May 12, 2020
Show resources:
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox:LinkedIn AdvertisingCourse
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Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com withideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Transcript:
How are your LinkedIn Ads performing? Good? Bad? How do youknow? It's benchmarking time.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJWilcox.
0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked all the time fromadvertisers if they're doing well or not. And imagine that peoplewanting to know if their efforts are paying off. So today we'rediving into all the benchmarks so you can know how your efforts arestacking up. We'll cover the ad format averages, as well as whatyou should be paying and seeing with engagement and your conversionrates as well. Also, if you want to share this topic with someonewho doesn't listen to podcasts, check out the video in the shownotes that I did with Social Media Examiner. Okay, let's hitit.
0:53
In the news, the most interesting thing that I've heard is thatLinkedIn Learning has seen a 3x in people taking their courses. Andso this is recorded in COVID isolation right now, which was sointeresting to see that people are taking advantage of the timewhen they're home alone, and maybe even laid off from work, andthey're using this time to better themselves and improve. I thoughtthat was great. That's one of those feel good statistics. I wantedto share a few of the reviews that you guys have left in yourpodcast players or on the podcast network. So Leonardo Bellini says"Ichiba, it means number one in Japanese. I think AJ is a fantastictrainer about LinkedIn Ads. Nobody knows LinkedIn Ads better thanthis guy". Oh, that is so awesome. Leonardo, I know him, he's fromItaly. So Leonardo, shout out to you. Thanks so much for leavingsuch a kind review. Someone with the username Wolf STGT fromGermany says excellent, valid information and hands on tips, keeprocking. Oh, thanks so much, Wolf. I appreciate that. Then there'sBilly Boy UK in Great Britain says "great as always, consistentlygreat, useful info from AJ". So thank you so much. And absolutelyto anyone else listening, I want to feature you. So leave a review.Even if you don't rate me all the way up. I'd still love to featureyou. So shout it out, put it on whatever podcast player you'regoing for. And I'm dying to hear your feedback on the show.
2:23
Okay, so now as we get into the benchmarking, first of all,LinkedIn does not publish their information about benchmarks, aboutaverages. So it's really hard to actually tell if you're doing wellor not. So if LinkedIn is not publishing this, that means someoneelse has to. Someone has to work from their limited data set. Well,we've managed hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts across every adformat, and about every industry that we can think through. Socertainly 400 accounts as compared to the 10s of thousands thatLinkedIn has. It's a small data sample size, but what we find isour benchmarks that we've found from our own clients. All of theaccounts we've managed, overseen, even consulted on tend to bepretty accurate. So I wanted to share those with you, even if theyare not a 100% representative. And I do wish that LinkedIn wouldpublish their benchmarks, I would be happy if they came and smashedall of our data apart and proved it wrong. Since their data set is100% complete, I would much rather be accurate than praised. So ourlimited data set seems to be more complete than anything we've seenout there. So I'm eager to share and a note on just the importanceof benchmarking. If you don't know how you're doing, you won't beable to improve. And my biggest fear is that marketers who aren'tin the know could be blindsided. There could be a situation where amarketer is complacent, thinking everything's fine. And then theaccount gets audited by someone where they point out a whole bunchof flaws or inefficiencies, and it could make the marketer lookbad. So I think there's a need to gauge and be aware And beeducated about the best things that you can do for your account forprotection. So you can make sure that you don't get blindsided. Itprotects your job protects your reputation. And I also thinkbecause of that this is the most important episode for the showthat we've come out with yet.
4:17
The metrics we're going to be benchmarking are going to be thingslike your click through rate, your cost per click, and yourconversion rate. Those tend to be the unifying metrics that we see.Now, as we talk about each one of these, certainly each oneindividually is not the end all be all. For instance, when wereport click through rate to clients, we constantly hear, okay,that's great and everything how often people are clicking on ourads, but that's not our goal. It doesn't tell us whether we'redoing a good job or not. And certainly that is the case. Clickthrough rate does not necessarily mean anything to our clients.But, it does mean something to us because it has a profound effecton the costs that you're going to get. If you're being smart onLinkedIn where you're bidding by the click, your click through ratereally doesn't dictate much, because you're only paying whensomeone clicks anyway. So as long as you're spending your budget,everything should be fine. But when you're trying to improve whenyou realize that getting a higher click through rate cansignificantly lower your cost per click, then all of a sudden itstarts to matter a lot. And conversion rates, this one's reallyimportant. But, certainly if you're not paying very much per click,then even if you had a low conversion rate, you might still behappy with your overall cost per conversion. Your conversion ratewill vary depending on the level of perceived friction, and thelevel of perceived value in what you're asking someone to do. So ifyou're asking a lot of someone or asking something big from a coldaudience, you're going to see a low conversion rate. And if you'reoffering something with a lot of perceived value, and it'sperceived as being free, then you'll probably have a very highconversion. rate. So we'll go over the types of things that affectthose. Like we talked about your cost per click will increase ifyour click through rates are bad. But we know that your cost perclick is also going to be higher if you're going after extremelysmall audiences, or more competitive audiences. So these very muchgo hand in hand. If you have a low click through rate, you will bepunished with really high cost per click, I get asked a lot aboutindustry specific benchmarks and audience specific benchmarks. Andwhat we've found is these benchmarks that we've defined, reallydon't change very much by industry, or really by audience. So ifyou're worried about your specific industry or your specificaudience, don't worry, go ahead and take these benchmarks the sameway they should still be pretty indicative. One of my earlyobservations when I was using LinkedIn Ads was I had a campaigntargeting manager level, another targeting director level, anothertargeting VP, and my last campaign targeting C level people. And inmy mind, I hypothesized, well, of course, I'm going to pay more perclick to reach the C level person than I would at the managerlevel. And what was so interesting is their cost per click, we'reactually within about 30 cents of each other. And to add to thecomplexity here, the cost per click of the C level was 30 centsless than reaching the manager audience. So what this goes to showis your cost per click really doesn't change very much acrosspersonas, across industries. You're probably going to pay anaverage right now of about $8 to $11 per click, regardless of whoit is. Now, this changes a little bit, because if you're goingafter the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, yeah, you're probablygoing to pay $15 or $20 per click. But in general, for audiencesthat aren't super, super tight and super in demand, you'll payabout the same Conversion rates and click through rates also tendto be quite similar in the same way. We do find elevated costs whenwe're trying to bid on enterprise sized companies. And that makessense. They're quite a bit more competitive. When evaluating adperformance, I'm imagining two hurdles that our ads have to getover. The first hurdle is when we put up an ad, we need someone toclick on it. And then once they've clicked on it, the second hurdleis we need them to convert. And based off of the efficiency metricsabout how people are getting over the first and second hurdle, itlets us know what needs to be improved specifically. So we'll goover those efficiency metrics and how to actually audit youraccount here in a little bit.
8:44
First off definitions. We're going to be talking about, clickthrough rates, which is the number of times people took action onyour ad out of the number of times that people saw them. This willprobably sound very elementary to many of you, but there's a reasonthat I'm going over the definitions because it's going to beimportant as we talk about sponsored messaging ads.
9:08
We're also going to be talking about conversion rates, which is thenumber of conversions out of the number of times that people tookaction and clicked on your ads. This usually is a form fill, butsometimes people have different definitions for what a conversionis. Okay, our two hurdles. So if you're having a hard time gettingpeople to click on your ads, you will know because your clickthrough rate will be low. And then if you're getting a lot ofclicks, but you're just not seeing the leads or conversionshappening, you'll know this because your conversion rate will below. So figure out which of those two hurdles you're stumblingover. And then here at the end, we'll go over the actions that youcan actually take to fix and rectify these.
9:50
Let's go over how to actually check out your performance. So you'relogged into LinkedIn's campaign manager where you can see all ofyour different campaigns or maybe you're even at the ad level, youcan see it there as well. Right above the list of campaigns, you'llsee an option for columns. And if it's already selected withperformance, then you're in a great place to see your click throughrate and your cost per click. If you want to view your conversionrate, you have to select that columns and drop it down to where youcan see leads and conversions. It's difficult because we can'tcustomize the columns so we can see all of this on one page. So youwill need to toggle back and forth as you're analyzing. It's veryimportant for you to understand that when we talk about clickthrough rate and cost per click, those metrics will be meaningfulfor every single type of ad, just as they're written in the adplatform. Except if you're using sponsored messaging, if you'reusing sponsored messaging, these metrics are lying to you, andyou'll have to figure out a different way. We'll go over all that.But the reason why this is is because there's an extra step in theadvertising process, when you're using sponsored messaging ads. Westill have impressions, which is someone seeing the ad. But onsponsored messaging ads, that's a send, that means it was sent tosomeone, but not necessarily viewed. So we're departing from ourdefinitions a little bit. The first action someone can take isopening it. And so LinkedIn calls an "open" a "click". And theaverage open rate of a sponsored messaging ad is like 50%. So ifyou're believing these metrics, as you're looking at them,sponsored messaging ads look really good. They're gonna have a 50%click through rate, looking at the dashboard. And your cost perclick is also going to look really low because half of the peopleopen it. LinkedIn is reporting to you that that's a click. So yourcost per click quote, unquote, is usually just about twice the costof your cost per send. So these look really good if you don't knowthe metrics you're looking at. You'll look at it going, "wow, we'repaying less than $1 per click, and our click through rate is 50%".That's incredible. So keep in mind, these are definitely lying toyou, the real click that you want to care about is in a differentcolumn. So we'll come to that as we covered sponsored messagingspecifically.
12:19
But as of right now, let's talk a little bit about conversionrates, because these are quite a bit more unified. So there are twodifferent types of conversions that we can have on LinkedIn Ads. Ifyou are sending someone to a landing page that you own, there are afew steps. And the conversions that occur here are going to becalled conversions in the ad platform. In order to get theseconversions reporting, it takes four different steps. So the firstis you have to take your insight tag, which is this little piece oftracking JavaScript from your account and install it on at leastyour homepage, your landing page, and your thank you page. Ideally,you have this on every page of the website, but just minimum ofthose three so that it will function. Next is you have to go intoaccount assets and conversions, and actually set this conversionup. You have to tell LinkedIn, when someone lands on page x, that'scalled a conversion. And you let them know anytime this tag fireson that page, then yes, you now have a conversion. But it's notenough just to have it set up. Now you have to go and actuallyassociate that conversion to the campaigns you're running. You cando that as you're setting up the conversion and just check everycampaign in the account. Or you can go into your campaign settingsand right at the very bottom of that campaign, you'll see an optionto install conversion tracking. There are two different ways thatyou can track your conversions. You can either have someone land ona thank you page, so they fill out the form, you then redirect themto a separate page that says something like, thanks for giving usyour info, we'll be in touch soon. Or here's a link to downloadthat PDF that we were telling you about. And this is by far theeasiest way to track your conversions. When you tell your webmasterthat you need a separate URL thank you page, they're probably goingto look at you like you were making a request from the 80s. This isa very old school way of doing it. But it is by far the best, it'sthe most reliable, and it's the most simple. Even without anycoding knowledge, I can still troubleshoot issues on a thank youpage. The other way though, is through an event tracking pixel. Andthis takes some pretty advanced understanding of JavaScript inorder to do so as soon as we get into event tracking issues. I'mout I have to get our web developer involved. But this involvesgoing on usually a button and then you set an event where as soonas someone clicks on the button to submit the form, then that'sgoing to fire a piece of code back to LinkedIn. And they'll callthat a conversion. Your web developer will understand this verywell. But if it's you, as a marketer trying to set this up, youwill likely do very, very well to just send it to a separate thankyou page, because this event tracking solution is much moretechnical. Okay, so let's say you have this set up and you'redriving conversions. If you go and look at LinkedIn's conversionscolumn, that number is going to be wrong. It's going to be lying toyou a little bit. The conversions column, which is the defaultcolumn, that everything on LinkedIn uses, is actually a combinationof two different things. There's something called clickconversions, which is what we care about. And then there's alsosomething called view through conversions. Now, a view throughconversion feels like a lie to me, because all a view throughconversion is is one of your ads had to show up as an impression tosomeone, and then they ended up converting because of a differentchannel. So I'll outline this for a situation that could haveoccurred. So a LinkedIn member is scrolling through their newsfeed,they scroll very quickly past an ad, they don't even see it. Theydon't even acknowledge it. And then they end up looking for asolution on Google, they click one of the PPC ads on Google end upconverting. And now LinkedIn is going to report that as aconversion inside of LinkedIn ads. So if you are comfortable withslightly over reporting on the platform, then yeah, go ahead anduse the conversions column. But we only report based off of clickconversions, because that sure seems a lot more honest. Now thereis a different kind of conversion altogether on LinkedIn. And thatis when you're using lead generation forms. So one of the nextepisodes is all going to be about lead generation form ads. Sostick around for that one.
12:19
But let's talk about what type of conversion you'll see comethrough. When you are running lead gen form ads, the native formsright within your ads, you won't see any metrics show up in theconversions columns, but there will be a column for leads. Andthere's also another column for lead form opens. The nice thingabout lead generation forms is you don't actually have to set upanything for this. Because the conversion occurs on LinkedIn andLinkedIn understands it. They will just do all of the conversiontracking for you. There's no setting up pixels, there's no reallyanything you could do wrong to screw it up. Of course, the hardpart with lead generation forms is you have to figure out how toget those leads out of LinkedIn by using an integrationpartner.
17:44
Okay, let's talk specifically about each ad format and what you canexpect benchmarking wise. So starting with sponsored content, whichis by far my favorite ad format, this encapsulates single image adsas well as carousel as well as video ads. The click through ratethat we normally see, and LinkedIn actually even shares thisinformation if you ask your rep. They see about a .4% click throughrate on average. When we launch ads, according to our ownconventions and strategies, we generally average between .8 and1.2. So it's not difficult to outperform the average. But as longas you're over .4%, you're at least beating the average. If you'reunderperforming there, absolutely we'll talk about the things youcan change. For costs per click, we expect sponsored content toland anywhere between about $8 to $11. If you're paying under thatyou're doing fantastic. If you're paying over about $11 a click,unless you are targeting a super small audience, or a really,really important enterprise level, like account based marketinglist, you're probably bidding too high or bidding incorrectly. Thenwe get to the issue of conversion rates. I abbreviate this CVR.There's a little bit of a departure here based on what you'reasking someone to do. So I split this into low friction offers andhigh friction offers. Low friction offers would be an example oflike, here's a free piece of content that's really valuable, reallyinteresting to you. And in exchange, all we're asking for is yourcontact info. If you're offering a low friction offer like that, weusually see between about 10 to 15% conversion rate, and anythingover 15%, we call rockstar content and we want to go all in on thatand generate as many conversions as we can while it's hot. But thenyou have high friction offers, like, hey, talk to our sales rep orbuy something or take a demo or try a free trial of something. Thisis where of a cold audience, you're asking too much too soon. Andbecause of that, people aren't going to be willing, or at least notas many people are going to be willing to take that actyion. Sothey'll click because they're interested or curious, but they willonly convert between about 1.5% to 4%. Mostly on the lower end ofthat though, unless you're a big brand.
20:12
Okay, onto sponsored messaging. This includes both message ads,which used to be called sponsored in mail, and the new conversationads. Like we talked about before, we have to add an extra metric inhere. So we're going to talk about open rate. LinkedIn will callthis click through rate, but that is absolutely not accurate. Theaverage open rate is probably going to be about 50%. So if you havea 60% or a 70%, open rate, you know your subject line is rockingit. But then once someone opens, the next thing that you're goingto want them to do is actually take action on something and clickinternally. Now click through rates are only between about three to4% on average, and so if you have 7, 8, 9%, you have an amazingoffer with great copy. If you do the math here with a 50%, openrate, a 3 to 4% click through rate and you're probably going to endup paying on a cost per send basis, anywhere between about 20 centsand 70 cents depending on how competitive that audiences. Youraverage cost per click is going to land somewhere between about $23to $56. Now that is cost per click, remember I just told you thatsponsored content, you'll average between $8 to $11. So what issponsored messaging doing for you that it would be worth three toeight times as much. So yes, sponsored messaging is on average, themost expensive ad format on LinkedIn and because of that, you needto be really careful and really strategic about how you approachit. Since the costs are so high on average, we don't even recommendit to our average client. We only even suggest it to our clientswhen we think we can get 70% open rates, and 7% click throughrates. That requires a very special type of offer. And certainlynot everyone has it, it has to be a very personal type of offer.But if you can get this 70%, open rates and 7% click through rates,that will get your overall cost per click somewhere between about$4 and $14, depending on how much you paid. If your audience isuncompetitive, and you're paying 20 cents per send, it's around the$4 mark per click, which is great. That's half of what we would payusing sponsored content. But if you're paying 70 cents on the highside, then that turns out to be about a $14 cost per click. And ifyou want any more information on these ad formats, check outEpisode 13 where we went really deep into those. Okay, here's aquick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the adformats coming right up.
22:56
The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,the LinkedIn Ads experts.
23:05
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be toolinked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn'slargest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to beofficial LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is ouronly priority. Fill out the contact form on any page ofB2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd absolutely love to help youdemolish your goals.
23:29
Okay, let's jump into the other ad formats. So next coming up istext ads. Now most people who run text ads think that they're doinga bad job because the metrics look really bad, especially clickthrough rate, but these are a hard ad to over perform or evenunderperform. So the average click through rate on these is .025%.So that's two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 impressions.Because these are only shown on desktop, and they're in the rightrail, and they obviously look like ads, most people tend to bepretty banner blind to them, they ignore them. So if you have aclick through rate over about .03%, you're doing amazing. Your adsare rock star level, keep it up. And this is LinkedIn's cheapest adformat. You can bid all the way to the floor of $2 if you want, butmost of the time we see people paying between about $3 to $5 perclick. So significantly cheaper than even sponsored content. Butit's also really hard to drive a lot of this traffic unless youhave a massive audience. If you're bidding higher, yeah, you canpay all the way up into like the $13 to $15 a click for these, butI probably wouldn't suggest it. You're really burning dollars atthat point.
24:51
Okay, and then conversion rate. This totally depends on the offer.If you have a low friction or a high friction offer your conversionrate is going to vary significantly. But what we find is text adsbecause they come from people who are on a desktop, they have afull use of the keyboard, you can generally get higher qualityleads here, you can generally get a slightly higher conversionrate, because they don't feel as bad about typing more fields thatthey might feel bad about on a mobile device, doing lots of thumbtyping. And you can usually get them to fill out more fields. Sotext ads conversions we love. Then you've got dynamic ads. Now onead unit of dynamic ads takes up the space of three text ads.Because of that, you'll see click through rates that are equal toabout three times the average click through rate of text ads. So ifyou're performing over a .06 percent click through rate, you'redoing great. We oftentimes see .08, .09, even as high as .1 in somecases. Now your cost per click here, it used to be that you'd pay$13 to $18 per click on these, but LinkedIn had a recent pricereduction, like we've talked about in Episode 13. And because ofthat, the cost per click now is usually between about $6 to $8 perclick. Because the click through rate is low like text ads. Again,this is an ad format that's really hard to get a lot of trafficfrom. So fight the temptation to bid so high that you're payingover about the $8 mark, because you can probably pay $8 per clickon sponsored content and capture a lot more traffic. Just like textads, your conversion rate on dynamic ads totally depends on theperceived value and the perceived friction of that offer. Okay, soyou're saying to yourself, I found some areas, identified somemetrics that are not as good as they should be. So if myperformance sucks, how do I go and fix it? Let's focus first onyour click through rate. So if your click through rate is below thebenchmarks that I've laid out here, it's probably one of fourthings. The first is maybe your ad copy isn't showing the value ofyour offer properly. Number two is maybe your image is not contrastenough to get people to stop scrolling. Remember, your images jobis just to be a thumb stopper. Don't try to convert someone fromthe image. That's the job of your ad copy. So on to the point threehere, your ad copy might not be pressing on your pain point hardenough. You might be saying, here's what you can get, but maybeyou're not telling them, "hey, you have a problem. This is going tosolve it". And your fourth is, and this is usually my last resort,it could be that your offer simply isn't interesting. And there'sno amount of ad copy rewriting you can do to make your offer seeminteresting enough to get over that first hurdle, which is gettingsomeone to click. So if you're under these, click through ratebenchmarks, try refreshing your ad copy, try saying it in adifferent way, try selling that offer a little bit better and seeif you can get that up. We'll get you sailing over hurdle numberone, and then getting towards hurdle number two. Okay, but what ifyou're paying too much? What if your costs per click aresignificantly higher than what I've laid out here? If you go backto Episode 6 where we talked about bidding and budgeting, the firstreason the biggest reason why people are paying too much, it'sbecause they're bidding too high, or they're bidding wrong. Sodon't take LinkedIn's advice on how to bid here, definitely use thestrategy I laid out in Episode 6. The next reason why you might bepaying so much though, is maybe you have bad click through rates,which we just went over. So improve those things. If you can getyour click through rate higher, your cost per click will come down.The third reason your cost per click might be too high is reallysomething you can't do very much about and it's if competition isjust so high. If you're in an area where competition is ridiculous,and you're paying like $13, $15 a click and you just can't gettraffic at less than that, what you'll want to do is play withdifferent offers and play with different ad creative. Because ifyou can get your click through rate up significantly, that will getyour cost per click down. And all you have to do is outperform yourcompetitors in the auction by getting a higher click through rate,awarding you a higher relevancy score, and then LinkedIn will letyou start getting traffic at lower bids.
29:26
Okay, and finally, conversion rate, this is the second hurdle. Soyou're getting a lot of traffic, you're getting people clicking,but you're not seeing a lot of conversions. There are lots ofthings that can affect your conversion rate. Let's go through eachof those. Very first off, most of the time, it's your offer. Ifyou're telling someone give us your personal information. Ifsomeone's going to be willing to give you that information, thatbetter be good, it better be worth their time and potentiallyopening themselves up to getting spam. So don't try to give them aproduct brochure. Don't try to offer them something like a whitepaper from eight years ago. It has to be interpreted as valuable,otherwise they're not going to convert. Okay, so assuming you havean offer that people actually would care about that is exciting isperceived as valuable. If you're still not converting, maybe it'sbecause your ad didn't prep them well enough when they got to thatform. So if the ad is telling them, here's the pain point, here'sthe value that you're going to get by moving forward here. And thenthey get to the landing page. It could be that your ad didn't prepthem well enough to convert. So maybe the landing page itself issaying fill out this form, and we'll give you this but maybe the addidn't tell them that there was going to be a form on the otherside. Maybe the ad didn't give them a call to action. It just said,"hey, you've got this problem, click here to solve it". And thenwhen they get to the page, they're disappointed because it's askingfor their information and it feels like a bait and switch to them.Then there are lots of things about the landing page that could bewrong here. So maybe your landing page doesn't instill trust. Youcould have all of the right stuff on your landing page, it couldlook good, but if for some reason someone is looking at it going,oh, I've never heard of this company before, this could be shady,you could have all the right elements, but your conversion ratewould be next to nothing and you wouldn't know why. So make sureyou concentrate on those trust signals. Put badges and here are thecustomers we've worked with. And here's where we've been featured.That type of information will help instill that trust and getpeople to move forward. Sometimes the landing page doesn't have allthe right stuff, and maybe it's hindering your conversion. Imaginewhat happens when someone goes to click on your ad. And then yourpage takes three, four or five seconds to come up and load. You'renot sticking around and neither is your prospect. So sometimes hereit's a page load speed issue. So make sure your landing pages areloading fast. So you don't lose people before they even get there.Maybe your form comes first, but you didn't actually sell the offerwell enough. There's no text telling them here's the value, here'sthe benefit to you. So make sure that you lead with the value. Byreading this PDF, you will learn X, Y, and Z, you will be able todo A. The three things that we really want to see on a landingpage. Number one, we want the form to be front and center. So assoon as the page loads, people are in the mindset, you're going tobe asking something of me and I'm in that mindset. Number two, youwant the text telling them here's the value, here's the benefits toyou. Third, you want these trust signals. You want somethingtelling them instilling that trust. And if you have all three ofthose things, but you're still not converting, chances are you'reasking too much. Your offer isn't actually valuable, which hurts tohear, but maybe you are just not providing as much value as youthought you were. Or maybe the offer is pretty good. But yourlanding page is asking for too much stuff. If you're asking formore than like four, maybe five fields, people are going to look atthat. And even if they are interested, they're going to say,they're asking for my social security number and a license to myfirstborn. I, this just isn't worth it, and they'll leave. So tryto keep your form fields down to preferably first name, last name,email converts the highest, you may have to ask for phone number.So one cool little hack here is, as of recently, LinkedIn allowedthe lead gen form ads to pass someone's profile URL from a field.And what's so cool about this is if you have access to theirprofile URL, you don't need to ask them things like what their jobtitle is, or what company they work for, or what industry they'rein, or what their company size is. You don't have to ask thatbecause It's all available on their public LinkedIn profile. So asmy little hack here, if I'm using lead gen forms, I will ask forfirst name, last name, email, and profile URL. People tend toconvert nicely on this because you asked them for a profile URL andthey say, well, it's public knowledge Anyway, why do I care, but ithas all of the other information that you want to extract and yoursales team is going to appreciate a very quick way to look them upand see how to approach them. So your job now, I want you to gotake a look at all of your different ad formats and theirperformance, compare them to the benchmarks, and then figure outare you having trouble over hurdle one, two, maybe even both, ormaybe you're looking at this going oh, I'm having trouble over nohurdles. And that's great. I hope that you are just killing it andslaying it. But, if you are stumbling over one of those hurdles, Ido hope this information has been super helpful for you. I do wantto add just one little thing based off of the conversion ratefactors. There is a cool way that you can actually test yourlanding pages to see if your landing page is hindering theconversion or if it's the offer. So if I'm running traffic to alanding page, and I'm having a low conversion rate, but I feel likemy offers good, what I will do is run exactly the same ad to theexact same audience. But instead, I'm going to test it through alead generation form. And the difference here is that a lead genform is filled out right on LinkedIn, where all the trust signalsare already there, and the speed is there. So if you're seeing a 2%conversion rate from your landing page, but you see a 15%conversion rate from your lead gen forms for exactly the samething, that is a screaming signal that wow, your landing page ishindering conversions and you need to fix that landing page,whether it's speed, whether it's the right elements, whether it'sselling the asset better on it, something's wrong with that landingpage. But, if you do this test, and maybe you had a 2% conversionrate on the landing page, but a 5% conversion rate from your leadgen form, then you know it's probably the offer. People just aren'twilling to download what it is that you're offering them. So that'stime to do some more work on the offer. Okay, with that being said,I've got all the episode resources for you coming right up, sostick around.
36:26
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more?AJ Wilcox, take it away.
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Okay, I mentioned at the beginning about the benchmarks video thatI did with Social Media Examiner. It's on YouTube so hit that linkin your show notes. This is an 11 minute video that goes over avery condensed version of what we've talked about here. So ifsomeone is not a podcast listener, but you need them to understandbenchmarks, send them that video. They'll watch it and go, "oh,great. You're right. We should change our landing page" or whateveryou're trying to get them to do. Use that as a tool to helpconvince. The next is when I present on LinkedIn Ads, I have aslide all about benchmarks. And so I'm going to put that as a JPEGthat you can just click on and download it, you can use this as aneasy reference. Just print it off, put it up in your office, or Idon't know, make it your desktop background or something. But thiswill help you have a reference guide. So you don't have to go backand listen to this and take notes. If you are new, or if you havean employee who is new to LinkedIn Ads, have them check out thecourse link. This is the LinkedIn Learning course that I did withLinkedIn Learning. And it covers about the first hour and a half ofwhat I train, when teams bring me in. I charge $500 an hour forconsulting. And this course is only $25 if you have to buy it, orif you have LinkedIn premium of any kind, you'll have access to itfor free. So a very, very good deal for anyone who wants to learnmore about LinkedIn Ads. It takes you from absolutely nothing toall the basics. Open up your podcast player right now and hit thesubscribe button whichever podcast player you're using, I want youto subscribe. I hope I've provided enough value that you'll want tokeep listening. I have so many cool plans for episodes coming up.So I want you to be ready for those. And then please, if you dolike what you're listening to, please hit a review, give it arating and leave us a review. I'd love to shout you out in thereview segment. And then finally, if you have any ideas for whatyou would like us to cover here on the podcast, or if you havequestions, feel free to reach out to Podcast@B2Linked.com and wewill help you out as fast as possible. Okay, see you back here nextweek. And we are cheering you on in your LinkedIn Adsinitiatives.
