LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ad Basics: What & Why

What a subject to tackle! I’ve been sitting here for an hour (though I may have been sitting on this for months…) trying to think of how to start this post. LinkedIn ads aren’t just something you can start one day…

But actually, that’s exactly how I started. I asked for a few hundred dollars to test run a campaign or two – tacked it on as a part of a video campaign we were developing anyway.

It did NOT do great.

The stats were low — not that we know what half of it meant. The audience was way too broad. And we may have spent too much money on so few views.

But you know what? Like every other #fail in my life, I learned a hell of a lot from it.

This helped me learn what I needed to do better the next time. And over a few years, “LinkedIn campaign” and even “click-through rate” became terms our lawyers started using. They find it valuable, even as an awareness tool — just wait until you know enough to start incorporating tools that grab actionable sales data! But, that’s for another day.

What are LinkedIn Ads?

On a very basic level, LinkedIn ads are posts you pay for certain audiences to see. Where you post something on your firm’s LinkedIn page, this goes beyond your firm’s followers to folks of your choosing (ones you probably don’t have access to otherwise).

For those of us who have been around traditional advertising — print magazines, radio spots, TV commercials, billboards — the concept is somewhat similar.

Super helpful graphic, right?!

A client sees your advertisement in the real world and tells you about it.

Do we generally get new clients?

Not usually (in defense firms such as mine). These campaigns are usually about awareness.

What else do we get out of it?

Well, maybe I could tell you the potential number of cars that drive by that billboard every day. We did airport campaigns, and we knew about how many business travelers came in and out of that terminal on a daily basis. But besides word-of-mouth and some basic numbers, there wasn’t much else we got out of it.

Canva gets me.

And think about that — how much money did we spend on general awareness campaigns with no real measurement on how it was received or who received it?

Don’t ask me why I chose these colors.

Creatives: you spend money to engage an advertising agency to come up with an ad campaign. You want a good-looking ad, so you’re willing to spend money here.

Platform: Outside the ad itself, it costs to place the advertisement. And it’s not like you can rotate ads like you can on a digital platform. In other words, you have one shot at this audience.

ROI: ROI, or Return on Investment, is one of those terms you hear thrown around a lot. If you ask the internet:

Wut?

Yeah, no (that’s Minnesotan for “nope”). I get it in theory but my mind doesn’t really work that way. Mine’s the basic “you get what you give.”

Back to the scenario. Let’s say, in a really cheap world, you pay $15K for the creative and platform.

What you’re getting out of it? Maybe you know a demographic or two about the folks who might see your ad. What you hope for is a client or prospect telling you they saw it. Which…thanks?

Generally, when you start an ad campaign, you have to get buy-in. Which means it begins and ends with a committee, and that involves a longer timeline. It’s really hard to distill so many messages into a single image or tagline, so it takes a lot of back and forth. Six to eight months seems like a good estimate for a timeline. Even if it’s more or less, it’s not something you turn around in a week’s time.

The Digital Advantage

Creatives: I’ve gotten good use out of my Canva subscription (or Adobe Spark). Stock art, clipart, attorney images, plain text — you can experiment. And test out different ad copy. [A/B testing is sending two different versions of the same campaign to your audience to see if one does better.]

Platform: Technically, you pay for your ad, but you’re really paying for the audience and not the platform.

ROI: Here’s where LinkedIn ads (and digital advertising at large, really) shine. Now, what you get out of it can vary depending on your tech knowledge. BUT, even as a complete novice, you’re getting a heck of a lot more than some general demographics and someone who saw it.

Level 1 ROI

(Totally treating this like a video game)

Base level: numerical statistics that come with LinkedIn ads, including (but not limited to!):

  • Impressions, which is the number of people who scrolled by your ad
  • Clicks, the number of people who actually clicked on your ad
  • Click-through Rate (CTR), impressions divided by clicks. So out of the people who scrolled by the ad (impressions) the percentage of people who clicked on the ad. This is one of our key measurements.
  • Video views, including the percentage of people who watched your video all the way to the end

Level 2 ROI

Still relatively “basic” because it’s there on the ad platform; you just have to know where to look. With these, you can start to piece together who’s viewing your content.

  • Company names (oh yes!)
  • Location
  • Industry
  • Job title
  • Seniority
(Probably not the greatest campaign we’ve done)

Again, that’s just some of them.

Level 3 ROI

To me, this is where you start to use Level 1 & 2 data to your advantage. This requires having a good handle on your audiences, as well. (We’ll get to that as I go along.) But let’s say you can start to look at the statistics you get (from the levels above) and identify trends or other pieces of data that might be interesting. We call this “actionable data” because this can become data we can use out in the real world (or those fab buzzwords “business development” and “sales”).

Here’s an example: We ran a LinkedIn ad campaign geared towards local restaurant decision-makers who manage employees (it was a local tip issue). After the ad campaign ran, we noticed a high number of clicks on the ad from a certain restaurant we hadn’t worked with yet. From there, the lawyer knew what to mention when they reached out.

Level 4 ROI

(Yeah, there’s more.)

For those who know and/or have access to their firm website’s backend/CMS, you can start to go wild with “conversions.” I’m not going to scare you by talking about this…yet. It intimidated me for a long time because these are not things I’ve had the chance to explore in the past, but they ended up being a lot easier than anticipated.

“Conversions” are almost like the IFTTT concept explained here. You add a piece of code to your website (or even to the URL/link you’re using) to track whether or not an action takes place. For example, you land on a website where a pop-up appears asking you to sign up for their newsletter to gain 20% off your purchase. A conversion happens when you enter your email address and click “SIGN ME UP for your 10K newsletters a day.” (It’s true.)

That data gets tracked and can further gauge what happened after someone clicked on your ad.

Where were we?

Oh, yeah. Traditional vs digital marketing. I just waxed poetic on all of the data you can get and have yet to talk about the cost. So, the advantage is clear, yes?

It isn’t going to cost you $15K, but $500.

Or less. The campaign example I used above aimed at restaurant owners ended up being around $300. For actual sales data.

The bonus is that, as we got a handle on the process, we were able to set up campaigns in a very short amount of time. Which makes ALL of us happy.