total addressable market, we would break that audience down into segments of 20,000 to 80,000 people. But if you’re smaller than that, that’s totally fine. running campaigns with 300 people in them is totally fine. It’s just not going to spend very much and may or may not be worth your time, depending on what your time’s worth, or what you consider to be highperformance. Small audiences maybe won’t spend much but the value of dripping something out to your ideal market over time is still a lot more value than not showing at all. So it might be worth running some of these small audiences Hope that helps. Alright, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

If you have any of the same questions that our community members had, go and listen to the episodes that are recommended around those topics, those will be super helpful. We’ll have links down below in the show notes. Also, if you are new to LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague who is or someone that you’re trying to train, check out the link in the show notes for the LinkedIn Learning course that I did in partnership with LinkedIn. It is an extremely good course if I don’t say so myself being the author and it’s also really inexpensive compared to anything else that you’d find out there, especially for the quality. LinkedIn Learning does a really good job. And of course, look down at your podcast player. If that subscribe button isn’t already lit up, hit it for me, especially if you want to hear this in the future. If you don’t leave it off, that’s fine. Please do rate and review the podcast in whatever player you use or podcast platform. Any review, I’ll give you a shout out and it is very, very much appreciated to help get the show shown to all the other ad professionals out there who need it. And of course, with any show feedback or questions or suggestions, shoot us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.