How to Run High-Performing LinkedIn Ads for B2B

Episode Description

If you’re into B2B advertising, you just cannot ignore LinkedIn Ads.

But for most of us, LinkedIn looks like an expensive and complicated platform to find leads. And to be honest, LinkedIn Ads are difficult to scale efficiently.

In this episode, I spoke to AJ Wilcox, in my opinion, the world’s best LinkedIn Ads expert. AJ is really a master at his craft.

Watch this episode for some great tips and strategies to get the most out of your B2B LinkedIn ad campaigns.

You will learn:

- What pitfalls to avoid while running LinkedIn ads

- Which post types serve you better

- How to run LinkedIn Ads alongside Google/Microsoft Ads

- How to run better retargeting ads

and more

Episode Takeaways

1. Pitfalls to Avoid While Running LinkedIn Ads:
   • Use personal profiles for ads to garner higher engagement than company profiles.
   • Refresh ad creatives every two weeks to prevent ad fatigue without overwhelming users.
2. Effective Post Types:
   • Thought leadership posts from personal accounts, sponsored by the company, perform best.
   • Short video ads are more impactful and cost-effective compared to single image ads.
3. Integrating LinkedIn with Google/Microsoft Ads:
   • Use LinkedIn for top-of-funnel activities to build awareness and Google/Microsoft Ads for retargeting to capture leads.
   • Leverage first-party data across platforms to enhance targeting and optimize ad spend.
4. Optimizing Retargeting Ads:
   • Create detailed retargeting audiences based on user interactions within LinkedIn.
   • Utilize LinkedIn’s lead generation forms that autofill user data to boost conversions significantly.

Additional Insights:

• Stay informed about LinkedIn’s algorithm changes to optimize content visibility.
• Adjust bids based on actual performance rather than LinkedIn’s often inflated suggested bids.

Episode Transcript

AJ WILCOX: When you post something from your personal profile and when you post something from your company profile on LinkedIn, you’ll probably notice that your personal profile gets 10 times or more the engagement. So we know people on LinkedIn like to interact with people, not with companies. So then you looked at the ad platform and the only kind of ad you could create came from your company and it just didn’t perform as well.

So what LinkedIn came out with in June was this ability to say, Hey, if Fred launches his own post organically, Optmyzr can then go and sponsor that post to your ideal target audience, and then it shows up in the news feed. It’s much less expensive on a per click basis, and then you get to like show your own thought leadership, which is fabulous.

These actually do perform very well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the CEO and co founder and Optmyzr, the PPC management platform. So today we wanted to go a little bit beyond the world of pure search and Google and Microsoft, and we wanted to talk about LinkedIn ads and we’ve brought in the world’s leading expert on LinkedIn ads.

AJ Wilcox, so we also took some audience questions from LinkedIn itself. We’ll be asking AJ a lot of those questions and we’ll help teach you a lot about what’s new in LinkedIn. So let’s get rolling with this episode. All right. And there’s AJ. Welcome back to the show, my friend. Thanks so much, Fred. I’m always

AJ WILCOX: excited to get to hang out with you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I know, right. And we actually got to hang out in person for a change. I think we saw each other in San Diego, right? That’s right.

AJ WILCOX: And going back again this year, I, I’m assuming you probably are as well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. So we’re talking about Brighton SEO which is a conference that’s usually held in Brighton, UK, but now they have Brighton SEO San Diego to keep things very confusing.

But yeah, it was a good show and it was an interesting crowd too, because it’s, it’s, it’s an SEO show. It says it in the name Brighton SEO, but they actually had a PPC track that Optmyzr sponsored. And tell us what were you speaking or what were you doing at Brighton?

AJ WILCOX: You know, I, I’ve spoken at Brighton before this last year, I went basically to see friends and network cause I, I wasn’t speaking at it and I’m so glad I did cause there there’s, you probably feel the same way.

There was this crowd of, of PPC people, more advanced PPC people that used to attend hero conf and I love going to hero conf every year to see them and hang out with them. Most of that crowd was at Brighton. And so I’ve got high hopes for this year when I’m going to be speaking to.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s right. Oh, nice.

You are. You’re going to be speaking. So, yeah, I mean, I think going to these events is definitely one thing that I do miss. I love doing webinars and podcasts because You know, I don’t have to travel anywhere. We take an hour. We kind of talk about all the latest and greatest. It’s very low effort and hopefully useful to the people listening and watching, but you do miss the personal connection, right?

And I completely agree. It was so nice to see everyone there in San Diego. Plus the location wasn’t bad. The weather was pretty good. So yeah, Optmyzr sponsoring it next year. So check it out and we’ll probably have some free tickets as well. So if you want one of those, hit us up on the comment section and come see.

Hopefully I’ll be speaking. I haven’t pitched yet, but we’ll see. So good. Hey we’re here to talk about LinkedIn ads. And you’ve been on the show before, but for people who may not have met you before, tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, sure. So I, I started out in, in Google ads, like back in 2007, 2008, and I liked them just fine, but the problem that I always had is this is all focused around a keyword that someone is searching for, you capture that intent.

Which is so great for so many businesses, but mostly for business to business, which I got really heavily into, we need more qualification than just what they’re interested in looking for. We need to be able to filter them by you know, what sort of role they have at what size of company and what industry.

And so that’s why I fell in love with LinkedIn ads. So back, it’s now been, Oh, 10 years, 11 years. Anyway, it’s been a while. I fell in love with LinkedIn ads and I, I went all in. I ended up growing LinkedIn’s largest spending ads account and leaving that company after two and a half years to go and start this agency.

So now I run b2linked. com and we’re an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is all we do.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. And so obviously very B2B focused because that’s the target audience on LinkedIn. And to talk a little bit about, you know, someone who may be advertising on Google search for B2B LinkedIn is thought of as a smaller opportunity.

I mean, Google is sort of the biggest place where people go and search. So can you put it into context a little bit? What is the opportunity on LinkedIn?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, I think. They search and social actually work so well together. I look at something like social, especially LinkedIn, where we can be so specific about who is seeing these ads and we can get in front of them and build this top of mind awareness.

Of course you can build all stages of the funnel with LinkedIn, but I think it’s very powerful for introducing your brand. Then once they know of you, then they’re going to go and search for you. And they’re much more likely to click on a, an intent focused search ad. They’re at the bottom of the funnel.

So I love those two things working together and all they do is strengthen each other.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And you talk about brand. And so there’s also thought leadership, right? And thought leadership ads. Can you talk a little bit about what those are and where they fit in?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, this is actually a new release. As of June of 2023 LinkedIn released this.

And we’ve actually been asking for this for a long time. One of the biggest challenges that we’ve seen with advertising on LinkedIn is when you look in your newsfeed, actually, let me just say this. When you post something from your personal profile, and when you post something from your company profile on LinkedIn, you’ll probably notice that your personal profile gets 10 times or more the engagement.

So we know people on LinkedIn like to interact with people, not with companies. So then you looked at the ad platform, and the only kind of ad you could create came from your company. And it just didn’t perform as well. So what LinkedIn came out with in June was this ability to say, Hey, if Fred launches his own post organically, Optmyzr can then go and sponsor that post to your ideal target audience.

And then it shows up in the newsfeed. It’s much less expensive on a per click basis. And then you get to, you know, Like show your own thought leadership, which is fabulous. These actually do perform very well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, we find the same thing in Optmyzr. So I encourage all of my employees to really get out there and post YouTube videos and share their knowledge and expertise, because like you said, people want to talk to other people.

They don’t want to talk to the brand logo and not to be very specific, right? When you said like there’s. Fred posting as Fred or there’s Fred posting as Optmyzr. You mean literally me logging into the Optmyzr account as opposed to me having two LinkedIn accounts for my name, right?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, exactly.

You’ll, you could post as yourself and then have the ad account sponsor that inside the Optmyzr LinkedIn ads account, or you can post from the company. And then you could boost that post as well. But yeah, lots more freedom now.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And so because LinkedIn is so professionally focused, it’s very easy to be on there as Fred, but constantly in the voice of Optmyzr.

And this is work related stuff. This is PPC industry related stuff. Well, what are some of the best ways to, to use LinkedIn though? I mean, they got newsletters, you can do posts, you can share PDFs videos. Like what have you found is sort of an effective mix?

AJ WILCOX: It’s, I’ll say single image newsfeed, they call it single image sponsored content tends to be pretty high performing and it’s also the easiest to create.

So I would say probably 80 percent of the media that our clients run is this single image between Dolly and mid journey and chat GBT and five minutes later, you’ve got an ad you can run, but what we find way outperforms all of them is short video ads. And so for us personally, we’ve actually gone a hundred percent in on video for our own ads.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. So single image is easiest to create, but short video is the most impactful. So talk us through both of them. Let’s start with the single image and you mentioned mid journey GPT. Like, give me an example. Like, how do you, how do you put it together? And like, do you go in once a week and you generate a bunch of stuff to be posted throughout the week, or do you go in every day?

Like what does it look like?

AJ WILCOX: The really nice thing, especially if you’re comparing LinkedIn to Facebook, On Facebook, people spend so much time there. And so you tend to get really high frequency numbers very quickly. And the result of that is people get sick of your ads. Very quick LinkedIn. On the other hand, this is a, it’s, it’s a two edged sword for sure.

Because people don’t spend as much time on linked in, there’s less of an opportunity for them to see your ads over and over and get sick of them. So what we find is when we launch ads, you know, especially single image we always love a B testing. So we’re going to launch two ads to begin with. And we found that those ads, as long as they’re performing well, you could run them for a month, month and a half.

If they’re not performing well, obviously you can switch them out a little bit faster, but I love to just on a cadence of keeping things fresh for my audience. About every two weeks switch up the, the ad creative and you don’t have to change very much. Just make it feel fresh so that as they’re scrolling through their newsfeed, they’ll give you a.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And what does so there’s organic posts. So say I, me or you wrote an article for search engine land. We put an organic post around that. Right. How, how are ads different? I mean, are they like really pitching the company or the service that you’re selling or are they still trying to be informative?

AJ WILCOX: I would say it depends on where you’re at in the, in the funnel. I wouldn’t send to cold traffic that I know didn’t know anything about me. I wouldn’t give a hard pitch. I wouldn’t say, Hey, here’s what we do. Get a demo. It would be more of like a, let me introduce the brand to you. Let me give you free value.

Here’s a, here’s some awesome blog content or guides or walkthroughs videos that are helpful. I think those are a great way to approach it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. So the different stages of the lifetime journey Or the consumer jersey in this case. So I guess that means you have different audiences and for each of those audiences you have an ad that would resonate that’s either more introducing the company or solving the pain points or getting the people the prospect over the final hump of actually doing something.

And we should also talk about what it is that we want them to do. Right. So, but, but, but am I kind of getting that right about audiences connected to the ad?

AJ WILCOX: Yep. Yeah. In LinkedIn, we can use their own audiences of like, they have to have this job title and be in this geography and be in this industry at a company with at least this many employees.

We get really specific about this native audience. And so that’s what I would call our cold audiences. And then you can also upload lists of either. Here’s a list of companies we call those ABM lists or account based marketing. You can upload lists of individuals who might be already on your, on your newsletter list, or maybe they’ve signed up for events in the past.

And as you’re considering these lists, you might go, Ooh, these are warm audiences. Let’s put them in separate campaigns and show special ads to them.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. And is there like a virtuous cycle there where you can use LinkedIn for that really early audience exploration, just to write people working at the right types of companies?

How do you get them to become part of your remarketing list? Like what’s, what kind of offers do you like to put out there? What sort of content engages them?

AJ WILCOX: Well, so first of all, we can create these retargeting audiences a variety of different ways. We have our website. Website retargeting. So that’s anyone who is on your website.

That LinkedIn recognizes as a LinkedIn member and they’ve got the cookie in their browser they can be added to that list, but obviously because cookies are problematic, it’s not going to capture everyone, but then LinkedIn got really smart and said, okay, when someone is taking any sort of action on LinkedIn, We know who they are because they’re logged in.

So anytime someone clicks on one of your any sort of click on a single image ad, or if they’ve watched at least 25 percent of one of your videos, or if they visited your company page, or if they’ve scrolled through a document post any of, and lots more things, then you can tell LinkedIn, ah, create a retargeting audience around these.

So now. You’re advertising to a cold audience who’s never heard of you before. As soon as they take action on one of your ads that you’ve defined, now you can move them to further down the funnel. There’s a separate campaign that’s just targeting that retargeting audience. And you get to say, Ooh, you saw my first one.

Now I’m going to show you the next thing in the sequence or give you something a little deeper.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right, so it’s not it’s not even a big ask to the the prospect. They don’t have to fill out a form They don’t have to really engage deeply. It’s just literally that click you got the remarketing cookie from linkedin And then you can start moving them down the funnel now, eventually you do want them to take some action, right?

Like is that the lead gen form? What’s the latest thinking on what should you be asking on the form?

AJ WILCOX: I think with very warm audiences, when they already know, like, and trust you there’s no shame in asking them to, to speak to someone when they’re ready. We know on average, only about 5 percent of your audience is actually considering a, a new product or service.

So if you’re in front of those. Those bottom of the funnel folks I don’t think there’s a problem at all in saying, Hey, hop on a call with us. Let’s explore or come find out more about our services. There are two different ways that you can convert. One is send the traffic to your landing page. And then of course, LinkedIn has conversion tracking like every other platform does.

But then like you alluded to LinkedIn also has the native forms. So these are called lead generation form ads. And what’s so cool about them, they have incredible conversion rates because LinkedIn auto fills everything that they know about you. So if you’re asking for first name, last name, email, and maybe their LinkedIn profile URL, All of those things are pre filled and all someone has to do on mobile is just hit that submit button and yeah, they, they convert like four times what most landing pages convert out.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. Yeah. I mean, so that’s about reducing friction, right? If all the information is already there, just like on a Instagram ads, if there’s a form, it says, Hey, do you want us to pre fill based on what we already know? So yeah, that makes sense. So the other way to engage with an audience, and you said this was like the, the much higher engagement format is the short video.

So how do you produce that? Are we again talking about some generative AI or what tools do you like to make this efficient?

AJ WILCOX: I would love to try generative AI at some point to, to build like a, a doppelganger of me and try it. What I’ve noticed is that AI is really bad at currently at putting emotion into it.

So what I prefer to do is actually just grab my phone and speak to it just very naturally, very organically. And we’ve found in a lot of cases that’s free to do. And it outperforms the stuff that was done in a studio with professional teams and crews. So I’d say start out by just saying like, Hey, you as the founder or you as a thought leader, share with us something that we care about.

That’s going to endear us to your company and get us to learn more about you and be a little bit more interested in what you do. Try those as ads. And what we’ve found is if you have an ad that’s like 30 seconds long, it’s going to The cost per getting someone to watch, you know, half or more of that video is usually about a quarter of what you’d pay to get someone to land on a landing page of some kind.

So it’s like, would I rather pay For four people to hear me share something of value for, you know, 15, 20, 30 seconds or pay for one person to go and read a blog post that I don’t even know if they’re going to scroll down. They might just bounce. The video makes a lot of sense.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s awesome. So yeah, it’s high production value is not necessary is what you’re saying, but walk me a little bit through the type of content.

So you said do something that’s personal, that’s useful. Like what would be, and how frequently do you make these new video ads of yourself? And like one concern that I think a lot of founders or CEOs have is we’re so deeply into the field that many things just seem obvious or boring or repetitive to us, and that often stops me personally from, from doing videos.

Like, how do you remove some of those mental blocks and how do you figure out? What the audience actually cares about. Do you, do you, would you do some research ahead of that? Or is it literally like, Hey, I read this interesting thing and here’s how it applies to to my target audience. Let, let’s talk about that.

Or is there actually a bit more research and a bit more scripting that sometimes happens?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, I ended up doing it about once a month and I, I literally, I have a tripod, a wireless mic. And that’s it. I take it out into my front yard or a park or even here in my office and just record based off of the kind of content I create.

I’ll always at least create bullet points for me to speak to if not like a full script and. I mean, the challenge that you’ve talked about with like us as founders, we think the standard stuff is really boring and we don’t always want to speak about that or, or think about that. But I gather ideas for my videos from the questions that we end up getting like from our podcast from posts on LinkedIn.

And so if I have three people ask me about manual bidding, for instance, I’m going to be like, Oh, there is interest about manual bidding. It’s something I talk about all the time, but let me create another video. I also think about where someone’s at in the sales process, like we offer a free audit. And so but I, I don’t want to offer free audits at the top of the funnel where they don’t know us from Adam.

So I’ll create a separate video. That’s just me talking about, Hey, here’s this Free audit. Here’s what we do with your account. And then I’ll end up, you know, it’s the same looking video, but I end up just serving it to our bottom of funnel audiences.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And I suppose if somebody comes across an ad or a post they don’t like, it’s as simple as scrolling past it and not engaging.

So. You know, the risk of annoying someone really comes in if you’re inundating the platform with way too many posts. But like you said, if it’s this occasional thing and. You know, I’ll, I’ll look at it, but I, I’m just happy to see AJ’s face and I’m reminded, Hey, like got this thing. I want to talk to AJ about, right?

Like, even if I don’t care about his latest update on bid management, because maybe I’ve seen some of your other videos around that. That’s fine. Right? So, so we, we should stop or I should stress less about what is in that content and just make it, try to be useful to a few people. And that’s okay.

AJ WILCOX: Oh, totally.

And I think this has helped by LinkedIn’s activity level because like we talked about, people don’t oftentimes go, I’ll say there’s a very active contingent, but on average, the average user logs into LinkedIn like twice a month. So you don’t have to worry about super inundating people with the same message and making them sick of you.

I would say like. Whether it’s organic or ad posting, go ahead and post whatever. But we do have this extra control with ads. If you have two or fewer ads in a campaign, then LinkedIn is only going to show that ad once per 24 hour period to users. But if you follow LinkedIn’s recommendations, which we know that lines their pockets, if you put more than that for every new ad you put in there, it allows LinkedIn to show it that many times in a, in like a 48 hour period.

If LinkedIn, if your LinkedIn rep tells you, Oh, put seven creatives in this campaign you might have some of your most active members seeing that ad or ads from that campaign seven times over the next 48 hours. And. People can get sick of that. So I would say just have fewer ads in your, in your campaigns.

And then you don’t have to worry about inundating people.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. That’s really good advice. I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday. He works for the state department and so he’s got nothing to do with digital marketing, but he said, Hey, I Keep seeing your posts about GPT and PPC and this and that.

And like, he’s like, I completely don’t understand any of this, but I keep getting it. And so we started talking about the algorithm on LinkedIn. And so one of my assumptions would be that if if you’ve posted a number of pieces of content and some of the is about bid management and some about ad generation, like, is the algorithm smart enough to say, Oh, like, listen, This person cares about bid management and that one cares more about creative management and, and that to actually show the right thing to the right person.

Or is that kind of the realm of Instagram, which seems to be like amazing at showing ads that I’m like, Oh, wow, that’s the thing I didn’t know I wanted, but I do kind of want it. How does LinkedIn’s algorithm compared to some of the others that people might be more familiar with?

AJ WILCOX: LinkedIn definitely tries to feed you content that.

It thinks you’re going to find most interesting. A lot of the signals that it looks for is if you’ve interacted on a person or a company’s post before, or if you’ve chatted with that person through DMS on the backend, LinkedIn goes, Oh, they must be friends. They must have a tighter connection. We’ll show more of their content.

So if, if you have a loose connection there, if they don’t interact with your posts, they’re probably gonna see fewer of them in the future. But I definitely think Instagram has way more data on what people engage with. And so their algorithm is going to be a lot tighter.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And so, I mean, that’s then sort of a little bit the point of going and speaking at conferences and doing webinars at the end we say, Hey, connect with me on LinkedIn because that connection is what ultimately then allows my ads, my thought leadership to be surfaced to that person.

And as they become one of those 5 percent of people actually looking for a solution you want to be top of mind, right? Like, so it’s not about like Google search. We think very much about the user just expressed that they want to buy this thing right now, and that’s where we got to be there, but LinkedIn is much more about becoming that brand, that trusted person or entity that when the need is finally there, and once you finally done that search on Google hopefully you’ve done enough.

To build that credibility and be the one that gets chosen, right? Because there’s always so many options when it comes to any solution. You’re not the only one out there selling it. So you got to be top of mind.

AJ WILCOX: I totally agree. And then plus LinkedIn has this little, little dirty secret. You probably remember about 10 or it’s probably been more years ago when Facebook came out with the algorithm.

And all of a sudden everyone started complaining. This is a pay to play game. My. Organic posts aren’t getting seen anymore. LinkedIn rolled out the same algorithm a few years later, you know, very, very similar, but the effect was totally different on Facebook. There’s so many people posting there. You know, there’s no barriers or walls against people posting.

And so 100 percent of people will be willing to post because of that. The algorithm has to take things out of your newsfeed because there’s too much there. But on LinkedIn, on the other hand, they had only about 5 percent of users were posting. We’re creating, we’re posting, but a hundred percent of people need content in their newsfeeds.

So what does this algorithm do? What it’s doing is it’s looking for posts that get really good interaction and engagement, and it then promotes them into other people’s newsfeeds. So here’s the most powerful way to do this. If you post something organically and, and then I come and comment on it let’s say you have 500 followers on LinkedIn or connections, and I’ve got 500 connections.

As soon as I comment, LinkedIn’s like, Oh, AJ likes what Fred posted. I’m the next, you know, chunk of AJ’s followers that show up. I’m going to show them Fred’s post. And then all of a sudden you have 500 followers, but you see your posts are getting a thousand, 1500, 2000 views, and you’ve gone viral.

And that’s what I love so much. LinkedIn’s the easiest network in the world to go viral on. Unless you look really good in a swimsuit, then that’s Instagram and

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: TikTok. That’s an amazing tip. So again, it’s the power of networking, right? Like build those networks, make a really deep personal connection so that, you know, I really like what AJ writes.

And because we met many times in person, we trust each other. And that’s ultimately the human connection, right? So human connection does help you out, even if it’s this more impersonal system like LinkedIn. Well, good. So some amazing tips. Let’s shift over to a couple of audience questions. So the first one came from Stacey Pledge and Stacey was asking AJ, do you have any examples or thought?

Thoughts on how LinkedIn ads could work together with Microsoft and or Google ads to support a lead gen campaign. Do you have specific strategies or best practices for combining these platforms?

AJ WILCOX: I definitely do. So we talked about how LinkedIn is very good for top and middle of funnel and Google rules the bottom of the funnel or all search, really.

So these play very well together. What I would suggest is have campaigns targeting your exact ideal Kinds of, of call it your ICP, your, your ideal customer profile. And. Reach them on LinkedIn and send that traffic to your website, whether it’s landing pages or or just pages of your website. And then with Google and Microsoft, you could retarget all of the traffic that is landing on those pages.

And then that way, you know, the biggest weakness I think we have with LinkedIn is that people don’t show up very often. So you can be present every time they log in, but they only log in once a day. A month or once every two months, it’s hard to stay top of mind, but with your Google and your Microsoft remarketing campaigns, you can stay top of mind, especially if it’s display network, like multiple times per day, all over the web.

So I love that one as a strategy, like let the platforms work together, retarget each other’s traffic to be ever present wherever someone is.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I love that. And that’s really when people talk about first party data and bringing that to bear on your marketing campaigns. That’s a little bit what this is, right?

So you have a variety of ad platforms you can choose from. But the moment that that customer or that prospect comes to your site, that is now your first party data. And that can be acted upon in a variety of places. So that’s how you connect these networks together. Now there’s sort of a Maybe the opposite point because LinkedIn ads are pretty expensive, right?

Like CPCs are relatively high compared to what you’d pay on Google. Is there a way that you would use? A lower cost system, perhaps even Facebook or Instagram to get someone maybe on a bit of a click baity sort of thing, get them to your website. And then once you’ve kind of like double qualified them, now you start advertising through LinkedIn ads.

AJ WILCOX: Definitely. One of my favorite parts about retargeting on LinkedIn is we can retarget all of your website traffic, but then we can overlay filters on it for things we care about. Like, okay, I’m getting traffic from all around the world. I’m only going to retarget you on LinkedIn. If you’re in North America or if you’re in the EMEA region, whatever you care about, we can also overlay company sizes.

We have a client right now who you know, we were running all of her retargeting and she said, you know what? My sales team, if we have a, an SMB lead, something that’s not enterprise, they just don’t even count it. It, we might as well have not even generated it. So what we did is we went into the retargeting campaign and imposed a 5,000 or more employee count on all of our retargeting traffic and then voila, all of our leads that are coming in, they now care about their, their enterprise.

So I definitely think that there’s value there but you probably do wanna be driving a lot of traffic for it to be worth it. ‘cause if I, if I’m gonna run LinkedIn ads to just retarget my, my traffic from elsewhere and I have to log in, you know, 3, 4, 5 times a month to check on it. But the audience is like.

It’s spending 30 a month. It’s probably not worth it. So I would say on large traffic sites, absolutely smaller. It may not be worth your time, but definitely still possible.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that makes sense. And so you were speaking there a little bit about overlaying signals, right? So and then that kind of leads to a question from Steve Bell, who is saying, I’m interested if you can shed some light on how you LinkedIn’s incredible targeting and Microsoft ad search as well as Microsoft’s audience network for display.

So they, they were really talking at the initial stages of the, so it’s Microsoft bought LinkedIn. And so there was sort of this promise of all of LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities and B2B capabilities are going to come directly to MS ads. But it doesn’t seem like they took that all the way. Like, where does that stand and what do you still use and how can people benefit from that?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, I think he called it out perfectly. Right at the beginning, Microsoft created these, these tides. So data has gone both ways and I’ll tell you what it did to each platform within MS ads. Last time I checked, we could target by company name, job function, and I think it was company industry, those three things.

And then someone just this last week told me that they, they released more. I think we might have job title now, so there might be more. I think that’s by far the most helpful thing that that Ms ads could have done with their LinkedIn data set. And I want to see more. I want to be able to say like, Hey, LinkedIn is weak because we only get in front of people once or twice a month on average, but Ms ads has access to them much more often.

Let’s go target the same audiences in Ms ads as we do on linkedin and get cheaper costs per click. So I love that. The data that went the other way is kind of interesting. LinkedIn didn’t do nearly as much. What linkedin did is they took Microsoft’s understanding of industries, which was much more granular.

LinkedIn used to have something like 34 industries and they took Microsoft’s data set and now we have 300 and something so now you can pick, like, I’m not just computer software. I’m, you know, some variation of software and and that works. The other thing they do is if you are a Bing search user LinkedIn to Microsoft will pass your probably keyword history or, or something to LinkedIn, and then LinkedIn uses that to decide what your interests are.

And then advertisers on LinkedIn can apply interests on top of their targeting. You can imagine like not all of your audience, not even a majority, is gonna be a a Bing searcher. So that dataset is pretty light. But it was data that, that LinkedIn took from, from Microsoft, which is kind of cool.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, no, and that’s great.

I mean, that’s more than what you have on Google search. That lacks sort of this LinkedIn type network. We also talked about CPCs being expensive and managing bids and costs. And so Chandler Quinton asks, what are some best practices around the timing optimizations? Do you do it daily, weekly? And then he had a follow up questions, but we’ll start at that.

So timing of bid management.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah. So I, whenever I make a change to my bids of some sort, I like to give it two straight business days of, of performance now,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: not weekend. Exactly.

AJ WILCOX: Exactly. So if you make this change on a Friday, I’ll I might not actually evaluate it until Wednesday the next week so I can have a whole Monday and Tuesday.

LinkedIn also judges their days based off of the UTC time zone, which is kind of crazy. So if I make a bid update in let’s say now I have to throw out the entire day as being like, that’s going to be a messy day of, you know, two different bids or two different budgets. I have to throw that out and I’m not going to evaluate my, my traffic for, you know, two full business days.

After UTC time,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: interesting tool idea for product managers at Optmyzr. Can we make a bit management system that loads the bid at UTC time of day change? So you had clean data as far as managing these bits though, AJ. So what’s the strategy or best practices? So one suggestion that Chandler puts out is, is it lowering it just above the average cost per results?

You’ve discussed this before, so you know, maybe any updates on how bid management has evolved for you?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, you know, my bid management strategy has been the same for the last eight years. And LinkedIn has released so many new features, nothing they’ve done has disrupted the effectiveness of the original strategy.

So here’s how it works. If you have a click through rate that is less than about one percent. Then you’re going to get better performance for manual CPC bidding. And if you’re over 1%, CPM bidding is. Is better and you want to go with, with LinkedIn’s what they call max delivery. It’s like an automated bidding.

So for me, it totally depends on the performance of that ad. Does it get an extremely high click through rate? Great. I’m going automated. If it’s lower than that, I’m going to go manual. But then when you go manual, LinkedIn is going to show you this crazy range and say your competitors are bidding between 24 and 90 per click.

No, they’re not. It’s just, it’s absolute bunk, total garbage. And, but a lot of newer advertisers will fall for it. They’ll go, Oh, for my bids to be competitive, I need to bid, you know, at least 30 a click. Scratch that what you need to do is bid only high enough to fully spend your daily budget. So I’m going to probably start at something like, you know, the average cost per click on LinkedIn is 10 to 16.

I’m going to start at like 6 and just see, do I get traffic that day or not? Do I get some impressions? And if not, I might say, okay, I, maybe I need to bid 8 or maybe 8. 50 and just kind of incrementally walk them up. As soon as I naturally start spending the daily budget that I want to for multiple days then I go, great, that’s the bid that I need to get just enough traffic to fill my budget.

And your LinkedIn rep will tell you, no, if you’re, if you’re not bidding aggressively, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. You’re going to get the lowest quality people. We’ve done this research now on three separate occasions that does not shake out. Are the, the height of our bid has 0 percent correlation to lead quality by the time it hits the sales team.

So you really just focus on paying the least amount for your LinkedIn traffic and getting the most out of it. Don’t worry about what LinkedIn says about. Whether you’re bidding high enough or not.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, no, that’s amazing advice. And I think part of that is also because you’ve probably spent a lot of time and investment in setting the right audiences.

So yeah, even if it’s a lower bid, like it’s still qualified in many other ways. And I think some of that thought process of lower bids, lower quality comes from the Google world, right? Where you go on a broad match and you. I mean broad match basically means show my ads for anything that could be even remotely related And if you don’t let automated bidding take care of that Then yeah, you could pay a really high amount for something that’s maybe a little bit relevant, but not that likely to convert And so linkedin sounds like it’s very different in that regard and that’s also answering Thank you burke kalyansu’s question about manual versus automated bidding.

So I think you covered that now Scott Clark is asking I don’t know if this is a bit of a cynical question, but why do industrial executives tolerate green in house staff achieving a 2 to 5 percent lead qualification at MQLs 000 for more than a year and a half? But then when it comes to talking to a qualified agency and investing even just 15, 000 a month, they balk at that.

But that agency probably has done this like 50 times before. So what’s it, what’s that disconnect, right? And I guess the underlying question is what’s the value of an agency and how do you communicate that to someone who’s you know, maybe kind of mucked it up in house?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, I love this question because we battle with this all the time.

We we’ve lost so many accounts to companies taking it in house and we’ve also taken quite a few. Accounts away from in house teams who, who weren’t getting the most of it. And I think what this really comes down to is ownership, ownership, and really having one chokable throat. I feel like a lot of executives if, if you have something in house, there’s an employee who is running this for you, you know, that you can go to them at any time and ask them for something and, and they have to do whatever you say.

Cause. You know, they’re on your payroll and it’s also if something goes wrong, they have one chokable throat to go after that person and say, fix this or else. With an agency, you don’t own it. And so even if performances is better or could be expected to be better I could see executives still saying, I’d rather have it in house, even if the performance isn’t as good.

It’s, I think it’s a risk factor to when you hire an agency, you never know if they’re actually really good at what they do. Like everyone needs to kind of trial out their agency and see we see the same thing. We really wish people would look at it and say, Hey, our in house team is paying three times more for traffic than they should come to an agency.

Spend a lot less money and get even better, better service and traction. And we keep trying to convince people of the same thing.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. I mean, so there is legitimate value in doing this day in day out is all you do. You’ve tested these strategies for other advertisers. You can benefit from that learning that’s already happened.

And then again, I think much more about Google ads, but. You know, it can take 10, 000 of wasted spend before you figure out what works and what doesn’t. And Google’s machine learning systems will also waste that same level of money. When you had some insights where you could have benefited from an agency that’s already tested a certain bid management strategy or a certain type of audience and can say, yeah, it might sound appealing, but That’s not going to work or like you just said like make a short video out It’s going to come it’s going to have so much more Engagement rate and higher engagement rate probably means that you can get away with a lower bid and still get that customer, right?

So all of these things that agencies know because they do it day in day out A lot of value in that.

AJ WILCOX: So we have a

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: question from our very own Nava Hopkins for into us. Both also works for Optmyzrs. So she’s asking how does off roading inspired the best content ideas? And I think you can add some like what she talked about.

It sounds like a little bit of an insider, uh, joke here.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah. Yeah. Basically Nava and I have been off roading together. Anytime someone comes out to Salt Lake City, Utah, I’ll generally invite them and say, Hey, you want to go out off roading? I’ve got a side by side and dirt bikes and stuff. And so I’ve gotten to go out with, with Nava before.

But you know, a serious answer to this question is if all I do every single day is the same thing that I’ve always done, I’m going to be stuck in this, like seeing the forest for the trees. Mentality. And so I really do love these times of like taking a day off and go do something different because especially when I have thinking time, I love road trips for this.

Like I’ll just not have any sort of podcast or music on. I’ll just think as I’m going down the road, I have these like crazy ideas of like, Hey, I should try this. I should try this. And I have ideas that I wouldn’t have had any other way. So serious answer to that question. Like, I think everyone should break out of what they’re doing, do something different, and then free your mind up to think about new and creative ways of doing what you’re already doing.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. And it’s also like have a good work life balance, right? Like if you’re constantly in the office only thinking about work, it’s just doesn’t allow space for creativity.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, totally.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. And then we have a question from our producer, I think. But how did you get your teeth stuck in a basketball net as a kid?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, this is a crazy story. I think I was somewhere around 10 years old, maybe nine. And my mom was getting ready to go to some sort of an event. And me and my brother were out on the driveway playing basketball because I was a basketball fiend as a kid. And I was like, I really want to do a back jam. I’m obviously too short.

So I went and got a bucket and stood on the bucket and then like took the basketball and, and did a back jam. But somehow my teeth got stuck in the, in the net. And this is a little embarrassing to say, but if you look at my front teeth, you can see like the two front teeth are, are like more yellow than the rest.

That’s because the teeth are actually dead. My dentist said like, Yeah, those are dead. You can’t whiten them or anything. I, I killed him by getting my teeth stuck in the net and I was hanging by my teeth until my mom could come and like lift me off and take me to an emergency dentist. So there we go.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And that was the day AJ decided he would not be a professional basketball player, but become like the world’s leading expert on B2B. That’s right. There we go. Okay. So we also like to do a little bit of rapid fire. So a short questions, short answers. First one, what’s something you wished you knew before you got into marketing?

AJ WILCOX: I joke about this, but I wish I would have known what it was when I got into it. I knew I wanted to be in the business school at my university and I was looking at the, the emphases, the majors that you could select there. And I looked at marketing and went, I don’t know what marketing is. But I love ads.

I love TV commercials. And so I, I registered for it and then I stayed with it and just learned more about marketing and fell in love with it even more. It’s, it’s a lot more than just TV ads.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. Next question, what’s something you believe in that a majority of other marketers might disagree with?

AJ WILCOX: I, I think the best one here is that LinkedIn ads are worth investing in, even though they’re expensive.

We had a client, sorry, I know this is rapid fire, but I’ll try to share this very quickly. A client of ours was advertising on both Meta and LinkedIn and they, they were trying to make a case for like. If we have to cut back budget, what do we cut? And you look at meta and the cost per click was like a fourth or a fifth of LinkedIn.

And because of that, the conversions cost a fourth or a fifth as much. But as we followed it through the whole sales process, we started calculating a cost per lead, a cost per marketing qualified lead, cost for sales qualified lead, cost per proposal, cost per closed deal. We found that their sales team was throwing out 90 percent of the leads for just being disqualified.

They weren’t the right people. On meta because meta doesn’t know who you are professionally. It can’t find those right people effectively, but LinkedIn, they were only throwing out 5 percent of their leads. So as you follow the math through the whole process, the ROI on LinkedIn, despite paying five times more for traffic, Was double what meta was, and it’s all due to, to the lead quality you can get.

So don’t cut, like, don’t cut the platform out just because it’s, it looks expensive at the front end. Always measure all the way to the, to the back end.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And, and, and the risk is, I mean, because it is expensive. Getting into it and have making some mistakes could be very costly. But great advice. I mean, ultimately it’s all about results.

It’s not about the CPC. It’s about the, did you get a customer? Did you make a profit on that customer? And how do you backtrack it to the click that got you there in the first place? So let’s talk about AI tools. What’s your favorite one?

AJ WILCOX: I think I have to say chat GPT. I’ve been using the API quite a bit more and there’s a plugin into Google sheets.

I think the plugins paid now, but it was free. So if you have API access to chat, GPT, you can build really cool spreadsheets that are like based off of this, generate this. And based off of this, give me three variations, run it through these three levels of creativity. Give me three different versions of ad copy.

Include emojis, include my reviews. I mean, you get really crazy that way. So I have to say chat GPT is my favorite right now.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And I love that the plugins that you’re talking about. So the plugin, it used to require that you had an API key, but now the plugin itself, because you have to pay for it, can use its own API key.

So it actually does simplify it a little bit for for users. And depending on which model you use, it also increases or decreases the cost. Oh, that’s great. And one of my favorite tricks too is and I don’t know how much you play with this but Try to figure out like what’s the cheapest version of gpt?

For the task at hand right when it comes to like give me three additional keywords You don’t need gpt4 because you know, you don’t you’re not writing beautiful paragraphs but if you need to produce a blog post then yes do spend a little bit more money and don’t go for model 3. 5 use model 4 pay more money, but you’re going to get better results out of it And again, it’s it’s like we talked about cpc, right?

You Don’t care about the underlying like base cost, but care about the cost to produce the thing that you needed. Sometimes it is worth paying for a more expensive model because you’re going to save a lot of time cleaning it up afterwards.

AJ WILCOX: That’s brilliant. I love that, Fred.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Thank you, AJ. Hey, what’s one important skill that you think marketers should develop to stand out in today’s modern marketing landscape?

AJ WILCOX: Excel data, get really good at data. I say this, you know, for the last three years, I’ve said like, this is the year of the technical marketer. And there are so many marketers out there who who can write ad copy, who can you know, crater arrange imagery. And it’s going to be really hard, I think, to stand out in your industry as an expert.

But the ones who win. Really understand data. We get so much data from ad platforms and from, you know, our CRMs and different sources. If you know how to use Excel to pivot it, to slice it, to dice it and get insights that way. I, I think that’s the far and away the best way for a marketer to stand out.

Be technical

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: great advice. I couldn’t agree more Ajay, thank you so much for sharing all this great advice Thank you everyone for watching if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want to be notified when we have other ones Please use the subscribe buttons to get notified. You can also consume this as a podcast.

We’re on youtube. videos So please keep following us And for the upcoming episodes, we are asking for questions. So take a look at LinkedIn and see who the next guest will be. Ask us questions. I will feed them to that person to get everything answered. So AJ, thanks again very much and hope to see you around in person and for another PPC town hall.

Thanks everyone.

AJ WILCOX: Have me back anytime. Thanks Fred.

Explore the rich insights on PPC strategies, LinkedIn ads, bid management, and more, shared by experts Frederick Vallaeys and AJ Wilcox.