Paid social is dominated by Meta – Facebook and Instagram in particular.
But we have LinkedIn Ads too, so when is best to use LinkedIn over Facebook?
I’ll break it down with examples for my own PPC consultancy services.
Generally, if the customer lifetime value is £15,000 or more, LinkedIn is a good idea, anything less than that may be challenging to justify the costs.
Campaign structure
To make the comparison between Facebook and LinkedIn
Campaign = Campaign group
Ad set = Campaign
Ad = Ad
Campaign Objective
80% of the time, you’d want to use either lead gen, an instant LinkedIn form to capture leads. Pro tip: you can send them to a thank you page afterwards and pitch your offer.
Or run traffic to your landing pages and optimise for conversions – downloads or form fills.
You may also want to consider Video views and create audiences from the people who engaged with the video to retarget with Conversion campaigns.
Audience
- First things first, set your location targeting to Permanent location because you don’t want to target people outside the country
2. We’ll target company size between 50 – 200
3. Disable audience expansion
4. Job functions: Business Development, Entrepreneurship, Marketing
5. Job seniority: Director, Owner, Partner, VP, CXO
Audience test ideas:
- Narrow by Job Seniority, Functions & Member Interests
- Rather than Job Seniority, pick Job Titles and use the Suggested Job Titles for ideas
- Warm audiences: website traffic, LinkedIn page visitors, contact list, anyone who engaged with your posts or watched 25%, 50% ot 90%+ of your video.
- Lookalike audiences: you can create similar audiences from various sources including: website traffic, LinkedIn page visitors, contact list, anyone who engaged with your posts or watched 25%, 50% ot 90%+ of your video.
Matched audiences
- Upload customer profiles
- Upload company details and create lookalikes from them – use a tool like https://phantombuster.com/ to match company names with LinkedIn profile URLs for a better match rate
- Retarget people who watched 25, 50% of your video.
Budget & schedule
Instead of going with the default Maximum delivery, pick manual bidding and set it lower than the recommended bid, which for me is between £8.83 and £27.64. I’ll start with £3 and monitor whether the campaign spends the daily budget, if it isn’t I’ll increase by £2 until I get it to spend 80-90% of the daily budget.
This is the best way to make sure you’re not overpaying for clicks.
Tracking – Pixel Setup & Tracking Leads
I recommend installing the Insights Tag with Google Tag Manager. You can use the official LinkedIn Insight Tag Template
As an example, this is what the conversion action would look for on my website after someone books an intro PPC chat.
Category doesn’t change anything, pick whatever is relevant to you. Value is optional. Clicks, views and attribution I like to leave as default, no need to overcomplicate it at this stage.
Next define the rule, for me it’s anything who lands on the thank you page: victorserban.com/thankyou15/ – this is unique to anyone who books a time on the intro call calendar, as soon as they hit schedule it gets them redirected to the thank you page.
So it should look like this:
What does a good ad look like?
Most advertisers make the mistake of trying to do the hard sell on the first interaction, whether that’s capturing the contact details followed up by a sales call or pushing people to book a call with you. It’s too much to ask for. Give them something that they’re interested in and have a funnel that nurtures them, if they are interested good, if they’re not, take the hint and move on. Test more creatives 😶🌫️
I like this example of a lead funnel from Tilt Metrics.
Shorter ads do better, but that doesn’t mean longer form posts won’t perform. Key points the ad should address
- What’s in it for me? For the person you’re targeting
- The copy in the creative is about the prospect & talks about outcomes.
- What to do next? (Add a call to action in the headline – Download)
- Social proof – this can be in the form on post likes & comments the longer you run the ad the more you’ll get.
Here’s an example of what that would look for me:
Notes:
- Average frequency: 4 is what you’re aiming for
- It’s normal to see CPCs in the range of £10 – £20
- A healthy CTR is anything over 0.5%
- And CVR (conversion rate) should be 10%+
Pro tip: to lower your CPC, start at no bid cap and lower every day by £1 until you get to the 80-90% budget spent, that’s your lowest CPC range. You can also use automateli.com to automate CPC adjustments at scale.