This episode delivers expert-level guidance on mastering LinkedIn ads for B2B marketers looking to get the most out of their budgets with control and precision.
https://page2pod.com - In this powerhouse episode of the Page 2 Podcast, we dive deep into LinkedIn Ads with AJ Wilcox, the founder of B2Linked and one of the top voices in B2B advertising. AJ shares his journey from SEO to mastering LinkedIn ads, discussing the nuances of account setup, bidding strategies, and the importance of understanding the learning phase.
With over $200 million in LinkedIn ad spend managed and direct experience with some of the platform's biggest accounts, AJ reveals the real best practices, the mistakes to avoid, and how to actually scale without burning through your budget.
Whether you're running a five-figure campaign or managing seven-figure ad budgets, AJ breaks down:
• What not to trust in LinkedIn’s default settings
• Why audience expansion could tank your campaign
• The secret to scaling with control using CPRU (Cost Per Retargetable User)
• How to structure your funnel for remarketing from day one
• Tips to avoid learning phase pitfalls and improve your relevancy score
• Budget-saving tactics from bidding to placements
• Audience segmentation that reveals surprising conversion insights
• Lead form field strategy to maximize conversions and sales team success
• Managing teams with the 80% rule for consistent client performance
📊 In This Episode 🔧
• AJ’s journey from SEO to becoming a LinkedIn ads powerhouse
• The biggest mistakes marketers make with LinkedIn Ads defaults
• Why manual bidding beats “Max Delivery” in most cases
• How to achieve $0.09 cost per retargetable user (CPRU)
• A three-stage funnel strategy that converts in high-cost channels
• The truth behind LinkedIn’s job title targeting vs. job function targeting
• Pro-level metrics AJ uses that LinkedIn doesn’t show you
• How to delegate without sacrificing client satisfaction
• Favorite tools and unexpected ad platforms worth testing
Unlock expert-level strategies to reduce waste, maximize ROI, and scale your B2B LinkedIn ad campaigns efficiently.
👉 Subscribe for more marketing insights from the best in the industry.
💬 Drop a comment sharing your biggest LinkedIn Ads challenge, we might tackle it in a future episode!
🧰 Key Resources & Tools Mentioned
• AJ’s company: B2Linked
• AJ’s podcast: The LinkedIn Ad Show
• AJ Wilcox on Linkedin
• Free LinkedIn Ads Startup Checklist
• Free LinkedIn Ads Advanced Guide
00;00;00;00 - 00;00;25;10
Unknown
LinkedIn ads are expensive, but platforms targeting isn’t perfect. And yet for B2B marketers, it might be the most precise lever you can pull if you know what you're doing. Today's guest is AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, a performance agency that's quietly managed over 200 million in LinkedIn ad spend. He's been in the trenches with five of the platform's top 10 global ad accounts. And he's one of the few voices who actually talks about what not to do with your budget.
00;00;25;12 - 00;00;46;27
Unknown
We get into the specifics, which default settings to always change, how to structure campaigns for remarketing from day one, and why AJ completely rejects LinkedIn’s audience expansion and bidding recommendations. But the real story here is about control. How much of your ad performance can you really optimize when the platform's data is limited, its algorithms are opaque, and the costs are rising.
00;00;46;29 - 00;01;08;15
Unknown
We also unpack a few of his original metrics, including cost per retargetable user and his framework for scaling accounts from five figures to seven without burning out the creative or the audience. For AJ, the challenge isn't just navigating LinkedIn's quirks. It's teaching his team to operate at 80% of his standard. While still delivering a lot of performance for clients who expect perfection.
00;01;08;18 - 00;01;09;14
Unknown
Let's get into it.
00;01;19;01 - 00;01;46;11
Unknown
Welcome to another exciting episode of the Page 2Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and as always, joined by my partner in crime at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today we're really excited to welcome probably the most known LinkedIn expert to the show, AJ Wilcox. Welcome. Thanks so much, guys. In preparing for this episode, it was really interesting to sort of see your history and sort of how you got to where you are today.
00;01;46;12 - 00;02;00;11
Unknown
I think a lot of us who have been in this industry for a long time sort of got into it by accident. I remember I was at a startup and they basically came in and said, hey, we we have this Google Ads account that we've never looked at that, you know, can you take a look? And that was sort of the trajectory for me, for you.
00;02;00;11 - 00;02;20;16
Unknown
It was sort of similar on the LinkedIn side. Can you take us back to that moment and I don't know, maybe give us a peek inside your head when they came in and said, hey, can you try out this LinkedIn campaign? Yeah, totally. So I started out my career as an SEO guy, and I loved SEO, but what I didn't love was how the changes that I would make, I wouldn't be able to actually see the result for 4 to 6 months.
00;02;20;23 - 00;02;37;20
Unknown
And then I figured out about Google Ads or AdWords at the time, and I went, oh, this is cool. It's the same keywords, but I get to see my results immediately because I'm paying for them. And so I got recruited into a B2B SaaS company and this was their they've since gone public, but it was just pre IPO.
00;02;37;20 - 00;02;56;12
Unknown
I was their first digital marketing guy. And as I went in I went in saying, hey, I can do SEO, I can do PPC and my CMO, my new boss said, by the way, we just started a pilot using LinkedIn ads two weeks ago. See what you can do. And I didn't want to look stupid to my new boss, so I saluted and said yes ma'am and jumped in.
00;02;56;14 - 00;03;19;00
Unknown
And within about two weeks, what I was doing is I was taking my same Google ad strategies and applying them to LinkedIn. It was like these tight ad groups. So it was tight audiences, micro segmented. That was kind of the way I did things. And within about two weeks, my sales reps came up and said, hey Jay, we don't know what you're doing over here, but we're we're in love with your leads and we're fighting over them.
00;03;19;00 - 00;03;41;12
Unknown
Keep it up. So I went and chased those leads down in the CRM and went. Every single one of these is coming from LinkedIn. There's got to be something more here. So over the next two and a half years, I grew that to become LinkedIn's largest spending account at the time. And over the course of that, I loved LinkedIn ads so much that I ended up giving SEO to an agency, and I gave Google ads to another agency.
00;03;41;17 - 00;03;58;25
Unknown
My, you know, all of my attention was on LinkedIn. It was the highest producing channel for the company. And, you know, I had really good relationships with LinkedIn's product team and my my reps. And, you know, that was where I just went, okay, I, I want my career to go all in on LinkedIn ads. Yeah, I guess. Fast forward to today.
00;03;58;25 - 00;04;30;16
Unknown
You've you've managed five. Maybe you've been maybe even more than that at this point of the top ten spending accounts on LinkedIn, which is just, incredible, percentage, but and maybe without sort of getting into individual, names, right, that you've worked with. Like, what is the difference between managing an account of that scale compared to, I don't know, maybe a smaller B2B company that's just sort of starting out, like, what are the I don't know, is it all the same or is it really different when you're getting to that sort of scale?
00;04;30;19 - 00;04;46;11
Unknown
Well, it's funny, I've had my employees say like when when they're on a seven figure a month account and then on a six or a five figure a month account, they go, well, it's all the same stuff. It's just all of my numbers. You add a zero or you add two zeros to. And so that's one aspect to it.
00;04;46;11 - 00;05;07;06
Unknown
Like the principles are still the same when when you're at, really high scale. What does change though is how fast you can run AB tests when you're spending seven figures a month on ads. Obviously, any ads that you can get, any optimization you can make is totally worth it because it it saves tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to your performance.
00;05;07;06 - 00;05;41;24
Unknown
So when you are running these tests, like, I mean, you can have, you can have statistical significance on your tests after 2 or 3 days versus a smaller size account, you might wait a week or a month to, to try to figure out what's working and what's not. Well, let's, let's maybe start with the basics. I definitely want to come back to testing because I think there's, you know, I would love to dig into your methodology there, but from a basic sort of account setup perspective, when you're setting up a brand new campaign, what are the most important sort of defaults to evaluate, you know, extended audiences and things like that?
00;05;41;24 - 00;06;00;02
Unknown
We know aren't great, but are there other, you know, defaults that are worth paying attention to when you're initially setting up that account? Yeah. And you ask the right questions. It's which defaults do we avoid? Because all of the defaults that like then recommends are actually not great for you. So the first one that you come across is the geography.
00;06;00;02 - 00;06;22;23
Unknown
When you target LinkedIn defaults it to recent or permanent location. We like permanent because that's someone when they create their profile, they say, I live in this city or in this state or whatever. We care about that. But recent what does recent mean? LinkedIn doesn't even share this in their help documentation. But recent means they were they logged in in that location in the last six months.
00;06;22;29 - 00;06;42;13
Unknown
So you go you can travel a lot of the world in six months and be in someone's audience. So first default is switch that to permanent location and you're good there. The next one is exactly what you mentioned, John. It was the right below the targeting. There's an option for enable audience expansion. And you do not want that.
00;06;42;15 - 00;07;02;09
Unknown
First of all, LinkedIn is charging you a premium to advertise just so you can be specific about who your audience is. If you're not having a problem spending your budget on the exact audience you choose, why would you ever open it up to interpretation and let LinkedIn choose additional people to stick in that audience? So always uncheck that.
00;07;02;09 - 00;07;29;05
Unknown
I tell people, if you leave that checked, a baby seal gets clubbed. So you got to make sure you uncheck that. Third is down below that in the placement section on a lot of the ad formats on LinkedIn. They will default you on to the LinkedIn audience Network. And in theory it sounds great. This is where you're able to target people using LinkedIn targeting, but hitting them all around the web when they're on apps, on their phone, tablet, when they're around the web sounds great.
00;07;29;05 - 00;07;49;10
Unknown
But in our measurement, what we've figured out is over half of that traffic comes from fraudulent activity, from bots and from spam. And there are great uses for the LinkedIn audience network when you're using block lists and allow lists. Right. But right up front, I always exclude it and I will test into the audience network, a little bit later.
00;07;49;16 - 00;08;14;01
Unknown
And then finally, the fourth default you need to change is down in the bidding section. They start you on what's called maximum delivery bidding. And this is a really high CPM bidding way of paying. In fact, it's the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 95% of the time on the platform. So always switch that to manual bidding and you're able to bid significantly lower than what LinkedIn recommends when you switch to manual.
00;08;14;07 - 00;08;41;09
Unknown
Can I just one follow up on there? The audience expansion. You have seen some success with it? No. Have you ever have? Okay, I thought you know the right exclusion lists. You have some success. Yeah. So audience network we have like what I do is I have a really strict allow list where I'm only allowing you to show my ads to Wall Street, like on Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, USA today, like the big publications that you know you can trust.
00;08;41;09 - 00;09;02;26
Unknown
And when I do that, I can get the audience network to give me better traffic. That doesn't turn out to be an absolute waste. But yeah, the audience and the audience network, okay, with block lists and exclusions, audience expansion. Never, never. Okay. Thanks. I wanted to dig into the the bidding models. Switching off from max delivery makes total sense at the start.
00;09;02;26 - 00;09;29;17
Unknown
But I would imagine at some point there is value to allowing the model to sort of learn and maybe bid on its own, if you will like. How do you, maybe ask it a little bit differently? At what point do you think about sort of testing into, moving off of manual bidding, or is it something where you just really like that control and prefer to keep it that way, you know, in perpetuity, you know, controls?
00;09;29;17 - 00;09;54;05
Unknown
Cool. And I definitely have control issues in my life, but, but what I really care about is performance. I care about costs. And so if my ads are performing at a click through rate, that's about three times LinkedIn's average or higher, then I know that bidding by CPM actually gets me a lower effective cost per click. So that's what I watch for any sort of ad that's performing three X the average.
00;09;54;11 - 00;10;21;03
Unknown
Then I go, oh, I might switch you to maximum delivery and you're probably going to save me money up until that point, though. Yes, using Max delivery allows LinkedIn to optimize towards the audiences that it thinks. So. So there is some AI, there's some machine learning happening there that might be helpful, but if you're paying 2 to 3 times more per click while it's learning, or even while it's serving, your effective cost per lead or cost per conversion is still going to be worse.
00;10;21;03 - 00;10;45;20
Unknown
So most of the time I don't let LinkedIn do the optimization for me. I'd rather do it myself until they get better or until they get cheaper. Yeah, let's let's talk about the the the learning period. You know, with even small campaigns for that matter, like making changes around budget, bids, audiences, all those types of things can kick everything back into that learning mode.
00;10;45;20 - 00;11;10;03
Unknown
Do you have any tips on how to sort of limit, that learning mode period and or not triggering it at all when you are trying to make those types of changes? Yes. Those who have experience with Meta,, they, they they come and they advertise on LinkedIn and then they immediately ask me questions about the learning phase, because the learning phase is not kind on Meta, on LinkedIn, though, it actually is during the learning phase.
00;11;10;03 - 00;11;33;28
Unknown
First of all, it's shorter than Meta’s. It only lasts for about a day to a day and a half. So that's kind of cool. Whereas on Meta, at least for my own experience, it seems like it can be 4 or 5 days, sometimes a week, and it's not kind it it charges you more. It gets worse performance on LinkedIn most of the time during that day to day and a half, they're showing us in the best inventory and they're showing it to, they're showing us at lower costs.
00;11;33;28 - 00;11;58;09
Unknown
Lower CPC is they're assuming that we have a higher relevancy score than than we might. They just assume that you're going to perform better than you do, just so they can get your relevancy score and test you out. And so most of the time, I don't worry about the the learning stays on LinkedIn. I actually I've had some clients who purposely try to keep us always in the learning phase, because that's where you get the lowest costs and the best reach, and that's inventory.
00;11;58;10 - 00;12;21;17
Unknown
I mean, that's that's super interesting. So I mean, how how often are they making changes to the kind of like, like daily budget changes or what's, I guess, what's the, what's the trick there to sort of keep someone in that cycle? Yeah. So this is interesting. I've had to go deep on this with, with reps. I'm trying to remember what I've done, but there are certain changes that you can make to creative that send it into the learning.
00;12;21;20 - 00;12;42;17
Unknown
The one that I know does not send it into learning is changing the URL, which is nice, because sometimes you just like you want to keep the same landing page, but you want to change a UTM parameter or something on it, then it's great knowing that you can make that change, and it's not going to make the ad go into relearning, but I think any other change that you make, changing out image editing in a text, I think all of that goes in the learning.
00;12;42;24 - 00;13;02;29
Unknown
Then at the campaign level, if you change the status from paused to active or active to paused, it resets the relevancy score, at least temporarily. It sends it into like a like a mini learning phase is what it seems like, where it might take 2 or 3 hours to learn rather than taking a day or so. Pretty interesting..
00;13;03;02 - 00;13;31;13
Unknown
I'd never actually considered that as a strategy. I think mainly because I've been so negatively hammered by Facebook's learning period. But yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned relevancy score, and I was listening to one of your older podcasts, All About Relevancy Score, which was incredibly enlightening. But I feel like at least outside of that particular podcast, I don't hear a lot of people talking about it, maybe because it's not as visible as it is in Google Ads, you know, as it relates to quality score.
00;13;31;13 - 00;13;47;03
Unknown
But let's spend a little bit of time there, like, how do you how do you think about it, given that you can't see it very well? I assume you're looking at metrics within the account to get a sense of what that is, and then using that to translate to optimizations. But yeah, maybe if you could dive in there a little bit.
00;13;47;10 - 00;14;08;07
Unknown
Yeah, it's a little bit more art than science at this point. It used to be that if you exported your data from LinkedIn's campaign manager into a campaign report, one of your columns would be Quality score. And it's it's nuanced because quality score is not the same as relevancy score. There's a difference in how it's calculated. But that was the only thing we ever got access to.
00;14;08;10 - 00;14;34;10
Unknown
LinkedIn never showed us our relevancy score or gave us any sort of feedback. All we know is that it's it's based off of your performance in competition or versus everyone who's competing for your same audiences. So I eventually just kind of gave up on, this dream of actually knowing what my relevancy score is. And what I do is I know based on which ad format and which objective I'm using, I know what the averages tend to be.
00;14;34;15 - 00;15;03;22
Unknown
So if you have your benchmarks in mind, let's say what I care about are clicks to a landing page. So I'm in the website, visits objective. If I see my click through rate is like 0.4 or 5, I know that's average. And so I'm going to assume that I have a relevancy score of like 6 or 7. If I end up with a click through rate of like point 9 or 1.1, I would look at that and go, okay, I don't know what my relevancy score is, but I'm going to guess it's close to like a nine or maybe a ten just because I'm higher than the benchmark.
00;15;03;22 - 00;15;26;28
Unknown
So that's how I do it. And over time, I like to plot my campaigns or my ads performance by click through rate over time. And if you plot, you'll see after your ads have run for a little bit, it's oftentimes about a month click through rates will start to fall. And when I notice them start to fall, I know what's going to happen is my relevancy score is going to follow suit and it's going to make it more plummet.
00;15;26;28 - 00;15;50;09
Unknown
So I use that as my clue of when I need to refresh my ad creatives to keep my relevancy score high and stop annoying my users if they're that really smart. You talked a little bit about sort of sequencing ads and you had a great stat. I wrote it down. I think it was something to the effect of you need 17 touch points, sort of in that journey to actually get someone to complete a purchase.
00;15;50;16 - 00;16;14;22
Unknown
So, you know, if you have ad creative for, I don't know, if you create, you know, 17 different messages within that touch point, you know, continuum, but you have a lot of different ad creatives running to in order to meet that 17 threshold. How do you manage sort of when that drop off occurs across that, you know, sequential messaging, right.
00;16;14;25 - 00;16;34;00
Unknown
Yeah. You actually have very little control over this, which is disheartening as a performance marketer, when I very first started in B2B, the the prevailing wisdom was it takes seven touches with a brand. And then I think there was a Forrester study 2 or 3 years ago that used the 17 number, and now I'm hearing it's even higher.
00;16;34;00 - 00;16;58;06
Unknown
So for us as B2B marketers, we're like, oh crap. Like now it's getting even harder. But what I do is I build all of our, our client accounts into a three stage funnel where I'm going to put really engaging, non salesy content in stage one. Stage two is going to be meatier content, and then stage three is finally what I'm going to go for the kill and say, hey, get on the front of the sales ramp or buy something now.
00;16;58;08 - 00;17;19;29
Unknown
And you know, two is the very fastest way to get to stage three is to interact with two ads, stage one and then stage two. So if everything goes, goes absolutely perfectly. They really love your brand and they just do everything that you ask them to do. You could be served an ad that says, hop on the phone with the sales rep on your third touch with the company, but we don't.
00;17;20;00 - 00;17;48;09
Unknown
We know that doesn't usually happen with our ads at any stage of the funnel. Well, let me take that back. In stage one, it's really common that we can run ads with like a 10% engagement rate. Well, that means that 90% of people who are seeing the ad on their screen don't end up interacting with it. And so if there's 90%, if every day, you know, 90% see it and only 10% engage, we'll get to a point eventually where it's like the same person.
00;17;48;09 - 00;18;08;00
Unknown
They saw the ad ten times or eight times before interacting with it. So that's naturally, just naturally, by showing your ads to the same audience over time, you're going to get some of those repeated touches and then we find that organically, your sales team can help a lot. We're seeing a lot of success with sales teams who will reach out to people and connect with them.
00;18;08;00 - 00;18;27;03
Unknown
The people who like or comment on your your ads because a like or a comment becomes public and so they can go click on who that is, send a connection request and say, hey, thanks for liking our our post on this. You know, what are you saying? And start a conversation. All of those touch points going together, they all add up to that
00;18;27;03 - 00;18;50;13
Unknown
17 are now probably more like 25. To help us really surround the prospect with what I call the big digital hug. They see you everywhere. Yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. You talked also about the benefits of being able to retarget interactions or engagements and I'll show a little bit of my lack of knowledge around the LinkedIn platform in this question.
00;18;50;13 - 00;19;30;17
Unknown
But can you retarget based on whether it's a like or a comment, or is it all engagement lumped into one? It's all lumped, unfortunately. I wish we could have a retargeting audience just for like and a separate one. Right? Just for commenters, some just for clicking to the landing page. Unfortunately, they don't let us do that. But what is so cool about this engagement retargeting, retargeting before, like 2019 was all based off of someone hitting your website, hitting a cookie on their, place in their browser, and then them still having that cookie by the time they make it back to the platform so that they could be recognized and served an ad.
00;19;30;19 - 00;19;51;23
Unknown
Well, now half of the browsers out there toss your cookie immediately as soon as your session's done. And we know it's just going to get tighter and more stringent. So I'm really through the tea leaves. I'm really reading like website visits, retargeting. It's it's like trying to carry water in a leaky bucket. It's just there's not much going to get to your destination.
00;19;51;26 - 00;20;13;21
Unknown
But with this engagement retargeting, I build this all the time because when someone interacts with one of my ads, it's because they were logged in and LinkedIn knows their identity and exactly who they are. And so when I watch Joe, 50% of one of your your video ads, you may go three months from now and say, hey, let me create a retargeting audience of anyone who's watched 50%.
00;20;13;27 - 00;20;48;19
Unknown
And LinkedIn's going to be like, oh, I did this on this date. I'm going to stick him into this audience retroactively. And that's so powerful. 100% match rate, not requiring any sort of allegiance to cookies and able to build in arrears that you couldn't do, with, you know, a website retargeting. So I love this. I just wish we could communicate this to other platforms with the same, you know, the same level of, you know, the hundred percent match rate. In your in your three phase, three stage approach that you use with, with a lot of your clients.
00;20;48;19 - 00;21;09;15
Unknown
I know you have a different KPI to judge the success of the different stages. I read about one that you use I'm going to murder at, but I think it was I think the way you described, I never heard anyone else describe it the way you did. The $0.09 is what I remember, mostly what you wrote about, but it was like cost per new remarketing audience.
00;21;09;17 - 00;21;29;29
Unknown
Or it was like something like, how what does it cost you to get one more person in your remarketing pool? What was that metric again? So this is why I'm still open to, to, suggestions on it. I call it cost per retargetable user. But okay, there's got to be a better a better term out there. Someone please reach out to me and be like, hey, I think this acronym fits it perfectly.
00;21;30;01 - 00;21;53;18
Unknown
Let's get a new acronym. Yeah, but but yeah, there's LinkedIn ads. They're like 7 to $9 per landing page. Click is about what our clients are paying. So if you're retargeting people who are interacting with the ads, that way your cost per retargetable user is like 7 to $9, which is quite expensive. If you're going to build a three stage funnel to get someone to the bottom.
00;21;53;18 - 00;22;23;13
Unknown
If you paid 7 to $9 for every person in there you could imagine, like this is a costly funnel, and and no campaign can run unless its audience is at least 300 people. So getting 300 people to the bottom, good heavens. But now with some of these other types of retargeting, we can do especially video and especially document engagement retargeting, you can retarget video viewers, anyone who's watched up to 25% or more of your video, you can retarget them.
00;22;23;18 - 00;22;43;03
Unknown
I like to do 50%, but lots of different options there. And with documents, you can retarget people who have just engaged with the document, like just flip to the next slide. And with these document ads, especially when you run them on the website, visits objective meaning you're only paying for the very small proportion of people who end up clicking the link at the bottom.
00;22;43;03 - 00;23;02;29
Unknown
But you're able to retarget everyone who interacts with this very engaging kind of carousel. We've been able to get our cost per retarget user down to like $0.09. Usually, if you're in the 30 to $0.50, you're doing great. But yeah, you can get them really, really love. CPRU, that shouldn't be so hard to remember. CPRU Cost Per Retargetable User.
00;23;02;29 - 00;23;26;26
Unknown
I'm going to I'm going to try to work that into my nomenclature. Yeah, totally rolls off the tongue. That's great. Let's talk about audiences a little bit. LinkedIn and Facebook for that matter, like everyone is recommending for these, you know, significantly larger audience sizes in the guise of, oh, well, the models will get more data and they'll be able to find your user better.
00;23;26;26 - 00;23;54;07
Unknown
Regularly say the opposite, right. Like smaller groups, which is, again, what Joe and I sort of came up in this industry, you know, single word keyword ad groups and things like that. So I guess, like, how do you how do you still think about that? Like, is that still the the approach that you take in terms of your audience sizing and you know, what are the pros and cons maybe of following LinkedIn's recommendation versus, you know, being a little bit more, specific.
00;23;54;07 - 00;24;24;27
Unknown
Yeah, we know what happened with Meta. Meta has so many data points on all of their users that you really can trust them to figure out how to optimize and find the right people. And so when Meta says just target broad, we'll find the right people, I believe them. Meta is a platform that, you know, the last time I heard this has been years ago, but it was like the average user spent something like more than an hour per day on Facebook, but then the average user was only spending an hour per month on LinkedIn.
00;24;25;03 - 00;24;46;15
Unknown
So you look at that data disparity, even if LinkedIn had exactly the same quality of data scientists, which they might. Silicon Valley is very incestuous. If they're working with the same kinds of data, they just have like a small fraction of what Meta does to work with. So when LinkedIn claims target broad will find the right people, I don't believe them.
00;24;46;15 - 00;25;05;12
Unknown
They don't have, at least in my tests, very, very little of the time. When they say they're optimizing towards something, do I actually see that come to fruition working out. The video views objective, this works on LinkedIn. They know who's more likely to consume video, but but all the other objectives, I just don't trust them very much to do that.
00;25;05;17 - 00;25;29;20
Unknown
So anyway that's why. So now when you're building an audience that is 20,000 to 100,000 people in in size, that's what I recommend. That's a great audience size. You know, it's it's big enough that you can actually spend a budget on the audience, and it's small enough that you can be very specific about who you're targeting. LinkedIn's going to tell you, oh, you should have at least 300,000 people in an audience.
00;25;29;28 - 00;25;52;15
Unknown
When I have 300,000 people in an audience, I know I'm missing a huge opportunity to break that audience up into three separate groups. So I can monitor their, their differences. To give you an idea, we ran this where we had, we were targeting all marketing decision makers for an account, and that was the marketing job, function manager and above seniority all in one bucket.
00;25;52;17 - 00;26;07;25
Unknown
What we did is, they were actually doing this before they came to us. When they came to us, I said, let's break that up into four separate audiences. Let's have a manager bucket, a director, a VP, and then a CMO bucket. And we're going to put the same ads. You were showing the same ads to all for anyway,
00;26;07;27 - 00;26;29;04
Unknown
let's just no extra labor here. Let's just put the same AB test in each of these different versions. And what we found out was it was actually cheaper to reach a CMO, and they had a higher conversion rate than it was to reach a manager. And so I presented this, the client, and they went, whoa, we just assumed that a CMO was going to cost more to reach.
00;26;29;06 - 00;26;49;21
Unknown
And so, you know, we're not building content for them. But now that we know CMO s care about our content, they click more and they convert higher, and it's actually cheaper to us. Throw out managers just shut them off entirely. And now we're just going to go director. And above those are the kinds of like I call it focus group level insights that you can get about an audience when you're going to do the same advertising.
00;26;49;21 - 00;27;17;26
Unknown
The only difference is now you're going to learn about who engages with what better. I mean, that's really fascinating. I would assume it's a common thought, right? Like CMO is more expensive. You know, everyone is targeting them already, but it's maybe it's exactly the opposite. That's really interesting. Do you in that scenario where you're sort of breaking out by job title, are you sending the same message or are you tailoring it a little bit to, you know, someone who is C-suite versus just a manager?
00;27;17;27 - 00;27;37;01
Unknown
Yeah, we've done this lots of times, lots of different tasks. What we found is by tailoring the message to someone like, you could call out CMO at the beginning of your ad, and by tailoring it to each audience, you might be able to get slightly higher engagement rates or click through rates, bringing you lower costs. But it's kind of a dice roll, honestly.
00;27;37;01 - 00;27;59;10
Unknown
It's like half the time it makes a difference, half the time it doesn't. So I would always recommend start with just the same ads across all four just to see what pops, you know, and and then maybe do a test of let me tailor this to this audience and see this, because that's going to be more work to do the tailoring, but it's worth a test to see if it makes a difference in your campaigns. - Fine.
00;27;59;15 - 00;28;26;06
Unknown
Oh, also say kind of going back to the the smaller audiences side of things, it's really damaging to tell people you have to have an audience of 300,000 or above, because what are the smallest audiences that people run? Those are your retargeting audiences. They are your contact lists and your ABM campaigns where you're targeting just specific companies. And if people think, oh, these are too small to run, they're not doing some of the most helpful and awesome ways of targeting on the platform.
00;28;26;06 - 00;28;51;26
Unknown
So I would I'm okay running any audience as soon as it hits 300. You may have to bid higher for sure. And you don't expect this audience to spend a whole lot and send a whole lot of volume. But there's no danger at all to running an audience between 300 people to 20,000. I just know that once you hit 20,000, it's going to be a lot easier to spend a budget and get data. With ABM account based marketing programs
00;28;52;03 - 00;29;12;03
Unknown
do you find success when you're only using LinkedIn for an ABM program, or is it typically it's LinkedIn plus some other platform? Yeah, there's a lot of platforms out there that will help with ABM. Most of those have a minimum buy in that's kind of pricey, whereas if you're already doing some advertising on LinkedIn, you get the very best ABM targeting there is.
00;29;12;07 - 00;29;30;20
Unknown
You're targeting someone because they claim that they work at that company. They were the ones who told you rather than a lot of the other platforms out there are just going by IP address. Their IP address signals that they're in the same building as Microsoft. So we're going to say that they're a Microsoft employee, but they might be subletting and that's a different company.
00;29;30;20 - 00;29;59;25
Unknown
Who knows. So I'm totally okay with running a whole ABM program just off of LinkedIn. But I'm not against bringing in other platforms as well. There's a lot of research involved before you start an ABM program. And I'm sure your clients asked you to get involved very early. You use any can you plan? Can you put together your ABM company list with just LinkedIn as your research tool, or do you need additional tools to help put a recommendation in front of clients?
00;29;59;25 - 00;30;26;25
Unknown
Like here's the 100 you should go after next year. ABM campaigns oftentimes revolve around companies in a specific industry and LinkedIn's industry targeting, you know, bless its heart, it's just it's not great. In most cases. It relies on whoever created the company page to select the right industry from the drop down. And then back when LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft, they they looked at LinkedIn's industry list that was like 120.
00;30;26;28 - 00;30;45;21
Unknown
Saw the Bing ads one. It was what it was the Microsoft advertising list that was like 480 something. And they went, oh, let's migrate to that. So they did this big migration from a small list to a big one. And so now you might say, oh, chemical manufacturing, those are exactly the right people that we want to hit.
00;30;45;26 - 00;31;05;24
Unknown
But if you select that industry on LinkedIn, you're only going to see those who have seen that there is now that category, you know, here in the last several years, those who created their company page beforehand, they're not going back to see if there's something different. So now a whole bunch of your ideal target is under just the general manufacturing industry.
00;31;06;00 - 00;31;28;25
Unknown
So that's a very wordy way of saying I love to bring in data from other platforms, other intelligence. I love to ask the sales team, like, tell us who you would love to get to work with, who you think would be perfect. We can do look alikes on LinkedIn. They call them a predictive audience, but you can do a predictive audience based off of a company list, and so that can expand and help you find more as you're running ads on LinkedIn.
00;31;28;25 - 00;31;46;28
Unknown
Now, they're going to show you the in this companies tab. They're going to show you all of the companies by name that are interacting with your organic content and interacting with your paid content. And you can create dynamic lists there. Add people. You're like, oh, I'd never thought to add that company, but they're interacting with us organically. Cool.
00;31;46;28 - 00;32;22;08
Unknown
Let's let's move them over into our paid funnels. So lots of different ways to build that. But yeah, LinkedIn, if it's based around industry, it's probably not your only research point. I guess there there's advantages to building out combinations of audiences where you sort of tack on attributes. And I think in some ways that in and of itself sort of brings down the audience size, which you're an advocate of, of course, are there I don't know when you're thinking about setting up an account, are there common targeting combinations that you always start with or I don't know, do you have a good sense of who that audience is when you first start?
00;32;22;08 - 00;32;42;14
Unknown
And so you're just applying that specific audience targeting that makes sense. Like are there good best practices around what you should start with and then sort of pare down as that data comes in? Yeah. Amazing question. Most people, when they jump into LinkedIn ads, they go, oh, job title, let's use that. And so what that means is, first of all, let me tell you what LinkedIn understands about job titles.
00;32;42;16 - 00;33;05;28
Unknown
They take what title you wrote in in your experience. And but it's a free form field. You can write whatever you want. You know, I've seen CEOs with cute titles like Chief Trash Can Empty or something like that. LinkedIn has to look at this and go, okay, what bucket do you fit underneath? And then so an advertiser can type a job title and it hits people who have that job title plus, you know, a fuzzy match.
00;33;06;02 - 00;33;27;05
Unknown
What happens is in practice, LinkedIn only understands about 35 to 50% of job titles. So if you're using job title targeting, you are now competing with every other advertiser who's using job title targeting, meaning that your costs go higher and you're only able to hit half or two thirds of the audience that you're trying to hit, or half to a third.
00;33;27;08 - 00;33;51;19
Unknown
And so you're paying more for access to a smaller audience. But it doesn't make me hate job title targeting. I just put it in a separate bucket. And then I'll also use job function with seniority. And this might be too broad if you're trying to reach a digital marketer job function of marketing is too broad. You're going to hit every type of marketer, you know, billboard and radio and, account managers, kinds of marketers, too.
00;33;51;19 - 00;34;15;26
Unknown
But if it's not too broad, if you're trying to hit leaders in sales or leaders in IT, job function and seniority work really well, and that hits everyone. I mean, everyone on LinkedIn gets put like based off of the keywords in your title and what industry you're in and that defines your your function and your seniority. So LinkedIn only understands a third to to a half of job titles.
00;34;16;03 - 00;34;36;14
Unknown
But job function, they understand pretty much 100%. So you get this larger audience that's less competitive with lower costs. Then I also love to use skills with seniority, just in case LinkedIn didn't catch their their job function right or didn't understand their title. If they went and added that skill, okay, they might be there. And then number four, I'll do groups.
00;34;36;20 - 00;34;53;24
Unknown
If you go out, I don't care what your job title is, if you go out of your way to go and join a group about HubSpot, for instance, like, I know you care about HubSpot, you went out of your way to go and join a group about it to have a discussion. I'm going to say you probably have something to do with the CRM or marketing or sales.
00;34;53;24 - 00;35;12;05
Unknown
So I like running all four of those targeting in separate campaigns, all against each other. And over time, obviously you run whichever makes sense. If one is too broad, you don't run it. You might only run three of these, but over time you're going to see the personality of those 3 or 4 campaigns. And that's going to tell you how the targeting difference was.
00;35;12;11 - 00;35;29;23
Unknown
If one gets you lower costs or higher conversion rates, or the sales team is reporting a higher lead quality coming in from that, cool. You know, you can give it more of your budget, beat it up and bid down others. But at least test and see like which of these targeting types is getting us more of the people we want at the best cost?
00;35;29;23 - 00;35;49;00
Unknown
Yeah. Super smart. I mean, that metric on LinkedIn's understanding of actual job titles is I mean, that's fascinating, but it makes sense, right? I definitely seen some of those fuzzy titles being used as well. I was like, what is that? And then you have to actually read the description. I was like, okay, I guess I see it. Yeah, I see PPC Ninja.
00;35;49;00 - 00;36;11;26
Unknown
Like, how does how does LinkedIn know what job title that that goes under. Yeah. Right. Right, right. Let's talk about a maybe reporting real quickly. So you know, the retargeting metric. I forgot the acronym for the cost per pro targeted. Yeah. There we go. We'll get it branded on the, on this podcast. What other sort of metrics?
00;36;11;28 - 00;36;33;04
Unknown
You know, personal or sort of ones that you've come up with on your own or otherwise. Do you look at regularly as a relates to, you know, performance and, how to make optimizations against the account? Yeah. So stage one for me is all about getting someone's attention and engaging them. And so if it's video content, I have a whole bunch of metrics that I, I've kind of custom engineered for video.
00;36;33;08 - 00;36;56;02
Unknown
Lincoln will tell you what your cost per video viewer is and your video view rate, but those are based off of someone watching at least two seconds of video. And it's very possible to scroll down slowly and get counted as a viewer, even if you were just passively scrolling. So I like measuring my cost per 50% viewer and my 50% viewer rate.
00;36;56;06 - 00;37;24;19
Unknown
Those are two ways that I can tell. Like if you watched 50% of a 30-40 second clip, I know you got the gist of what was being shared. Oh, I like that. LinkedIn will also share your completion rate and your cost per completion. Those are helpful to me too. If you are not using video content. If it's static content, then I love engagement rate and you know LinkedIn will show you that, you know, on its own, you don't have to do any sort of calculations.
00;37;24;22 - 00;37;48;01
Unknown
But then I do a calculation where, depending on which objective you choose, the definition of what a click is changes significantly. And so I've built one metric for click through rate that works with every single ad format and every single objective out there. And I take landing page clicks, plus sponsored messaging clicks, plus lead form opens.
00;37;48;01 - 00;38;07;20
Unknown
If you use that definition of click, whether you're running something in the engagement objective or website visits, no matter which ad format you're running, you can do a cost per click based off of that, or a click through rate based off of that, and you have a really clean look of what percentage of people are actually clicking on the thing I want them to.
00;38;07;20 - 00;38;34;13
Unknown
And that's probably the main calculation I do when I get data outside of LinkedIn is, okay, show me this, because I know LinkedIn's not going to show that to me by default. So let me understand. So you you add all those clicks together or you're reducing from the total clicks. Yeah, I add those clicks together because what LinkedIn says in its clicks column, if you're in, let's say, the engagement objective, they will count any interaction with a post as a click.
00;38;34;15 - 00;38;51;25
Unknown
So a like, a comment, clicking see more to read more of the ad. All of those get called a click, but usually what I care about is someone getting to the landing page that I linked to. That's worth more to me than anything else. Or if it's in if you're using one of LinkedIn's login forms, they're they're native forms.
00;38;51;25 - 00;39;14;03
Unknown
I don't care about a click anywhere else on the ad. I click about I care about the click where it expanded and showed them the form. So those are your lead form opens. And then in sponsored messaging, I don't want to count an open as a click. I only once they've opened the message I want to count a click as somewhere in there did they create a meaningful click that would then take them where I wanted them to.
00;39;14;03 - 00;39;32;09
Unknown
So that definition of click, you build that into your click through rate or your cost per click. And it's a lot more even of a measure when you're running reporting across a whole bunch of different campaigns. It really compares them all apples to apples. You mentioned lead forms, and we've had conversations with other guests around this. Are there too many fields
00;39;32;09 - 00;39;51;10
Unknown
And, you know, each one becomes a roadblock to actually getting the lead? Too few and your sales team yells at you because they're not qualified enough. So I guess, do you have a sense of like, what that sweet spot is and maybe are there must have fields like no matter what that you feel are necessary to really get the quality of lead that you're looking for?
00;39;51;10 - 00;40;10;27
Unknown
Yeah, most of the time this is with all forms. If you ask for too much, people start to get weird about it and go, I just, I don't think it's worth giving this much information about myself. So I try, even though most of these fields are auto filled by LinkedIn, when you ask for them, still, it's a turn off when someone sees that eight data points on them are being collected.
00;40;11;04 - 00;40;35;11
Unknown
So here's what I recommend. First name. Last name. That's a given. I do work email address because most sales teams need a work email or at least prefer it. And then I ask for their LinkedIn profile URL. Their LinkedIn profile URL is auto filled. They don't have to go and find it, which is great. But if the sales rep clicks on their profile, they can immediately grab their title, their company size, what organization they work for.
00;40;35;14 - 00;40;53;15
Unknown
All the information that you want to know about someone, it's there. Their industry, like, and of course there are enrichment tools and scraper services to all. If you give them a LinkedIn profile URL, they'll collect all that stuff for you. But that's my sweet spot. If I collect those four fields, I'm usually going to have a pretty high conversion rate.
00;40;53;17 - 00;41;11;09
Unknown
And then if enrichment can give me all the other data that my sales team cares about and I don't have to ask for it, then I'm super happy. That first name, last name, so a lot of CRMs need them separate so that they can populate them correctly in the CRM. Do you, I guess what's your methodology there?
00;41;11;11 - 00;41;35;28
Unknown
Have you ever tried like just connecting like full name as like one field or is your standard like first and last? Just because that's how it works within the CRM is easiest? I've tried tried doing it just to see if it helps our conversion rates at all. And what usually ends up happening is I haven't yet found a CRM that knows how to categorize someone with a hyphenated last name, or two middle names.
00;41;36;02 - 00;41;52;15
Unknown
And you know, when you're working globally, you have all kinds of different names and it's really difficult. So I always separate them first and last name and everything I do. Just so a human or a program never has to try to make that determination of like, is that part of their first name, part of their last. So we just leave it out, offend someone?
00;41;52;21 - 00;42;07;13
Unknown
Yeah. It's better to keep them separate. Okay. We've we've tried to do that testing in the past before. And if we did see a lift it was very small. And so I think our, our standards are also sort of just keeping them separate as well. All right. Let's I know we only have you for a couple more minutes.
00;42;07;13 - 00;42;27;28
Unknown
So let's transition to one question on agency building. And I think this is more maybe for Joe and I's benefit. But as you've grown and as we are growing, delegation is, you know, it's a massive challenge to be able to scale while still keeping the quality of the deliverables that you know, your clients have become accustomed to.
00;42;28;00 - 00;42;54;06
Unknown
I was listening to, I think it was a podcast around this idea of this 80% rule, that you sort of defined around what you can expect your employees to be able to do as a relates to your 100% effort. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that, just in terms of, you know, coming to terms with that, for one, and maybe identifying who those people are that can actually hit the 80% because, right.
00;42;54;06 - 00;43;18;03
Unknown
That can't be everyone. So yeah, just maybe talk to us a little bit about that and any tips that you have. Yeah. For me, when I first started my company, I'd never had experience of really leading a team before. Like I'd been a team lead but never made hiring firing decisions. And so starting my own thing, realizing I needed help, and so starting to hire, making all the wrong choices right up front was a great learning experience.
00;43;18;06 - 00;43;37;14
Unknown
But the hardest thing for me was that delegation. When I'm really comfortable with how I do things, and when you go to give a task to someone and you find they're only going to do it, you know, even if they're good, they might only do it 80% as well as you. And so you as a business owner, you can try to say, okay, I'm going to give you other tasks that maybe you perform better at.
00;43;37;14 - 00;44;01;27
Unknown
I'm going to hold on to, to this task. Well, eventually you get to the point where you as a business owner, you can't do everything, and it's a forcing function. You have to be able to delegate. And so then as I start handing off tasks to people and starting to get comfortable with the fact that, like, oh, they didn't do it quite the same way, I would have, but when they send it to the client, the client said, oh, this looks great, thank you.
00;44;02;00 - 00;44;19;27
Unknown
I start to breathe a sigh of relief and go, okay, maybe this is going to be okay. So I, I really think as, as the owner or as the person who you have your baby and you don't want to give up your baby, you just have to have that experience of like a forcing function making you hand your baby to someone else and and seeing them run with it, because that's the only way they're going to grow.
00;44;19;27 - 00;44;38;03
Unknown
What I have found for who it is, who can do those tasks. I have had terrible luck hiring people. It's just been a crap shoot. You know, sometimes I'll get fantastic employees that want to stay with me for years and are great, and others who will take advantage of you and steal from you, and you can't tell the difference between them in an interview.
00;44;38;04 - 00;45;03;08
Unknown
So the way that I do it, I purposely look for people who I can tell are hungry if they are working on side projects. That tells me that work isn't fully fulfilling them, and they still want to gain knowledge and experience in other ways. And I go, oh, if you've got that kind of drive, I want you. So I look for side projects as like my main guide for like how hungry someone is to learn.
00;45;03;10 - 00;45;21;10
Unknown
I think your comment around the client receiving it and be like, oh, this is great. I think it was. I've definitely experienced that as well. And I'm like, you know, sometimes this level of quality is only in my head and the client really doesn't know the difference. So, you know, and that's okay. So just getting more comfortable with that is, is definitely been, been a process.
00;45;21;10 - 00;45;37;19
Unknown
Oh yeah. And having a relationship with your employees where you can keep giving them feedback to improve and get them closer to the way that you would do things and the way you prefer is great. And having that relationship being something that they're open to, rather than than them feeling like they're being criticized or picked apart all the time.
00;45;37;19 - 00;46;00;13
Unknown
That's the line I'm always trying to escape. Yeah, perfect. Well, I know we only have you for a couple more minutes, so let's transition to some rapid fire questions. So it's the optimal number of times to leave a cruise ship in a week. That was magical. Oh, I like this. I know you like cruises. I heard you say that I do, I mean, you just have to look at my skin color to realize, like, I don't do well on a beach.
00;46;00;15 - 00;46;19;18
Unknown
I don't like being outside. I'm the vampire that would happily, like, live all his days in a in a basement with the lights turned off. But I love cruises as a vacation. Probably because of the buffets. So my optimal number of of leaving the cruise ship is zero. I want to go on stay on until the cruise is over and then leave at the very end.
00;46;19;25 - 00;46;39;07
Unknown
But obviously I've got a family, other people like the beach and the sun, and sometimes I have to follow along. Love it. How about a LinkedIn tool? Or I guess any tool that saves you the most hours per month? There's a tool called shape.io. It's my budget tracking tool and it watches every account. It knows the budgets.
00;46;39;12 - 00;46;54;11
Unknown
It'll show me along the way. Any time I want to know how we're tracking to budget. If we're pacing hot or under. But then it also has built in functionality of like shut off a campaign. If it's if it spending the whole budget for the month, it's like my insurance policy and making sure I don't lose a client and get sued.
00;46;54;15 - 00;47;11;07
Unknown
If you couldn't run LinkedIn ads, which channel would you prefer to master? Right now I'm running some Reddit ads and I think they're really cool. So I like Reddit. I would also probably want to spend some more time on TikTok if I got more experience on the video side of things. I'd love to have you back to talk about Reddit ads.
00;47;11;07 - 00;47;35;14
Unknown
It's, we don't run a ton just because we haven't really cracked the performance on that side of the house yet. Yeah, I think it's a super interesting space. All right, last question in this round, a book that you would give to performance marketers. Oh, I hate to say this, but I'm not a reader. But I love crunching audio books, and I love podcasts, so it depends on what they were most interested in.
00;47;35;19 - 00;47;56;08
Unknown
But if you're into social media, I would say go and binge listen every social media, social media marketing podcast episode with Michael Stelzner. That's awesome. If you're into LinkedIn, I would suggest my podcast or at least LinkedIn PPC. I would say my podcast. if you want to know, just LinkedIn in general. There's a podcast called the...
00;47;56;10 - 00;48;12;11
Unknown
It used to be called the Linked Informed Podcast. It's by Mark Williams. Then LinkedIn got after him for having LinkedIn in the name. So I forget what it's called now, but that one just goes really deep into the organic side of LinkedIn. So it's going to be different depending on what area of digital you really care about. Fair enough.
00;48;12;13 - 00;48;28;18
Unknown
All right, AJ, well, we have probably 100 more questions that we could ask you. So thank you so much for giving us an hour. Before we let you go, let the audience know where they can find you. Sure thing. So on any podcast platform, if you look for the LinkedIn ad show podcast, you'll find me there.
00;48;28;18 - 00;48;48;12
Unknown
It's a weekly podcast where I go really deep into every area I can possibly think of and teach you everything I know for free. We're also at b2linked.com. If you check out the website, we've got lots of good blog posts and stuff. And then follow me on LinkedIn or even send a connection request. Just make sure you let me know that you heard me on John and Joe’s show.
00;48;48;15 - 00;48;58;03
Unknown
So I make sure I accept it, but I share all my best stuff for free every chance I get. Yeah, I have to say your your podcast is one of my new, my new favorites. Thank you.