When I began creating LinkedIn ads 10 years ago, it wasn’t really a thing yet. Nowadays, for many B2B firms and marketers, LinkedIn is a robust tool.
But the issue is that lots of firms arrange a LinkedIn ads account but then fail to manage and optimize them. Consequently, they find yourself disillusioned since the ads will be expensive, so the user resigns themselves to accepting the next cost-per-lead.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn ads will not be a set-and-forget solution. You need to always put in effort and time and frequently work on improving the general performance. Over the years we have now identified the largest bottlenecks and the traps that will be avoided to lower the associated fee and increase the conversion rate.
This is strictly what I going to show you on this post: my exact technique of once I take over the management of a client’s campaign. From the mistakes to look out for to the optimization needed to improve the campaign (without pouring extra money into it), and all the pieces in between.
1. Quicks Wins
The first step is to discover the setup and configuration mistakes which are common with latest accounts. These technical mistakes are easy to spot and treatment once you start to gain experience managing LinkedIn ads.
Audience Expansion Enabled
By default, any lead generation objective campaign can have this feature enabled.
I can be very clear on this: that is the quickest way to sabotage your Lead Gen Form campaigns on Linkedin.
If you allow this default set, LinkedIn will show your ads to members outside of your target market, defeating the aim of constructing a targeted audience. You may collect some leads but they can be out of your targeting criteria, so it will be counterproductive.
Website Conversions Objective
Another classic mistake.
Once you create a campaign that redirects a user to a web site landing page, you should have to select your objective. Naturally, you’ll go for the ‘Conversion’ objective, pondering it’s the correct goal to optimize your campaigns for more conversions.
This may appear to be the plain selection, however the platform is misleading you. Never use ‘Website Conversions’ as an objective to your LinkedIn ads should you don’t have already got tons of conversions to feed the algorithm.
The reason is this may occasionally lead to your cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion being much higher than it will be with the target ‘Website Visits. ‘Website Visits’ is one of the best objective to get conversions should you want to redirect users to a landing page.
Audience Network Enabled
‘Audience Network’ allows LinkedIn to display ads on third-party web sites, like The New York Times, Yahoo, BBC, and CNN. But also from publishers you’ve never heard of.
Because of this, the Audience Network traffic is usually bot traffic. If you A/B test and check the campaign metrics with Audience Networks on G4 analytics, you’ll see a high bounce rate and low time spent.
Numerous agencies are doing this intentionally to inflate the numbers and misrepresent ad performance (very similar to the Google Display Network, the Audience Network records higher click-through rates and impressions at a low price).
The worst part is this could’t be capped once it’s enabled, because the Audience Network cannibalizes nearly all of the clicks generated.
Here is what I discovered for this account: a part of the Audience Network traffic is greater than a part of the traffic on LinkedIn.
There is not any other option than to disable this feature, as there’s zero value on this. It’s an absolute waste of your budget.
2. Audience
The Situation
Another must-do for improving the conversion rate is to check the present audience targeting and be certain the client is targeting the best customer profile.
Are the attributes appropriately chosen and configured? In this case, the client was a B2B health and safety training solution that was targeting HSE staff in North America. The client was using the ‘job title’ and ‘company size’ criteria to goal this audience.
The audience targeting setup seems correct but should you take a look at the forecasted number results you may see the target market size is 290,000.
When I see an audience size this big, I at all times ask the client, “Is your target market really this size?” And the response is at all times the identical: “Absolutely not!”. How on earth could an HSE training software that sells to mid-market enterprises in North America have 290K potential buyers?!
LinkedIn is just not like Facebook. You don’t want to go broad and goal everyone. Keep your cold audience specific, ideally between 20k-100k. In this case, the maths didn’t add up.
The Solution
So, on this case, we want to refine the targeting with more precise segmentation which is a standard practice we apply during our audits of other clients’ LinkedIn ads campaigns. The best way to do that is to narrow down the audience with more precise targeting to lower it and keep only the potential buyers. Why should we goal everyone if we are able to spend money on the leads who’re most fascinated with our solutions?
We need to thoroughly understand our ICP (ideal customer profile) and be data-driven to improve this audience setup. The best way to do that is to base our audience on the past results we have now for this account.
The ‘Demographics’ tab is our greatest friend. Once I had checked different demographic attributes (job title, job functions, company size, industries, etc.), I discovered that 4 specific industries were driving 50% of the leads: manufacturing, higher education, insurance, financial services, and hospitals/healthcare.
Instead of blindly targeting all of the industries, I created 4 different campaigns, with one targeting these 5 specific industries:
Campaign 1 – Manufacturing
Campaign 2 – Higher education
Etc.
It is just not only about targeting one of the best industries for this company but using segmentation too. Segmentation allows you to control the budget and scale with clearer data. You can see the fastest horses and increase the budget on the winning campaigns.
3. Retargeting Campaign
The company was spending all of the ad budget on cold audience campaigns. LinkedIn cold targeting is great but should you’re not targeting users who’ve already shown interest in what you are promoting, you’re potentially leaving lots of money on the table.
Furthermore, there’s a likelihood that you simply’ll persuade someone who has already heard of you or visited your website to book a demo than someone who doesn’t know who you might be. Especially when you’ve gotten a high average ticket size or an extended sales cycle, as this client does.
For this client, we decided to allocate 30% of the entire ad spend budget on retargeting campaigns. We created an audience combined with their cold campaign website visitors, LI page visitors, single image + video ad interactions, etc.
4. Ads
The Situation
One of essentially the most common challenges for LinkedIn creatives is an absence of originality, and this case was no exception: very boring visuals and headlines, etc. The message is generic and doesn’t emphasize the pain point.
Also, using the landscape format is just not optimized for mobile devices. This signifies that all of the mobile users inside the target market won’t have the opportunity to see the ad.
The Solution
Through extensive audience research, we identified several pain points that the target market had. One of them was using Excel to manage the training, and the way purchasing latest software will not be the last word solution for managing their challenges.
The bonus point was that we might be original. B2B doesn’t have to be boring, so we decided to craft some latest ads with a touch of originality and a less formal overlay.
We also modified the format from landscape to square to make it mobile-friendly and displayable on different devices.
The Result: 20% Increase in Conversions
The team implemented these changes in July 2023. After 6 months, they saw the next results while spending the identical overall budget:
- 20% increase in conversion rate.
- 25% increase in demo bookings via LinkedIn ads and a rise in call show-up rates.
- 10% increase in deals closed from calls booked.
- 40% reduction in cost-per-conversion (to book demo call or purchase made) from the LinkedIn ads.
There is not any shortcut to improving a campaign. You have to perform some research and spend time managing and optimizing it, but with solid consistency, achieving higher results is straightforward and doable.
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