Linkedin Paid Ads - From A to Z by Impactable.com

Fun interview with the folks at B2B Playbook where we talk about b2b marketing, Linkedin ads, and startup life. I'll also cover a pretty amazing retargeting framework that Impactable has rolled out to over 200+ clients!

Linkedin Ads VS Facebook Ads People really like to compare different ad channels to each other to try to see which one is better or where they should put their money or maybe even just what to try next. I’ll start off by saying that each channel is actually pretty different for a few different reasons and you can’t just be thinking in terms of cost per click or cost per lead. You need to evaluate channels on these criteria. Targeting Each channel builds targeting in a different way and is better suited for targets that match a certain demographic. Part of this is because people actually use each platform differently and are in different modes when using them. Facebook is traditionally considered a more consumer-type platform where people come to consume content, be entertained, and buy B2C-type products. These are typically impulse buys. It’s typically not the best place to start a B2B relationship or build a target list using their filters but it can be a great medium to show up on if you bring your targeted list from outside. Targeting on Facebook: On Facebook, you can’t really get that granular on the position title, years of experience, industry, and things of that nature. You can target “business owners” or professionals and then you can work in interests that might help identify what bucket they fall in. Targeting on Linkedin: Linkedin is the world’s largest professional database which gives it a pretty big advantage when it comes to building targeted lists for B2B ads or outreach. You can specify things like: Position tile Job function Seniority level Geography Years of experience Industry Company size And then on top of those..things like interest in marketing automation, retargeting, sustainability and more. You can stack job/industry criteria on top of interest/skill sets to really get an ideal prospect who is more likely to have a need and be interested in your offering. Audience mindset The other thing I try to keep in mind when advertising on a channel is this. What is the average user really here to do. And is my ad going to disrupt that activity in a good way or bad way? Linkedin is probably the only platform that B2B decision-makers actually log on to with the mindset of being influenced on business and buying decisions. They are looking for industry news/insights, tips + hacks, and also to discover new products/services and vendors that could save them money or deliver better client success. Price vs Quality The other sticking point for many is that they hear “Linkedin ads are just too expensive” or maybe just more expensive than facebook. If you are looking at cost per click or cost per lead…i’ll 100% agree with you. I’d argue that Linkedin delivers much higher quality traffic for the above reasons and that a booked call from Linkedin is 3-5 more likely to end up as a new paying client than a Facebook call. I’d take 5 Linkedin ads booked calls over 10 Facebook booked calls any day of the week. So what’s the answer? - I’d use both but favor Linkedin with my spend. To me it’s rarely ever a matter of this or that..but more how do we leverage each platform to their best functionality.

Elements of a Linkedin Ad - Launch Day! 1. First, you have the name at the top. This is optional but can help with organization or even numbering different options. 2. Next, you have the introductory text space. This is where you’ll input the main copy for the ad which will show above the image. For this one, I’m referring to single image ads which are the most common. Once you understand how these work and what each space is for, the other ad formats are honestly not that intimidating. 3. Third up is the destination URL This just means that if someone clicks the image of the ad or the call to action button (CTA) this is the destination they will be pushed to. 4. Next is the ad image. We like to use rectangular images here much like the “sponsored Linkedin post” option in canva. These are typically 1200 x 627. 5. Fifth element of an ad is the headline. This is the small sentence (just 200 characters) that will show below the image of the ad and next to the call to action button 6. The 6th element of a Linkedin ad is the description. You get 300 characters here and it’s basically as it sounds..a description of the service or action you’d like them to take. The thing about the description is that it will not actually show on mobile. It can only be seen when you are leveraging the Linkedin display network and when the user is on the desktop. For us that means that this is typically visible when we run retargeting campaigns and open things up to the Linkedin audience network. In the event that this actually does show, it will show the description and not the intro. So viewers will see the image, the headline, and the description. Just something to keep in mind when using the audience network. 7. Last element of a Linkedin ad here is the call to action button. This is the button that appears on the bottom right of the ad image and has a clickable action. This is just a text filed and then the prospect will be pushed to the destination URL when they click. For example the most commonly used would be “learn more” and which then pushes them to the website destination URL. OR “Download” which then pops up a LinkedIn lead gen form which triggers an ebook to be sent to the prospects provided email address. And there you have it folks….you are ready to save and launch the ad! And if you’ve been following along and setting things up with us, you have everything you need to track conversions, build the retargeting audience, and launch a killer retargeting campaign in about a month! Keep following us as we get into some intermediate stuff next with ad optimization, retargeting strategy, UTM tracking, Google analytics, and more!

Linkedin Ads Bidding Basics I actually leave a lot of my campaigns on these settings: Set a daily budgetRun campaign continuouslyMaximum delivery (automated). Let’s walk through it real quick. Set a daily budget. This just means that instead of setting a lifetime budget with an end date..I choose to put a daily budget that just continues to run until I decide it’s over. The way I approach most marketing is not in 2-week sprints or a 60-day trial. Most marketing should honestly be an ongoing and continuous effort that you work on optimizing and perfecting. Most of you should be familiar with that concept but this is just ad budgeting 101 here. **Keep in mind that depending on other factors such as audience size, bid amounts, active members in your search group, it may spend under your daily budget or it might come in slightly over that budget occasionally. Run Continuously If you’d like you can actually change this setting to have a set end date. This works really well with seasonal campaigns or short tests you’d like to run. Bidding. Under bidding, we have a few options. We can optimize toward conversions, clicks. Or impressions. Just starting out and in most cases, you’ll choose the option that aligns with your objective goal at the top of this page but Linkedin actually will choose that automatically for you by default. One thing to keep in mind is that conversion focus requires data. You actually need to have a handful of conversions to be completed and tracked for Linkedin to have any idea how to optimize for that goal. So if you’re just starting out or don’t have that data in yet, you are probably better off just optimizing for clicks/website visits. Linkedin will also by default set you up with maximum delivery which is not bad. There will be some waste there but until you are more advanced and comfortable and also willing to check in on your campaign more frequently (daily), it’s probably best to just leave it as automated for convenience. Manual bidding would allow you to set a maximum CPC which could result in your full daily budget not being used. There are some advanced tricks we can talk about in a later episode where you can start low and walk your way up to find the right manual bid amount for you but that will be for another time. Conversion tracking. I’ll just throw this in here because after this we just need to input the ad elements and launch! So this conversion tracking section is just where you click the different conversions you want to be attached/tracking with this campaign. If you already set these up (which we covered in an earlier episode) then you should just have to click the boxes and then hit next! Ok folks..that’s it for today and in our next episode, we will actually input the elements of an ad and launch one!

Let’s get into a fun one here which is Linkedin targeting - the actual audience that you can target with your Linkedin ads and what filters you have to work with here. Linkedin’s targeting capabilities are probably one of the top 3 reasons people actually love Linkedin ads and one of the main reasons they are so effective. It’s also part of the reason the cost per click and cost per lead are a bit higher compared to maybe facebook because the quality is just better. Today I’m just going to quickly run through the basics so you know what’s possible. The two main sections of linked ads targeting are Audiences and Audience attributes. Audiences are those that you either import yourself or that are created through your custom audience functions like conversions, website visitors, or specific page visitors, company page visitors, lead gen form opens and so forth. This one is used heavily for retargeting. The Audience attributes is the main filters used to create a cold audience to target. Main subsections you have are: Company Demographics Education Job Experience Interests and Traits Let’s run through these next. Company filters: The main one used here is just industries. There are also some others like growth rate, follower of, company connections, and category but Industry is really what most people use and very rarely does anyone use the others. Oops, I missed one here - Company size is under company and it’s one of the top 5 filters everyone should be using. 1-10-10-50 50-200 etc. Almost every business out there does way better when they know what company size they do best with. Demographics: This is just member age and gender. Education is the next one. Job experience. This is where you can target by job function, job seniority, job title, member skills, and years of experience. You have to choose between either function plus seniority or just job title as it won’t let you pair job title with seniority or function (which makes sense as the job title pretty much should tell you both of those as well). Interests and Traits This one is kind of cool. It’s a bit like Facebook but better because you are combining this interest filter with all the other laser-like filters. So for example I could target financial advisors that have an interest in marketing automation and hit them with ads about an automated Linkedin outreach service. That extra insight as to which financial advisors are more likely to vibe with our offer can make a big difference in ROI. Some other cool traits/interests in here are - job seeker, job hopper, active on Linkedin, open to education, recently switched jobs, open to relocation, recently promoted, and then you can dive into either general interests (sales/marketing/health/business, etc) or product interests which would be like CRM software, health products, marketing automation. After you get the right targeting filters in place, you can create an exclusion list using the same filters or uploaded list, and then you are ready for bidding and almost ready to launch! In the next episode, I’ll touch on bidding basics, and then we will actually do the ad setup and launch on of these bad boys. Keep listening after we get through the basics and I’ll walk you through more advanced strategies soon.

Conversion setu We actually got rid of the form on our website because it was just another hurdle for people to jump through before booking a call and then required another touchpoint to follow up with those who submit a form but don’t book a call. Instead, the first conversion we track is actually booked calls. How did we do this? We use calendly to book calls and calendly (along with most call booking tools) allow you to set up a URL redirect upon booking. This means that when they confirm the call booking, they get redirected to a URL of our choice. So we send them to a call-booked thank you page on our website which allows us to set that as a checkpoint that we can track for conversions. We then also put a conversion value on this so we can give our different conversions values and optimize for the ones worth the most. B. Purchase conversion We use a software called Paykickstart to manage sales pages, upsell offers, subscriptions, and affiliates. Once they hit purchase and it goes through, they get directed to purchase confirmed URL on our website that allows us to track this as a conversion and slap a value on it. Next stop - Custom Audiences. I’ve set up some cool custom audiences for us so here a few. Website visitors (all) Those who visit our outreach offering page Those who visit our Linkedin paid ads offering page Those who visit our google ads offering page Those who book calls with us Those who purchase from us Those who visit our company page Those who have clicked on one of our cold LinkedIn ads Those who have clicked on a google ad Those who have clicked on any of our paid marketing channels. My cold ads. For this ad I actually took a screenshot of an organic post I made from my personal account. This allowed me to visually show high engagement - I think it had 100-200 likes and a lot of comments. The other fun thing here is that on the screenshot it starts to show how the conversion value was 16k for retargeting and has a … view more like a real post would show..but again this is just a screenshot so when they click on that..they are actually just clicking on the photo which then takes them to my landing page. The Click-through rate on this is over 3% which is absolutely absurd. You won’t see that anywhere on a cold audience. Our cost per click is under $3 which again for a cold campaign is just ridiculous. Retargeting Next up I actually have 4-5 retargeting layers going at the same time. I have a trust/credability campaign that retargets website visitors with things like case studies, testimonials, press releases, a few other things. I then have a campaign that promotes my other channels such as youtube, podcast, and newsletter. I then have a 3rd retargeting campaign - this one segments those that visited my ads page but not my outreach page and hits them with outreach offers just making sure they know we have that capability. A 4th retargeting layer is a series of text ads that have a whole range of uses/offers - because these get such high frequency…we can really work in a ton of different options and strategies of what to say.

Let’s break up the tedious foundational walk-through and take a step back to a little more high-level view of what we are looking to build. For those who have never run Linkedin ads before, this will shed light on what all these pieces we are building will eventually look like. And for those who are currently dabbling or running Linkedin ads, this might shed a little light on if you are on the right path or give you a different perspective. Overall Strategy Here is the summary/cliff notes. Our goal is to find our ideal prospects, get our company and solution on their radar, build up trust and credibility with them until we are the clear expert in our space (or at least a top contender), and then nudge them into converting. All while tracking each action/metric so that we can test and improve. So here is what a decent 101 basic Linkedin Paid Ads strategy might look like. You create the audience inside LinkedIn ads and go after marketing startups with 50-200 staff who operate inside the USA, speak English, and our targeting will include founders/owners/ceo’s/presidents - I’ll also throw in that they have an interest in chatbots and marketing automation and are frequent contributors on the platform which means they are active and more likely to interact with our ads. Next, I’ll run cold ads to this group in the form of Single image ads to get on their radar - depending on the need and complexity of my solution I can either be pretty blunt take a longer approach. I might run a case study as a cold ad (what we do), touch on their major pain point, or come right out and just announce the solution we offer to see if they are curious enough to bite - which in this case means click. Step 3 - we track all the intent signals from this cold campaign which means we track all the website clicks it produces, company page visitors, even video views if we ran any here or lead gen form opens. We track all of those signals and put those that do interact with our ad, company page, or website into a retargeting audience. We now know they fit our ideal target criteria and have shown some form of interest which makes them a pretty warm lead if you ask me. The next step here is to build up trust and credibility - You see that one click into your website will rarely ever convert. It’s likely not the right time and even if it is, they don’t know you or trust you yet. We no retarget this group who have shown interest with a series of ads - but these ads won’t always look like ads. I’ll run case studies, testimonials, press releases, us in the news, awards we’ve won, and even cross-promote our podcast, youtube channel, newsletter, and any other communities we are growing. Paid ads is the best way to ensure the distribution of key content that creates a story or narrative that we want our prospects to see. This is the modern-day nurture sequence. Not some clunky 52 step email drip that they might only open half off. I like to layer in the ads as well so they see some variation or a different angle of us almost every time they log into Linkedin - when you are just filtering the ones who have shown intent, it’s a small enough group that you can dominate without a ton of spend. Retargeting might only take 20-30% of the budget but it will account for 80-90% of the conversions.

Welcome back and we are grinding out the basics here still. A lot of foundational info to get through but it’s important to really understand what the capabilities are here in order to know what’s possible. I won’t spend too much time here (hopefully) as my main goal is just the basic understanding of the Linkedin ad formats you can work with. Single Image Ad This is probably the most used type of Linkedin ad - You get to choose an image, intro text, and a headline for the ad which then appears in the prospect home feed. Great for almost any use and can be used in 100 different ways. These are the most common ads that you tend to see in your feed. A small tip here - Linkedin paid ads will always show “sponsored” underneath the company name when it’s a paid ad in your feed. LinkedIn Carousel Ad These are the ads that have multiple images that you can scroll through from left to right. You can use them to show off different product offerings or could be more like a storyboard or even just bullet points. They don’t tend to get the best cost per click but can be great for exposure and retargeting. Linkedin Video ad-Pretty simple - this is the ad type you’d select if you are going to run a Linkedin video ad. You can use this with different objectives (not just video view objectives). A common one I see is using a short webinar video with a conversion or website visit objective. Linkedin Text AdThese ones are pretty cool. They currently show up above the main LinkedIn feed or over to the right of the feed and only give you a very limited space to get a message across to prospects. Pros: They get a pretty good cost per click and a high number of impressions because they are currently underused by most. Cons: They can’t accumulate likes/comments so no social proof is possible long term and the space is really limited of what you can write. I’d recommend using these in the retargeting layer for most campaigns. Linkedin Spotlight ad Spotlight ads show up on the right side of the feed and show in a box format with the prospect's profile image next to the ad in order to get their attention. You get super limited space for text here but they can be great to grab attention and also will show off your company logo as well.

What are the different ad objective types? Brand Awareness Website visit Engagement Video Views Lead Generation WEbsite conversion Job applications Funnel Concept - Stages of a prospect If you haven't been in the b2b world for too long then you might not be familiar with some of the ever so popular funnel images that show the different states of a prospect. It looks like this - Awareness is the top of the funnel. Consideration is the middle of the funnel. And then conversion is the bottom of the funnel. The idea is that a buyer starts off having never heard of you before and knowing nothing about your company or offerings. So it makes sense that just hitting them over the head with “buy now” type ads wouldn’t be very high converting unless you have an ecomm product that is just impulse buy/transactional. Typically you first have to just get on the prospect's radar with an awareness-type campaign as their first exposure to you. Here the goal is just first impression - not conversion. So our first LinkedIn paid ads objective is “awareness” Let's dive in. Linkedin Lead Generation Ad Here we go! The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Lead generation objective for Linkedin ads. Yes, this is the infamous Lead gen forms that you can run. But let’s hurry up and wait on this one. That’s my expert opinion about lead generation forms. You want to really be careful about using them. I’ll tell you why I don’t recommend starting with these, why you should be careful about using them, and where you should use them, and I’ll also tell you why other marketing agencies freaking love them and why they don't have your best interest in mind. Ok so for starters and for those who don’t actually know what the Linkedin lead generation objective is, I’ll explain. With this objective, you can only run lead generation ads which are the ads that try to capture prospects' information inside of Linkedin without sending them outside of the platform. They will see one of your ads in their feed and click the call to action button. Typically these are used with ebooks or some checklist or something downloadable. They click - download and a form pops up and asks for basic information such as name, email, and company name. Since Linkedin already has all of that information it just auto-populates for the prospect which allows them to just hit submit and for you to capture their info really easily. This is the quickest and easiest way to generate “leads” from Linkedin ads. This is why most marketing agencies love using them because they can show leads sooner. My issue with lead generation ads is that they produce really low-quality leads usually. 8-10 of these won’t be responsive when you try to follow up via email and if you are passing them off to the sales team, they will usually be very frustrated with them as they waste lots of time. My advice is to not use these as cold ads but instead put them in the retargeting layer. Wait until they have at least visited your website first before using lead gen forms. This will improve the quality of the leads dramatically. Listen to the full episode for all objective types!

This is another common question as people tend to be a bit anxious to start getting leads and closing deals as soon as possible. I’ll level with you a bit here. If you aren’t aware of this yet, I'll be the bearer of somewhat bad news. Marketing is a long-term play that builds momentum over time and is not as quick and transactional as you might hope it to be in the beginning. By that, I mean that any new channel has its growing pains, optimization time, and momentum-building time periods. So what exactly does that look like for LinkedIn paid ads? Depends. This depends on if you are running other channels, what your budget is, and also how long your normal sales cycle is. Not quite the answer you expected? I know and I’m sorry. I really wish I could give you some guru advice of averages that gave you a warm fuzzy feeling that you could know leads and revenue would just start dropping in after the 35-day mark but that’s just not how it works all the time. So here are the most common scenarios I see and how they play out. Linkedin ads in a silo -No other channels This is the toughest situation to be in terms of probably having to really set realistic expectations. Carving out your first paid ads channel is no joke and takes some time and consistency but here is how it works. First 30 days you’ll be putting cold ads in front of your target audience and trying to drive down the cost per click while you build up the retargeting audience. Don't expect many if any conversions in the first 30 days. Depending on your budget, you could expect to get into retargeting phase after the 30-45 day mark which is when you start seeing your first signs of actual life. During the initial retargeting phase the audience size is small and a $10/day budget for the retargeting side is enough to dominate their feeds. You’ll notice cost per click drop dramatically from cold to retargeting. As the retargeting audience grows from 300 up to 2,000 or so, the $10/day is usually still enough and you should really start to see leads/conversions start dropping in. At this point, you’ve had the time and data to really optimize your cold campaign and maybe boiled it down to the top 2 ads and hopefully even gotten some likes/comments on your ads which helps further drive down the cost per click. There are also all sorts of retargeting strategies and layers that can come into play at this point to really move the needle and improve conversion rates but we can get into that on a later episode with advanced retargeting. For now, just know it might take 3-4 months to carve out a profitable ROI on Linkedin ads if it’s your first paid ads channel or you run it in a sllo. Listen to full episode for the rest of info...

In this episode, I'll cover the main types of custom audiences that you can make which are also the audiences we can later use for retargeting. Here are the main types of custom audiences I cover: -Company/contact -Event -Company page -Lead Gen form You’ve probably at least heard about Linkedin lead generation forms or could make a good guess what those are all about. Basically, they are just a form fill type ad that you can run on Linkedin that captures the prospect’s information quickly and easily within the platform. Lead gen form audience options are pretty simple as well - Did someone open the lead gen form and then the second option is if they submitted the form. And here is the first opportunity that you can see to segment. If you set up a group of those that open and also those that submit, you are then able to target a group that opened the form but did not yet submit. -Video Website Visits Here is the main one that everyone uses. Website visits is just any website or landing page that you can put your insights tag on and are able to then create a group based on any URL associated with that domain or page. The main groupings for a website visit. 90 Days all website visitors - For our domain which is impactable.co, we would simply create a group that says “URL starts with www.impactable.co” or even just contains “impactable.co” I’d also set up a custom audience for each conversion you have as well. So contact us form submitted, call booked, purchase confirmed etc. Anything you have set up as a conversion should also be a custom audience so that you can segment your retargeting. The way you do this is very similar to the conversion setup. If your form submitters get redirected to a thank-you page upon submission, then you can set up a contact us form as a conversion and also as an audience. This logic would then allow you to create targeting for a campaign that targets website visitors that have not submitted a form. Or form submitters that have not booked a call. Or call bookers who have not purchased. Depending on the type of traffic your website gets and what other channels you are running ads on, there is a lot you can do with website visitor audiences. Not going to show you how today but a few advanced things you can do here would be to retarget just google ads traffic, just paid traffic, just facebook traffic, just Linkedin ads traffic. You could also target just those that visit a certain page on your website like your pricing page or segment by what service offering pages they visit. Really there is just a ton you can do here. But for just getting started? I’d just set up basic website visitors for now and create the 90 and 180-day time range buckets.

Good question and I have a few answers on this one as each person/business is different. First off, what’s your overall marketing budget and what other channels are you involved in? Really big difference in answers here on a budget if this is your first paid ads channel you are looking to carve out vs you already running 8k/month on google, 2k/month on Facebook, and now want to add in Linkedin. Also, do you have decent website traffic by any other means? Either organic maybe or good SEO in place? Scrappy startup - initial channel So let’s start with my scrappy startups who are either starting with Linkedin ads on its own or very limited paid ads to budget overall. The absolute bare minimum you’d want to invest for Linkedin ads would be $500-$1000 a month. Now with that amount of spend, I’d have you keep a few things in mind. First, 80% of the Linkedin ads results typically come in the retargeting phase. So you absolutely can’t judge the effectiveness of a Linkedin ads campaign by the initial cold ads you start running. The initial goal of the ads will be to just get in front of your prospects and get on their radar. It’s not until you track and retarget all those who show interest that the real results start to kick in. Second, if done right, the Linkedin algorithm and whoever is managing your account will ensure that you get more and more momentum over time. The results you see in month one are going to be bad probably. BUT if you learn which ads are performing well/poorly, and what audience types are most interested/engaged, you can see dramatic improvements from month 1 to month 2. I’ll dive more into that question on a different episode that details the timeline of results. Already have established channels The next group I’ll talk about is if you already have established channels that produce consistent leads/conversions. Depending on your overall budget, I’d say you want to give Linkedin ads a fair shot which would be $2,000-$3,000 initially and then grow from there. BUT, if you are running other paid channels that are profitable, Linkedin ads will be a no-brainer, and here is why. Linkedin’s insights tag will track all website traffic and not just traffic sent to your website by Linkedin ads. This means that if google ads is a foundational channel for you, we can actually retarget google ads traffic with Linkedin retargeting ads and help you get even more out of that already great channel! Pretty cool right? We can even get more specific and say we want to retarget traffic from 1 particularly successful campaign of google ads. This might be relevant if you have experimental google ads campaigns or some newer/weaker ones you don’t want to be lumped in there. We can also put filters on the backend inside of Linkedin to say that we want to retarget the website visitors but only if they also fit our criteria of job title, function, location, industry, company size etc. What about our agency? We spend around 8-9k/month on google ads, 2k/month on Facebook, and 5k/month on Linkedin. Linkedin paid ads is a really solid channel for us and really help enhance our google ads campaigns which is one of the reasons I love it so much.

Linkedin Insights tag installed We touched on this in the last episode but let me recap and expand on this. The Linkedin insights tag is much like google tag or Facebook pixel. It’s a line of code that goes into your website that allows the Linkedin ads campaign to see who’s clicked into your website, what pages they visit, and helps ensure your conversion tracking works if you are using URL view. You can drop the code into the global footer and all pages under that domain will be visible by that tag. This is super important because it’s what allows us to track website visitors and fill up our retargeting audiences. I absolutely would never launch or run a campaign or even continue to spend any ad dollars if my insights tag was not installed or not working. Most of the results and conversion in Linkedin ads campaigns come from the retargeting layer which requires a retargeting audience, which requires the insights tag be working. So let’s go through the steps to get this installed. I’ll walk you through this. Conversion tracking set up Under Account assets, you’ll also find the conversion tab which is where we can set up the different conversions to track with our ad campaigns. The basic conversions that most companies track would be the submission of “contact us” forms on the website. Let’s dive in. Click “create a conversion”. Here it will sort of walk you through the options but I’ll explain some of the thought processes behind each option. Name your conversion - keep it simple for example - Website form submission Next, let’s look through the settings. There are lots of different options as to what best describes this conversion. The common ones would be lead or request quote for form submissions, phone call or book appointments for a booked call, and sales or purchase for a confirmed paying client type action. Conversion Value -We could go into a whole advanced calculation of what type of number you should use for conversion value but for the most part let’s just say for now, if you know what this action is worth, just enter it in, and if you don’t we can either just take an educated guess or leave it blank for now. Ultimately you’ll want a conversion value assigned to help you make better choices down the road. If all conversions are the same value, you’ll end up chasing the conversions that are easiest to get vs the ones that are worth the most which is a dangerous path.

Basic areas inside the campaign manager that should be on your radar. SettingsSettings are actually not labeled super clearly so you might be searching around a while at first. It’s located on the top right corner and has an icon of the company logo you are in and the name next to it. If you click this logo, you’ll see options to visit the company page, manage billing, and manage access. This is where you would go if you wanted to give someone else access to your LinkedIn account in order to help with management, audits, or just have visibility. Account assetsLocated along the top bar towards the center, this is where you go for information about the insights tag, conversion setup, custom audiences, and lead generation forms. There are some other options here but those are the main ones. Let’s just introduce you to each of these real quick. Insights tag The LinkedIn insights tag is much like google tag or Facebook pixel. It’s the piece of code that gets dropped into your website that allows LinkedIn ads to track your website visitors and ultimately what allows us to retreat and segment our ads which is where the best results come from. Reminder - I’m just introducing these today but will go into each of these in-depth on an upcoming podcast. ConversionsThis is where you set up your goals/conversions for campaigns. It’s one thing to make some pretty ads and put them in front of your target audience (hopefully) but then how would we know if we are successful or not?Conversions is the place where you can set up tracking of actions such as form submissions, booked calls, purchases, newsletter subscribers, and almost any other action you wish your prospects to take. It’s important to set this up properly so that we can track back what campaigns and what ads contributed to the successful completion of these actions and ensure we work towards a profitable ROI for this channel. Custom AudiencesThis is the place where you create your retargeting buckets and audiences that can then be used in your targeting of ads. For example, if you’d like to retreat website visitors, or website visitors who didn’t submit a contact us form yet, or those who visited the product pricing page but didn’t actually buy, or those who made it to the checkout page but didn’t finish, or even those who filled out a contact us form but have yet to book a call. Later on I’ll show you all the standard audiences you should create as well as how and when they should be leveraged. This is also where you can import audiences and create lookalikes as well but we will dive into that later on. (that’s more intermediate/advanced).

In this episode I cover why you should even care about Linkedin ads, what the format of this podcast will look like (what kind of things we cover), and a quick intro into who I am and who we are as a company. 1. Why Linkedin Paid Ads? -If you are looking to grow sales -If you want to improve the ROI of your google ads, Facebook, or other marketing channels -If you are looking to carve out a new channel for client aqcuasition -If you want to finally start using Linkedin ads and learn how to do it right -If you are already using Linkedin ads but want to save some money and improve 2. What will this show cover? What sort of episodes will we do? - This will be a complete walk through of Linkedin ads from the initial creation of an account all the way up to advanced strategies -We will cover the most frequently asked Linkedin ads questions. -Top growth hacks and performance improving tactics -Case studies and real-life client examples -Ad audits that I conduct on real clients -Our own Linkedin ads account, experiments, and results. -New features and updates so you stay current -High-level expert strategy - I guarantee everyone who listens to this podcast will learn something. 3. Who the heck am I??? -Founder and CMO of Impactable - the Linkedin marketing agency -Previously was Linknlearn.co until we were acquired -Bought by heavy-hitting data-focused investor - huge capabilities on the horizon -Worked with 1,000+ clients in 30+ countries (we know our stuff). Sound like fun? Ok, let's go.

Honestly first episode so I'm sure I'm going this wrong but like a true marketer...I just dove right in. I answer the basic questions of "Is Linkedin Ads too expensive?" and also dive into the cost per click, cost per lead, and make a good case why these should not be the primary consideration when looking at Linkedin Ads. Linkedin Marketing is it's own channel and can't be rightly compared to Facebook or Google (which I'll tackle in the next episode). The main thing you should look at with Linkedin ads is the quality of traffic and the cost per actual conversion.