Show resources:
Cities that tanked and others that didn't with jobs from covid.
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
Video ad specs
Carousel ad specs
Single image ad specs
Text ad specs
Message ads specs
Conversation ad specs
Dynamic ad specs
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Transcript:
Four different ad formats with 10 plus variations. No wonder y'all are confused about how to create LinkedIn ads. Let's get it.
0:13
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So you guys ask me all the time about the different ad formats on LinkedIn? Which one should I use? Which one performs best? We're going to go into all the pros and cons of each one, and which situations to use them in. So we're going to hit it. But first, let's talk about the news. Obviously, this is going to roll out a little bit later because I record a little bit earlier. But COVID-19 is all throughout the news. So I wanted to share a little bit about how people are talking about COVID and how people are using LinkedIn because of it. LinkedIn, let me know that 33% of the posts right now are related to Coronavirus or COVID-19. And then of course topics like remote working, social distancing, those things have definitely seen at least made a showing in the types of content being shared. There's been a 19% increase in the number of posts about remote work, 8% increase in social distancing, 6% of additional posts on online collaboration. So definitely, we see a whole bunch more. What else was interesting though, to me is that we're seeing the hashtag #webinar as one of the fastest growing hashtags. And I think this definitely signals the need for brands to move to virtual events. So more people are doing webinars and virtual events and talking about them. It definitely seems like smaller companies are the ones getting involved, because those companies with 1 to 200 employees are the ones driving the increase in posting, whereas enterprises are actually posting a little bit less, they're only down about 1% pre-COVID. But you know, even with that, you figure the bigger enterprises are probably being disrupted more and pulling back and maybe the more nimble, smaller organizations are deciding to, you know, this is the time to speak up. One cool article I'll share in the show notes is called as US hiring skids, Atlanta and five other cities fight back. And it's a really cool article where LinkedIn's economic graph team actually did some research based off of who's hiring and who's not in the largest metropolitan areas. And there's a really cool graph in here where they show pre-COVID, especially what hiring rates looked like. And then afterwards, you can see, surprise, surprise from the title of the article, Atlanta is doing really well. But you'll want to jump on and check out and see how did Atlanta do compared to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and San Francisco. Some other really cool stats here on posting, LinkedIn says that there has been an 8% increase in weekly posting on pages. So companies, like we said, are getting more involved. There's been a 10% increase in content shared by pages, so definitely more more active in the feed just doing more 16% increase in lead gen campaigns. And then of course, you wouldn't be too surprised to hear that there's been a 78% increase in Coronavirus related videos. 26% increase in original posts with video. So just people are sharing more video right now. And then a 13% increase in thought leadership. And there's been a 13% increase in sharing industry news from third party articles. Something else really cool. This is you're going to hear this two weeks after we found out about it. But LinkedIn just barely this week released two new types of targeting. One of the new targeting is called company category. So you get to it by going to company and then company category. And there's a whole bunch in here of different types of company categories. You can target many having to deal with Fortune or Forbes. So there's Forbes fastest growing companies. There's Fortune 500 companies, which is something we've been asking for for a long time, this is great. LinkedIn's news editors actually have their own list of top companies by country. And so you can use these classifications to make sure you're hitting just the very fastest growing the very largest companies on the planet. It's awesome for those who are especially in the enterprise. But then the one that I'm actually arguably more interested in is called company growth rate. Now, you access this one the same way you go to company and then company growth rate. And there are options here like 0% to 3%, company growth, 3% to 10%, company growth 10% to 20%. And then 20% and above. You can actually even target negative growth companies, so those who are pulling back on the reins. Now, immediately when I saw this, I was asking, okay, how did LinkedIn get this data? Because it can't be by company size. Because if you look at just the company size buckets that LinkedIn has 1 to 10 or 11 to 50, 51 to 200, etc, just bumping from the next bucket up, you'd be looking at growth rates in the 60 to 90% range. So we know that LinkedIn is not pulling this from the data recorded by company page admins, as they are increasing their company sizes. And this is actually really good because if you relied on people to give just that data, I think it would be largely inaccurate. Company page admins just don't go in to update their company sizes all that often. But then I started thinking about it. LinkedIn, can actually know how big your company is based off of how many employees are adding them as an employer. So this is data that LinkedIn doesn't give us. But every new employee who comes to work for you can go and set you as their employer and LinkedIn sees this data. And this goes all the way down to a granularity of one. So even if you're in an industry where, let's say only 30% of your employees are even on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. LinkedIn is calculating here a percent growth or percent change. And so as long as you know, one or two or three people come in and associate themselves to your company page and say they work for you, LinkedIn can see that growth, which I think is awesome. All right, now let's get down to the individual ad formats on LinkedIn. And we'll go through the pros and cons and all of that good stuff. We're going to start out with my favorite, which is sponsored content. Now, there are several different variations of sponsored content. So we'll cover each one. But here are the basics of just all types of sponsored content. You can expect about 80 plus percent of your traffic to come from mobile devices, because your sponsored content comes in the newsfeed and the majority of feed users are mobile. The homepage experience both on desktop and mobile is to dump you right into the feed. So you will see a lot of interaction there. We expect somewhere around 0.4% click through rate, so a little bit under half a percent. And we generally expect to see a cost per click anywhere between about $8 to $11. The floor though is variable. So that what that means is for one audience, you might bid all the way down and find out that your floor is $5 and 50 cents. And then for a different audience, you might find that it's $6 and 27 cents or something like that. So you just have to find that floor by just reducing your bids until LinkedIn screams at you and tells you what the floor is.
7:35
So then we start looking at single image ads, which is, again, my very favorite version of sponsored content, because it's the simplest, it's the least risky. I ended up recommending this type of ad format to about 95% of advertisers. It's such a great starter ad format, because it's so simple to troubleshoot. It's made up of really three elements. There's text up Above at the top of the ad, which is called intro text, and that's by far the most important piece. Then you have a big beautiful image that's 1200 pixels wide by 627 tall. And then down below, you have a headline. Now for your intro, you want to make sure that you keep it under about 150 characters for that intro, so that it doesn't truncate and show the See More link. For the headline down below, keep it under about 70 characters and a little bit less if you want to make sure it doesn't get truncated on mobile. Our ideal we found if we keep it under about 130 characters for the intro and about 60 for the headline, we tend to see better performance, but certainly your mileage may vary here.
8:45
Then the next variation here is carousel ads. Now I recommend carousel ads about zero percent of the time and the reason why is because there there are a lot of work to create. You have to use a different image size and you can have up to 10 cards in an ad, but creating each card, you have to have your own unique, visual creative, and it gets its own headline. So if I had to create a carousel ad with four cards in it, it would be about the same amount of work as creating four separate single image ads. So it's a lot harder to create it, it's more effort. And for that effort, I don't see us getting rewarded very much. There doesn't seem to be a huge increase in performance, and there's certainly no reduction of cost. So I don't end up recommending this very often, unless you have visual creative that tells a really interesting story in these tiles that you can scroll through. One potential good use here might be if you were, if you're advertising, some kind of maybe an online summit, and each card you could show a different headshot of one of your keynote speakers, so people get a feel for you know, here are the types of speakers you might hear from if you register the same rules apply a single image here, where you get the same hundred and 50 characters for an intro. But then each card only gets 45 characters for a headline. And each image on the card needs to be formatted to 1080 by 1080.
10:15
The next variant is video ads. Now I end up recommending video ads only to about 5% of advertisers. And that generally means these are going to be the 5% of advertisers who are expert at video, they've already aced their creative on about every other network. And so when they come to LinkedIn, they already know that their creative is very high performance. And so it's a really easy translation. There are three different ways you can pay for video ads. Most people know the two second video view or the impression. Many don't know that you can actually also bid by the click which is the the least risky version and my favorite. So if I have video creative, I'm going to test it in a website visits objective first If it performs well to the click, then I can start testing. If I could save even more money to bidding by two second view or by the impression. There are three different formats for your video. You can do 16 by 9, which is just the normal it's 1920 by 1080. We've been able to do square for a while, which is 1920 by 1920, or even smaller sizes throughout. And that makes it nice for both mobile and desktop. But what's new that LinkedIn just released is vertical video. So now you can do video that's 1080 wide by 1920 tall. And this is great for specifically targeting the mobile users. If you have video creative that is formatted for vertical, it's actually only going to show up on mobile devices. So if you wanted to segment only to mobile devices, that could be a good way to do it. My recommendation is to keep all of your video under 30 seconds if possible, because if it's much longer, you will have Either most people not willing to stay and watch or a huge drop off before the end. So be brief. Also keep in mind, the same rule for all of social video applies here, it's going to start playing automatically, and it's going to play a muted, which means you want your thumbnail, the very first frame in the video should be something exciting. So if the video hasn't loaded yet, as they're scrolling by, it at least catches their eye. And then because the sounds off and 80% of people are going to watch it, totally with the sound off, you want to make sure that your subtitles are great. You can do this two different ways. You could either burn subtitles into the video file itself, which is really safe. Or you can generate an SRT file, a .SRT subtitles file. There are lots of different ways you can do this. You could go and pay rev.com $1 per minute to transcribe for you and created a dot SRT file. But then you upload that .SRT file as you upload the video, and LinkedIn will attach the subtitles to it and you'll be off to the races. My biggest qualm with LinkedIn video ads is that there just hasn't been an ability to retarget the traffic. So we pay LinkedIn premium prices, but then we can't do anything with it if they don't end up clicking. But this of course, changes in October in October, at least so far, it's looking like October, LinkedIn is going to be releasing engagement retargeting to the public, and then we'll be able to say something like if you've watched 50% of my first video, now I want to show you the second one in the sequence. Now my strategy here is if I can launch my video ads with CPC bidding, where I'm only going to pay by click, if I'm running this against other ads to the same audience, similar message, static image. If I can get my costs per click anywhere close on the video ads to the static ad, then I'm going to be happy running video ads. I know I can communicate way more emotion through video than I can from a static image. So if my cost per click is anywhere close, I'm assuming my lead quality is going to be better. And so I'm willing to pay, you know, maybe 10%, 20% more per click for a video. But if I'm paying double or triple for a video view, click, then I'm going to be happier running a static ads. Format here is it needs to be mp4 and it needs to be under 200 megabytes in file size. And you'll want to shoot at less than 30 frames per second because LinkedIn can't handle more than that. You can check out the link to the video add specs if you want to go deeper. Those are in the show notes below.
14:49
Next, we have a variation that can be applied to any type of sponsored content and actually any type of sponsored messaging ad too, and that is of course lead gen forms. Now, lead gen forms are really interesting. And they have been an absolute game changer for so many of our clients. And what they are, is if you interact with one of these ads, you click on it, a drawer will slide down with a form within the ad itself. That means there's no waiting for a new landing page to load. There's no assessing, do I trust this site or not? Because they're staying on LinkedIn. LinkedIn even sweetens the pot a little bit by auto filling all the fields that they know for the prospect. So if you're only asking for first name, last name, login email address. I really like asking for LinkedIn profile URL, that's a great one. So you don't have to ask for much else. You can get everything through that. Then this form is going to be totally auto filled. And if the prospect is interested, all they have to do is hit the submit button. Because LinkedIn has made this so frictionless. You will see incredibly high converting rates, we find that our conversion rates are most of the time 10% to 50%, higher. And we've definitely seen some times where conversion rates will double or even triple. Now, certainly lead gen forms are amazing, but they're not always a silver bullet. Because of that, I only recommend them to about 60% of advertisers. And the reason why is when you are using a lead gen form, that user it was so easy for them to fill out the form. Sometimes they don't even remember having filled out the form. And so if you contact them three days later, they may say, I'm pretty sure I didn't request any information from you, or I've never heard of you before. And it just generally leads to a lower quality of lead. Facebook advertisers will tell you this all day long with Facebook's lead ads, which is essentially the same product. Lots of times people assume Well, if all the form fields just filled out automatically, then people won't mind how much info I'm asking for. Well, that's not true. We've actually found that the more fields we ask for, we can scare people away, even if it's a lead gen form. So we suggest asking for fewer fields. But just be aware, whatever you're asking for, it will probably convert 10% to 50% higher as a lead gen form than it would if you send them to a landing page. Once someone actually fills out a form, LinkedIn is not going to deliver it to you super easily. So you're going to have to get the lead out of LinkedIn and into whatever system you're using. If you happen to be using salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, live ramp, Microsoft Dynamics and a few others, then you're very much taken care of. There is a native integration there ready for you. But if you're not using one of their native integrated partners, you'll want to use Zapier.com. On their $20 a month plan, they can pipe your leads from LinkedIn into pretty much any CRM or marketing automation system out there. Like I mentioned, these lead gen forms can be attached to any type of sponsored content, or any type of message ads, which we'll get to here in a moment. They're a great way to reduce friction in your whole advertising process. So if you're having a hard time getting someone to, let's say, hop on the phone for a free consultation, maybe you have a super low conversion rate on your landing page, it's definitely worth trying as a lead gen form. Because it's taking so much of the friction away. I found that lead gen forms are by far the cheapest way to get your very qualified types of prospects into your email list for nurturing. They're just as no cheaper way to do that on LinkedIn. So this is great for just reducing your cost per lead. We talked about the lead quality generally being perceived as lower, and that is very, very true. We also see some other weaknesses, which is why I don't recommend these to 100% of advertisers. Because the traffic never lands on your website. You don't Don't get to track it with UTM parameters or any sort of analytics that you do. And you also can't retarget that traffic, at least yet, in October we'll be able to. So if your goal is to make as strong of an impression as possible on a super high value prospect, then I would still send them to a landing page. But certainly if your goal is just to get the cheapest cost for getting your ideal prospects into your funnel, so that you can then nurture them, then lead gen forms win hands down every time.
19:31
Then we move on to the text ads. I love text ads, they are very under appreciated, because they were the original ad format back in the day, these launched back in 2008. And they were the only ad format until 2013. When sponsored content launched. I love them so much because they are they utilize the same targeting as all the other ad formats. So you know your lead quality is going to be high and they're also the least expensive ad out there. The floor is static, they are always $2 per click at the floor. And you'll likely end up paying somewhere between about $3 to $5 per click. So if you're just trying to dip your toe in the water in LinkedIn Ads, and not spend a whole lot and just get a feel for what the lead qualities like, I would recommend text ads. The big downside to text ads is really, they're very low click through rate. The average click through rate we see from these is .025%. Put into perspective, that is two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 times these ads are displayed. So very, very low click through rate. You'd have to have either a very large audience or a click through rate that is much higher than average to really spend much budget at all. If you were into Google ads or AdWords back in the day, this will feel very familiar. We get a 25 character headline on these and then a 75 characters Description, which is the old AdWords was 35 and 35, for description lines. So LinkedIn gave us an extra five combined for a description, we also get a 100 by 100 pixel image, which is most often reduced to 50 x 50. The low click through rate can be a little bit of a liability, it means it's hard to spend too much money on them. And you might wonder if it's worth your time to actually set up because of how little traffic it runs. But I want to tell you about something that I really appreciate, which is you get tons of free branding. The frequency cap on these is something like 20 impressions per day per member. So imagine everything your ideal prospects are doing. They're seeing your logo in front of their face constantly. That can be very powerful. We've seen a lift as much as 15% when we're running sponsored content, and then we launch text ads to the same audience. We'll see 15% higher click through rates in our sponsored content. So there is power in combining these for sure. These are over in the right rail only on desktop, so you might not even remember having seen them. They usually show up in a three pack, sometimes there's a two pack. And very often, the top bidder will appear at the very top of the page in an ad format that LinkedIn used to sell individually called the one by one, but it's just a single line of text at the very top of your browser. I mentioned these are super low risk. And the reason why is because they don't get clicked on very much. So it's really hard to spend too much budget, and when they get clicked, it's usually a really inexpensive click. So if you're looking for just low risk getting the cheapest clicks possible, and you like the idea of 100% of this traffic being from a desktop because this isn't even available on mobile devices, then text ads are for you. I generally recommend them to About 15% of advertisers, but certainly I think they're worth anyone's time just for the branding aspect.
23:08
Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the sponsored messaging ad formats right after this.
23:13
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts.
23:23
B2Linked is the LinkedIn ads focused agency. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest accounts worldwide, and we are official LinkedIn partners, do contact us on B2Linkedin.com to get in touch, and our team can help you enact these and other strategies to help you get the very best of the best performance.
23:42
All right, let's jump now into sponsored messaging. There are now two different flavors of sponsored messaging. So we'll go through both. But we'll start out with just the basics about the entire category. I want you to think of this like it's a cold email. And rather than the other ad formats we've talked about, so far, where you're only paying when someone clicks, these, you actually pay per send. So you're going to pay on average 20 to 60 cents. And that's in North America, that's about what we pay. And you send these to someone with no guarantee that they will see it or open it, or click on your call to action. So this ends up being actually the most expensive ad format, and making it also the riskiest. Here's how the math works out and how you should think about these. So you're going to pay 20 to 60 cents per person you send it to, on average about 50% will open. And then on average, about 3% to 4% of people of those who open it will end up clicking on your call to action. So when you look at your actual cost per click here, you're going to end up in the $10 to $40 range, which is insane, and that's all based off of the averages. So of course if you're going to be running these, you don't want to be average, you want to get a higher than a 50% open rate, and then a significantly higher click through rate. If you can do that, you can end up getting cost per click significantly lower than where you could with sponsored content. But it takes a very special kind of offer to make this work. When I say a special offer, I mean, it has to feel like a personal invitation. If you have an offer, like hey, because of who you are in the industry, we want to give you early access or a sneak peek at something that we're building or it's something in your industry. That feels very special. It feels very VIP. Maybe you want to invite someone as a VIP to a free event you're putting on where there's going to be drinks and networking with their peers. That also feels very special. Maybe even something like hey, we're looking for people like you. Does this position look interesting to you would you want to apply? Those are all great examples of things that performed very well as a sponsored messaging ad. The rule that I run every one of my message ads through is I asked myself if I would be excited about getting this as a cold email from someone, or if I would mark it as spam. Because if you would mark it as spam, you know, this would be the most expensive way you could advertise on LinkedIn. But if a cold email to you, you'd be excited about the opportunity, then you know that this is going to land super well as an ad. We mentioned before that these can be attached to lead gen forms, which really helps conversion rates. And because these feel very personal because there is some dynamic insertion you can do. You can insert someone's first name, last name, title, company, industry, this will feel very personal to them. It'll feel like someone is actually reaching out to them and feel a little bit special. So when you get leads here, they are generally of a much higher quality, which is great. Be aware though, when you are evaluating your performance here, realize that LinkedIn is not truthful in the metrics that they show you. Now I know that's a bold accusation. But let me explain. on all of the other ad formats, you only have two layers, you have an impression goes to a click, and then a click goes to a conversion. But with sponsored messaging ads, you effectively have one extra step in between. So LinkedIn added the opens, but when they started calculating click through rate, the same way that they always have, click through rate, as they say, it is actually just your open rate. So people look at this and go, Oh, wow, I have a 40 cent cost per click here. That sounds insane. And it really is because if you calculate it out, you're probably only going to have a three to a 4% click through rate. And so your metrics there about what your cost per click are, if you're just looking at the dashboard are definitely going to be lying to you. So if you are running any sort of sponsored messaging, I would encourage you go and manually calculate it. Go and look at your cost for how much you've sent. And then just divided by the number of actual clicks you've received on your offer. And that will tell you what your actual cost per click is. And certainly, if I had a cost per click that was 20 30%, higher on sponsored messaging, then I would be happy to pay that, because the lead quality is generally much better. And these are so good at delivering rapidly if you're trying to get the word out about something. This is a great way of pushing it out to people. So you're not just waiting for you're putting something in the feed and waiting for people to click and come to you.
28:30
When you use these, you do get a free banner ad. And not everyone takes them up on this, but realize that if you don't upload a 300 by 250 banner ad to be used on just your desktop visitors, it's just a waste because one of your competitors could pop up instead. So it's certainly worth going to your designer and having them kick out an extra banner image for you.
28:52
Okay, so let's go down to the actual flavors of what sponsored messaging commands. The very first one, the original is called Message ads, it used to be called sponsored in mail. Now, I only recommend these to about 5% of advertisers simply because you really only get one shot with someone, you send them out this message. And if they don't click on it, they're gone. And in order for someone to actually want to click on it, it really does have to be this special kind of offer that makes them feel like a VIP makes them feel very valued. This will appear in your messaging. So in your LinkedIn in mail, you get a subject line that people see first, up to 60 characters, and then you get text in the message itself up to 1500 characters. Now, if your subject line is good, you'll see your open rate be higher than 50%. So try to get it up in the %60, 70% is, I think 76% the highest I've ever seen. And then your text, even if you're allowed 1500 characters, I would recommend still shooting for less. People don't want to read a wall of text. And so start by teasing them. Don't give them everything. up front. Otherwise, they'll just see a wall of text and start to ignore you. But if that text is effective, you should see a click through rate higher than 4%. So watch for that. All of the other ad formats are relatively quick to create, we will end up designing all of our ads in Excel. So we have very quick copy and paste to create ads. But any sort of sponsored messaging is a lot more involved. It takes us about two or more minutes per ad to create a message ad, whereas it's probably going to end up taking us less than one minute to create sponsored content of any kind, and certainly texts that are super quick. There's also no retargeting here yet for message ads, so if someone doesn't make it to your landing page, they're kind of just gone to you. Now when engagement retargeting comes out in October, I'm really hopeful that they will have retargeting here where you could say something like if someone opened my message ad but didn't click, then I want to send them another one. Because these are like a cold email, they work really well to warm audiences because it's not cold anymore. It's now warm. But then I think about it like this. If I already have their email address, then why wouldn't I just email them for free? Why would I pay LinkedIn 20 to 60 cents to send it, but these can be really good for that.
31:23
But the newest variation that LinkedIn just barely came out with I mentioned a couple episodes ago in the news section. These are called conversation ads. They are Lincoln's newest ad format, and one that I'm truly excited about. I told you that I only recommend message ads to about 5% of advertisers because you have to have this special offer. But your conversation ads are essentially a chat bot experience. So you'll send this to someone and you'll give them some options. And let's say you were asking someone if they were going to be at an event because maybe you're going to be at that event and you'd like to meet them at your booth to talk. You might start off the conversation by saying, "Hey, are you going to be at this event?" And if they respond, no, they're not just gone like they would be with message ads. You can follow up and say, "Oh, well, sorry, you're not going to be there to meet us. But hey, how about do you want to join this webinar we're doing next week to talk about something that we're going to be talking about at the conference anyway, and you won't miss out on the great conference stuff". So because you get more shots on goal here, you're not just wasting it with one message that people aren't especially interested in. Now you can test different messages. And what we found we were actually part of the pilot here, and we have a case study with our clients on the initial release of conversation ads. We found that these have a 30% higher conversion rate than message ads did. So that means that 30% of the traffic that would have just seen the message and bounced, ended up converting, which is amazing. So because it's 30% more effective, it means I can end up recommending these a lot more often. So I find myself recommending conversation adds about 10% of advertisers, as opposed to the 5% from message ads. I think with these being just more versatile than message ads, and really giving us more shots on goal, I think these will very quickly become the most used sponsored messaging ad format. The big downside to you who's creating it, though, these are even more involved than message ads. I told you that it takes us about two minutes per message ad to create one with conversation ads, it takes us 20 plus minutes to create each ad.
33:46
There's no bulk creation, there's not very many shortcuts. So it's it's very difficult to do these, but knowing that they perform 30% better is enough for me to say it's worth our time in creating. Your initial message. be up to 500 characters. And you can, at least as far as we can tell, you can ask unlimited questions. And you do get to put unique links in for every answer. So if you're really insane about your UTM tracking parameters like we are, every single answer, every single question, can have a unique tracking link so you can really pay attention to what's working and what's not.
34:24
Alright, now let's move on to dynamic ads. Now, you might know dynamic ads as being LinkedIns creepiest ad format, because they stick your picture into them. That's, of course joking. I've heard a few people say that that's creepy. But I think most people understand that a company is not actually sticking your face in their ad. This is done by LinkedIn dynamically. These are shared inventory with text ads. So they are only available on desktop and they're over in the right rail, because they're essentially combining what was three different text ads, they tend to have a click through rate. That's six nificantly higher than text ads, but will still look significantly lower than your sponsored content. I recommend these to about 10% of advertisers. I used to recommend these zero percent because they used to be insanely expensive. They were usually twice the price of sponsored content, and their click through rates were low like text ads. But just recently, LinkedIn had a price reduction on these when they took all of the inventory back from their programmatic ads, and dynamic ads was the beneficiary of that reduction and got all of the ad inventory. So because of that cost per click came down significantly. And now I recommend these a lot more because you can pay between six to $8 per click on these, whereas they used to be in the 15 to $18 range. This is the best ad format that you can use to get people to follow your company page. It's a native ad format that's just asking "Hey, we want you to follow our company page". These started out life as an ad format just for talent solutions, the the talent side of the business. And then LinkedIn Marketing Solutions ended up taking it because it was already developed, and it was worth a shot. These do work very well for hiring, you've probably seen the ads that are like picture yourself at IBM. You get a 70 character description, and then a 50 character headline down below, and a 100 by 100 pixel image. These come in three different flavors. One's called spotlight ads, which funny name, but it just means that it links to your website. So if you want to send someone to an external landing page, that's on your website, you'll want to select spotlight ads. And for these, you'll get an optional 300 by 250 pixel background image. So you can customize these a little bit to maybe feel more like your brand. You can also dynamically insert their first name, their job title, and even their company name as variables.
37:05
Then, like I mentioned, there is a follower ad. And this is just to follow the company page. And it is the most efficient way to get more company page followers as you're paying for them. This is so much better after the price reduction, because now you can actually get your cost per follower down into a really palatable range. You can dynamically insert someone's first name and company name into this. The third variation is called job ads. And I don't have a whole lot to say here except they exist. And that's because I've never used them for a job ad purpose. I would much rather use sponsored content and text ad formats to get people for a position. So I haven't ever used these, I'm assuming very similar performance to the others. Okay, I've got all of the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around
38:01
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show.
38:04
Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
38:11
Okay, we're gonna go over all of the episode resources. So down in the show notes, you'll find that article we talked about at the beginning about the cities that because of COVID, their hiring either did okay, or it totally tanked. So that'll be interesting to watch. But you'll also notice links to all of the different ad specs around each of the ad formats. So check and see a link to video ad specs, carousel ad specs, single image ads, text ads, message ads, conversation ads, and dynamic ads. So whichever of these you want to start creating, go ahead and check out the specs to make sure that you've got all of the assets you need to tackle them. There's also a link to our LinkedIn Course that we did with LinkedIn Learning. You'll definitely want to check that out. It's very inexpensive and a great walkthrough and introduction In the world of LinkedIn Ads. And of course, I would implore you on whichever podcast player you are listening, please hit that subscribe button so you can hear more of this awesome deep LinkedIn ads content, if I don't say so myself. And then of course, if you're liking what you're hearing, please do rate and review. It makes a big difference because we're on Episode 12. This is very early on in the journey and certainly anyone who's interested in LinkedIn Ads, I hope they are listening to this. So please help share it with them. drop us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any ideas for episodes, any questions based off of what you've heard, and we will see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
