#243: B2B LinkedIn Ads Playbook: What Works (and What Doesn’t) in 2025

#243 Linkedin Ads | In this episode, Danielle Messler sits down with Anthony Blatner (LinkedIn ads expert and certified instructor) and Tagg Bozied (Head of Brand Awareness at Docebo and award-winning B2B campaign strategist) to dig into what actually works with B2B LinkedIn ads in 2025. These two have spent years in the trenches, building campaigns for some of the most niche, high-intent B2B audiences, and they’ve got the data and real stories to back up what works (and what definitely doesn’t).

Danielle, Anthony, and Tagg cover:

• The biggest mistakes B2B marketers make on LinkedIn and how to fix them fast
• Why “thought leader ads” are crushing right now and how to set them up the right way (even if you’re not Dave Gerhardt)
• How to measure success in brand awareness campaigns (including smart ways to use dwell time, frequency, and Google Analytics)

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro from Dave
  
• (01:59) - – Why This Isn’t Just a “Webinar”
  
• (03:27) - – Meet the Experts: Tagg Bozied and Anthony Blatner
  
• (05:38) - – Biggest Mistakes in LinkedIn Ads
  
• (08:09) - – How to Make LinkedIn Ads Stand Out
  
• (10:21) - – What to Know About Thought Leader Ads
  
• (14:42) - – What Does Success Look Like? Metrics That Matter
  
• (17:39) - – What’s a CTV Ad and Should You Try It?
  
• (20:43) - – Budgeting Tips for Niche Audiences
  
• (26:54) - – LinkedIn Lead Forms vs. Landing Pages
  
• (32:52) - – Proving ROI on Brand Awareness Campaigns
  
• (38:53) - – Reporting Tools and Stack Recommendations
  
• (41:35) - – Targeting Secrets and Retargeting Best Practices
  
• (44:57) - – How to Think About A/B Testing on LinkedIn
  
• (48:55) - – Wrap-Up + Where to Connect

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Danielle Messler [00:00:17]:
Hey, everyone, I am Danielle, head of content at Exit Five. And if you're expecting Dave today, I'm hosting. So I'm very excited to host for the first time with you guys. Yeah, Dan, where's the bald guy? I have a lot more hair than Dave, if you haven't noticed. Hi, Carrie. Oh, I'm so excited to see you guys. Do me a favor and put in the chat where you're from while everyone's kind of like signing in and finding their links from their calendar, invites and all of that. Pennsylvania, New York, Dallas, Wisconsin.

Danielle Messler [00:00:48]:
Great cheese there. Philly, Great cheesesteak. Sunshine State. We'll ignore you because it's like 30 degrees where I am right now. We got Toronto. Wow. There's people from all over. That is so cool.

Danielle Messler [00:01:01]:
So I'm excited. If you have not joined one of our Exit Five live sessions, do not call them a webinar because they're way more fun than a webinar. We are live today to talk about B2B LinkedIn ads. We're excited to do this session because for people in B2B, like, that's the biggest, probably paid channel you might be working with right now. And we always get a lot of questions about it. So we thought we'd bring together a handful of experts to help us out with that. So I'm really excited about who we have today and a big thanks to our partner, Metadata, who is partnering with us to bring you this content live. So I'm excited.

Danielle Messler [00:01:37]:
So a couple of housekeeping things. Yes, this is being recorded. It will be emailed to you. You don't have to ask in the chat. I won't make you do laps and burpees like Dave will, but I will probably give you a little fast. Just kidding. It's funny. For questions that you have for our experts today, we'll introduce in just a second.

Danielle Messler [00:01:56]:
Throw them in the Q&A tab. I think it's on the right hand side of your screen. It's on the right hand side of my screen. Add them in there. And then what we'll be able to do is keep track of them and throw them up on the screen. But we'd also love you to, like, be involved in the chat. Throw in your 2 cents, your questions, whatever you want. So now I'm just going to do a brief intro of who we've got coming to teach you about LinkedIn ads today.

Danielle Messler [00:02:16]:
Really excited. We have Taggg Bozied, who is from Docebo which I just learned how to say, and something really cool about him is they actually won the best B2B linked ads campaign award, I think it was last year. I'll have Tagg up here in a second and he can fill in the details there. Then we also have Anthony Blatner, who is known to many in the Exit Five community.

Danielle Messler [00:02:38]:
And he is one of only nine LinkedIn certified marketing experts in North America. And he's actually doing a whole course for them right now, I think. But so I'm going to bring them on stage. Give me one second. Tagg and Anthony, you're backstage. So get ready.

Anthony Blatner [00:02:55]:
Boom. On stage. Hello, everyone.

Danielle Messler [00:02:57]:
All right, there we go. Hey, guys. How are you doing?

Anthony Blatner [00:03:00]:
We're doing great. I'm good. How are you?

Danielle Messler [00:03:02]:
All right, Tagg, so correct me about the award. Who gave you that? And, like, what was it for? And just, like, brief. Give us who you are.

Tagg Bozied [00:03:09]:
Yeah. So Docebo is an Italian company, but our headquarters is in Toronto, and we won the Canadian Marketing association gold for best B2B campaign on LinkedIn.

Danielle Messler [00:03:22]:
Awesome. I love it. Very cool. And then, Anthony, tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with LinkedIn right now. I think it's. Is it launching or has it not launched yet?

Anthony Blatner [00:03:30]:
It'll be launched in about a month or two from now. We're creating new LinkedIn learning courses. There'll be two different courses. One is LinkedIn ads tips and Tricks, so some different advanced strategies and tips for LinkedIn ads. Then the second course will be B2B marketing on LinkedIn, where we'll kind of cover all different channels of, like, different ways to use LinkedIn. So just film those. They'll be launched in about, like, a month or two from now.

Danielle Messler [00:03:51]:
That's so exciting. All right, we'll definitely have to check those out, and then we'll find them and share them with everybody once it's live. So are you excited to talk about B2B LinkedIn ads today?

Anthony Blatner [00:04:01]:
Talking about LinkedIn ads, I know we.

Danielle Messler [00:04:04]:
Like two biggest, like LinkedIn. And I say this with love, B2B ad nerds. We could. So I'm excited. So I'm going to kick us off with. We talked about a couple of questions beforehand, and I love kicking off with this one because I feel like it gets us in a good headspace and everyone's always wondering, like, what am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? So what are some of the, I guess, biggest mistakes you're seeing right now with B2B and running ads on LinkedIn.

Anthony Blatner [00:04:27]:
The ones I always see, it always starts with like targeting. I'd say like the most common things I often see is like when I hop into an account, you'll look at the targeting that's set up and some of it's intuitive, but then a lot of the options maybe aren't as intuitive as you might think. And I'd say like, the best way to like plan out your targeting is to go do research and go look at like several customers or prospects actual pages. Because sometimes they're not in the industry you might think that they would be in, sometimes they're at in a top level industry or another industry on LinkedIn. So I've seen lots of times where people will select the wrong facets and then if you have the wrong targeting then everything's off from there. So go analyze a couple of your customers or top prospects pages to like reverse engineer your targeting.

Danielle Messler [00:05:10]:
That's a really good point, Tagg, what would yours be?

Tagg Bozied [00:05:13]:
Yeah, I'll speak from my own experience and own fails as opposed to what other people have gone in. I've spent pretty much the last five years of my professional life almost entirely on LinkedIn and I would say from the beginning into the end, I think that what I've learned is that at the start my calls to action, my thought process was entirely way too far down in the funnel. I was way more advanced. I think that what my experience has taught me is the importance of the brand awareness component. I think that what my experience has taught me is how important the creative is. And so I think early on I was lacking creativity and trying too hard to create the end goal that I wanted as opposed to thinking ultimately I think simpler, simpler and a little bit higher up and thinking more from the user standpoint. I think that it was way too complicated and probably not the right media at the start. And my time has taught me to educate first, Deliver value first, don't let your content speak to your goals, just deliver value to the user.

Danielle Messler [00:06:23]:
Would you agree with that, Anthony?

Anthony Blatner [00:06:25]:
Yeah, it's very easy to jump to like get a demo ads and just focus on that because at the end of the day that's what most people do want. But you got to be careful not to jump to that too fast. Otherwise you might be getting demo requests coming in, but people have no idea what you actually do if you jump to demo too fast. So I think what Tagg said is definitely correct. Start with building awareness, educating the prospects on who you are and then retarget to demo if that's your End goal. But yeah, very easy to jump too fast to those. Get a demo ads and then you might be getting leads, but they might not really know what you do.

Danielle Messler [00:06:58]:
Yeah. And as far as creative goes, like what's one way to make an ad stand out in the LinkedIn feed? Or what formats are you finding a lot of success with right now?

Tagg Bozied [00:07:07]:
I mean in the context of B2B in particularly, I think that video, having good video that is clever and creative and still on brand and on point and delivers a solid message, I think that that is absolutely the hardest thing to do, but also the most effective. That being said, I think that that's a great lead off. I'm interested to hear what Anthony has to think because by and large what I see from right now I'm in the middle of doing an audit of our biggest accounts that we've closed in the last 180 days. And what we're seeing in terms of engagement is how important the mix is. So I think in terms of making a great first impression, you can't go wrong with video. It's absolutely the most powerful and most effective way to lead off an introduction of yourself to a prospect. But I have to also speak to how important it is to have a media mix. So having long form sorts of content, having still image, again clever and brandier sorts of things speaking directly to the customer, pain points, I think those are things that are also effective too.

Tagg Bozied [00:08:13]:
But you really have to hang your hat on a good video. I think if you want to have a holistic approach to a healthy campaign.

Anthony Blatner [00:08:19]:
Yeah, I agree with that. Video can be the most powerful format when done right. It's just such a high fidelity interaction where you get to see and hear from somebody and you can cram a lot more information into a video ad than you could just an image. And like taking that one step further could be like thought leader ads with video. Especially when it's like a founder or owner or CEO and like kind of telling the story. You know those selfie videos, those do awesome. And it's like a very high touch interaction where somebody gets to hear and see from the founder, you know, really get to learn from them. And then you can convey so much more than you can in just an image ad when you have video there.

Anthony Blatner [00:08:55]:
So QR's a very high touch interaction. It's very sticky and that FaceTime is gold. And like you don't get FaceTime unless you're like seeing somebody in an event or if somebody joins a webinar or something like that. So being able to do that with ads, put that in the feed. It's a great format.

Danielle Messler [00:09:10]:
Yeah. You both kind of mentioned the thought leader ads and those are relatively new ish to LinkedIn and we've been running them at Exit Five and having a ton of success with them. And Kelly in the chat has said she's been wanting to try them out. Just kind of what are your best practices there? What are you seeing in terms of results and what should Kelly try that out with?

Anthony Blatner [00:09:30]:
Yeah, thought leader ads have been great. So first to define it as thought leader ads are boosting posts from people. LinkedIn calls them thought leader ads, so that's what we call them. But essentially just boosting a post from a person. So anything that you would post on LinkedIn you could then go boost that into an ad. I guess the caveat is it's like single image, single video, you can't do document post, you can't do multi image. There are a couple restrictions but for the most part boosting posts from people and we just see like they get much higher engagement rates and much higher. More importantly dwell time of like people are sitting there and reading that content more than if it was coming from a company page.

Anthony Blatner [00:10:07]:
And it makes sense, you know, people will always engage and want to hear with people more than just a business. So yeah, they create much higher engagement rates, much more dwell time. So people are sitting there and reading it and then that allows you to bid a lot lower. So you can get much better CPMs and costs in your ads than company page ads. So those are thought leaders.

Danielle Messler [00:10:25]:
You're doing this for us at Exit Five. So if you've seen Dave in your feed it might be a thought leader ad.

Anthony Blatner [00:10:33]:
Yeah, if you've seen Dave a lot more on LinkedIn recently, it's those thought leader ads and those have been crushing it. So stuff like that where it's like if you have a visible founder or like a well known founder or somebody like that's even better if you have that. Otherwise if you don't then you can still boost your CEO's post or your founder's post and like you know, help get their voice out there more. And it also doesn't need to be just the CEO. You know, if you're a bigger company you probably have a lot of like really smart people on your teams. Like you might have engineering leaders who have written a lot of like really great code. Like they can share your their thoughts and stuff like that. So there's a lot of opportunities with them.

Danielle Messler [00:11:07]:
Yeah. And Rachel actually has a good point. Sorry, go ahead, Tagg.

Tagg Bozied [00:11:11]:
I was just going to add to that and say that as a campaign manager there's nothing like when you see one of your leaders that post something really great that you don't have to do any planning for in terms of a content or a campaign. That being said, what my experience has been I would try to enable the people that would be on your short list and have some brief conversations with them because what I've come across is like, oh man, this would be a perfect thought leader ad if it just was like this or if it. So I would say that do remember it is going to be new content to an audience that probably doesn't know you. And so I've gotten burned a little bit just because getting in the thought leadership ad craze and haven't had always still have had great success. I'm by no means I'm saying that thought leader ads aren't what everyone says that they are. But you still need to have a good high quality piece of content. And if you're going to involve people that are close and in your network, it would probably be worth a 15 minute call to discuss some guidelines of this is what we need. Or probably more importantly, don't do this.

Tagg Bozied [00:12:14]:
X, Y and Z.

Danielle Messler [00:12:16]:
Rachel had a good question in the chat. She said, are those posts that you're boosting, are those from an employee or an external influencer? And we kind of do. Well, we don't do both, but we run ours as Dave. So that would be an example of like an employee or CEO running them for Exit Five. But one of the things we also do with our partners is sometimes we create really good content for them on LinkedIn and then like they run them as thought leader ads, which has worked really well. And it adds I think, a boost to any kind of like influencer campaigns. If you're doing that in B2B, you get permission from them and then you can run that and then it's like another face too.

Anthony Blatner [00:12:47]:
Yeah. And you can boost posts from people outside your company too. So when it first came out it would only be employees, but now you can do people externally too. So one of my favorite plays is like if you have customers who are posting good things about you on LinkedIn, those are great to be boosting anything like testimonials from like well known companies, well known people. Anybody saying something good about you on LinkedIn like boost that, like hearing directly from a person is so much more powerful than reading a testimony on a website. So if you have any of that out there, those are great to be boosting.

Danielle Messler [00:13:17]:
Good question from Josh. So we've been saying like crushing it a lot in the chat. So let's turn to metrics and metrics of success and what you're looking out for. So can you just dig into a little bit? Maybe Tagg, like, what's a successful campaign to you by the numbers, and then you, Anthony as well.

Tagg Bozied [00:13:31]:
Yeah, so I'm almost entirely brand awareness. So I do. In terms of the objective that I work at is brand awareness. When I meet with my content team, the question becomes if we're using brand awareness campaigns and then we're optimized for reach, then how do we use engagement metrics to determine the success of the content? And that's where I think what Anthony's already mentioned at once. But the dwell time, what has kind of evolved as our strategy's evolved and we've gotten more in the corner of working almost exclusively with brand awareness campaigns. Looking at click through rate isn't necessarily. Or an engagement rate that isn't necessarily a good indicator. What we have seen and what we've been doing since they've come out with that metric is the dwell time.

Tagg Bozied [00:14:15]:
And so trying to assess our content's performance on the premise of how long on average people are actually looking at it, that's been an adjustment for us and a way for us to take what's important from an objective standpoint, but then also use engagement to improve our content.

Anthony Blatner [00:14:35]:
Yeah, dual time has been awesome. I'll kind of build on what Tagg said, that LinkedIn's average click CTR is like.04 0.4. So that means 99.6% of people are not clicking on your ad. So clicks are probably not the best engagement metric. But are people sitting there and reading it? Just think about scrolling in your feed. What do you stop on? What do you read? And then you probably keep going. So you don't click on most things in your feed, but what are you sitting there to read so that those stats have been like, yeah, some of the best for like, are people sitting here and reading this? You know, what are they interested in reading? So yeah, dwell time is that new metric and it's nice because that metric also works across formats. So previously video would tell you how long and percentage of watch time people would watch that video.

Anthony Blatner [00:15:18]:
And then you're like, okay, well how do I compare this to image posts or other things? Now dwell time will tell you dwell time across image versus video versus document or anything else. So you can see which of your content formats are people sitting there and reading the most. Are they sitting there and watching a video longer or are they reading your long form post because it is a thought leader ad and they're reading your strategy that you put in that post. So yeah, dwell time has been a great metric.

Danielle Messler [00:15:40]:
What's a good starting point for dwell time? I've seen that come up a couple times in the chat around how to optimize for it. Like what's a good starting point? What should be aiming for?

Anthony Blatner [00:15:49]:
Yeah, for company pages I think like the average I usually see like starts at like three seconds. So if you're above three seconds then that's better than average. If you're below three seconds, that's worse than average. So it's about three for average for company pages. For thought leader ads it's more like the 5 to 6 second range. And again this is an average. So some people are sitting there reading it for a lot longer than that. Some people are just kind of scrolling by.

Anthony Blatner [00:16:11]:
So those are some averages I usually see.

Tagg Bozied [00:16:13]:
I'll give a hack dwell time hack for the group. You know, CTV ads are unskippable. So if you throw in a bunch of CTV ads, your average number will go up. And that's probably relevant to some of the leadership questions that I saw in the chat.

Danielle Messler [00:16:28]:
What's a CTV ad?

Tagg Bozied [00:16:30]:
Connected TV ads? Yeah, it's basically the starting at the Olympics last year is where they started to implement the B2B inventory into connected TV ads, which are basically unskippable ads on larger devices through streaming platforms. It's a newer inventory inside of LinkedIn. That's the award winning component of my company and our content and what we've done. We basically did a video interview series. We did nine episodes of an interview series that we distributed through Connected tv, which was really great. There's some additional guidelines that go into that. Like for instance the times a 6, a 15, a 30 and a 60 second, they have to be exactly those times. There have to be a standard bit rate.

Tagg Bozied [00:17:12]:
So there's some nuances there, but it is a guaranteed full view impression. And so your dwell time ends up going up. And ultimately what we've seen too is a lift in our brand and impressions in terms of organic search as well.

Danielle Messler [00:17:25]:
Didn't even know you could do that with LinkedIn. So it just goes right to my TV.

Tagg Bozied [00:17:29]:
The future is here. It's like we used to think of like getting on TV advertising is like the super bowl ad commercial, right? Like that conventional Type. No, it's not that way. Like you can go get in people's homes and on their larger devices like with very small purchases and buys. Now the key is to have the good high quality video content. That is certainly the gap here.

Danielle Messler [00:17:49]:
Yeah, interesting. Anthony, have you had any experience with that? Maybe we need to get Dave on Connected TV.

Anthony Blatner [00:17:55]:
Yes. Yeah. No. CTV ads, they're still very new on LinkedIn but like as a format they're great because being honest, like people only spend a certain percentage of time on LinkedIn every day. So usually during the workday they'll scroll a little bit or maybe like the average person just jumps on LinkedIn to like look up somebody before their next meeting and then hop off. So it's great to have another channel to reach people when they're not on LinkedIn. So yeah, CTV opens up that whole inventory of reach people in another channel when they're watching TV. There's a lot of different partner placements that LinkedIn has, so it'll pre roll on like those TV channels.

Danielle Messler [00:18:30]:
I always forget that not everyone is like as LinkedIn LinkedIn to LinkedIn as we are. And then I mean this, this group.

Anthony Blatner [00:18:37]:
Probably spends a lot of time on LinkedIn but your average prospect out there.

Danielle Messler [00:18:41]:
Yeah, and my husband's. I was like, who did you see this on LinkedIn? And he's like, I go to LinkedIn like twice a week.

Tagg Bozied [00:18:51]:
I see a question there about. I don't believe it's in beta anymore. What it is is when you create a campaign, it will be at the very top and it's just a button you can toggle. It's a toggle button that you can click at the very top of your campaign creation template.

Anthony Blatner [00:19:06]:
Yeah, you have to click brand awareness first for objective.

Tagg Bozied [00:19:09]:
Yeah.

Anthony Blatner [00:19:09]:
Brady.

Danielle Messler [00:19:11]:
Awesome. Jennifer's got us hooked up with the FAQs on the chat. So let's go to some audience Q&A. I feel like this has just been like, I can scroll down for quite some time. So I'm going to throw these on screen. We're going to answer them live. I got one from Maggie. How much should I be spending on LinkedIn ads for them to actually be effective? My company has a very niche audience.

Danielle Messler [00:19:32]:
We find it hard to target on LinkedIn because the audience is so small.

Tagg Bozied [00:19:35]:
Yeah, I can grab this one. Cause I would. I know Anthony has a lot of experience with niche audiences, but my day to day is certainly that. So we're a learning company and so we target very senior HR professionals inside of enterprises and so you can imagine that is a very niche audience. This is how I do it. I know that the default and the best practices around LinkedIn target audiences, they tend to be big. Like, for instance, they're always trying to get you to have at least north of 50,000 people inside of your audience. As an example, one way to make sure that your budget is congruent to your size is first thing I would recommend is stay away from daily budgets.

Tagg Bozied [00:20:17]:
If you use a lifetime budget, that will help you not waste money. Because what ends up happening a lot of times is if your audiences are too small and your budgets aren't proportionately perfect for them. Let's say that your CPM ends up going through the roof. And so you kind of see some money going out the back door that way. So if you set up, if you go away from a daily budget and look more at a lifetime budget, then the algorithm is going to take a little more time to be vigilant with its spend. Let's just say that. So that would be my first recommendation. The second is make sure to also have enough variance of your ad.

Tagg Bozied [00:20:55]:
Make sure to have at least five ads inside of your campaign so that you can maximize frequency caps. I'll make mention of a question that I saw in there and they asked for like an optimal frequency. I typically don't go more than 12 within 30 days. But one thing that's important to understand about the content piece, it's like LinkedIn's hard because it's a professional audience. There's no incentive to be sensationalistic, which is something that I think in B2C marketing is quite common. And then a lot of times just to kind of have content and just keep a fresh feel, that's what a lot of people do. But I would say making sure that your budgets are set up for a smaller audience, stay in the lifetime lane. And then also make sure to have multiple variants that are in there so that you can maximize your frequency to that audience in a given amount of time.

Tagg Bozied [00:21:43]:
But by and large, the smaller your audience, the more your CPM is going to go up and the smaller your audience. And this is how I represent it to my stakeholders, Usually the smaller your audience, the more complex your content needs to be. So that's my best recommendation, is that the best way to try to circumvent the increase in cost from your smaller niche audiences is to take some time and have really, really, really good content. That way your engagement goes up. So whatever increase in cost that you're having, from an impression perspective, you're offsetting with an increase in engagement.

Danielle Messler [00:22:19]:
How much would you say like to a starting budget for a smaller audience should be?

Tagg Bozied [00:22:25]:
Anthony, you want to go with that one?

Anthony Blatner [00:22:27]:
Yeah. I would go back to say that depends on your audience size and I would say do watch your frequency metric when you launch to see am I spending too much on this audience or am I spending not enough. If your frequency sits at like one to two, that means you're not getting many impressions per person and maybe you'd need to shrink your audience or maybe you need to increase your budget. But if your frequency jumps up to 20 within a couple days, then you're like, okay, I'm spending way too much on this audience and I should lower it and spread it out a little bit more. It kind of depends like what you're trying to do with LinkedIn to decide how much you want to spend. I can like share some like just kind of average recommendations.

Danielle Messler [00:23:02]:
Let's talk like audience size. Sorry to interrupt you, but I think like what would you classify as like a small audience, a medium audience and then like large in terms of size.

Anthony Blatner [00:23:12]:
So first of all, LinkedIn will have a little pop up that if you're under 50k, it used to be like a red message that they changed a little bit so it doesn't look as error like but you do not need to be above 50k. You can have audiences smaller than that. But that said, if you start to get under like 20k people, then you start to see some serving inconsistencies and it just depends on how active your audience is. So if you're under like 20k people, you might see it spend more on a couple days and then maybe you don't spend for a couple days. So it just depends on how active that audience is. And then for an average campaign, depends on budget and audience. But like 30 to 80k people is like usually a pretty good size for a campaign. Again, a lot of dependencies here, but if you're above 80k people at a campaign, sometimes you have more opportunities to get more targeted.

Anthony Blatner [00:23:58]:
Where if you're like, hey, I have 200k people in this campaign, then all right, well how about adding some skills to get more niche or groups or interest that targeting to get a little bit more niche into who I want to be targeting. But that said, if you have like a really large budget, you're looking to push a lot of results, then you will need a big audience. So at those points then you need to like open it up a little bit more. So average campaign I usually try to have it between 30 to 80k people. But that said, if you have a really big budget, then you have to like open it up a lot more.

Tagg Bozied [00:24:23]:
Then I would say under 10k is a small audience.

Anthony Blatner [00:24:26]:
Yeah.

Danielle Messler [00:24:26]:
All right, now moving on to Alexandra's question. LinkedIn lead ads versus pointing people to your own landing page.

Anthony Blatner [00:24:35]:
This is a hotly debated topic. If anyone reads it depends on the offer. So there's a lot of dependencies here, but it depends on the offer and if anything, split test it. But the general differences here is yes, a LinkedIn lead form will pop up, it'll autofill, people are still on LinkedIn. It makes it very easy to submit it, almost too easy sometimes. So they do have higher conversion rates on average. But the less high touch interaction, splitting that with going to a landing page, somebody is going to go to your website, going to get to read a lot more, probably see more of your branding and info, fill out your form there manually on that page. So it's a much lot more work they have to go through to submit that.

Anthony Blatner [00:25:12]:
So it's usually more higher intent that you'll see. So split test it, see what works for your company. I have lots of accounts that will go one way or the other and like focus more of their spend on either one of those. I'd say kind of for like a rule of thumb is like, if you're really just trying to start with some content downloads and get those moving, then you can use the LinkedIn lead form to make it really easy to start getting some content downloads. But just know that people are just downloading pieces of content. That's not a high touch interaction. And then if someone's going to go request a demo, they probably need to go to your website to learn more about your company before they're really ready to request that demo. So I'd be careful using the lead forms too much for demo requests.

Anthony Blatner [00:25:50]:
You know, point people to your website to go read more about what you do and then request the demo.

Tagg Bozied [00:25:55]:
I'll piggyback on that and say that I've learned that lesson. What demo ads have actually been very effective for us is driving website traffic. The adjustment that I made a while ago that has really done well is instead of just sending them back to the website, be contextual. And now, for instance, me, the audience that's seeing a demo ad for me, they've had to have been to our website multiple times and have also already had to engage with an ad. Okay, so given that, let's just call It a third touch. The fact that it's a third touch and I know that they've been to the website before, early on was taking them to higher funnel pages on the visit or on the website, taking them into like a product tour or taking them into the product page, like being mindful of where you're dropping them off. That ended up being way more effective than a form fill or a demo. Form fill was actually people going to the site, then converting them when I was putting them in the right part of the site.

Tagg Bozied [00:26:51]:
So I think the best advice that I would have for the demo and or site or both is be mindful of what the audience has seen before. And if it's nothing, then they probably need to go to the site and if it's something and they probably need to go somewhere else on the site, I would be mindful of both. And when you're crafting the campaign, that.

Danielle Messler [00:27:15]:
Would be a lot spicier. I want more to do.

Anthony Blatner [00:27:19]:
Yeah, I mean a lot of it just depends on like how you're like thinking about these leads and planning to use them. So if somebody signs up to download a piece of content, don't treat that like a demo lead and don't expect it to move like a demo lead.

Danielle Messler [00:27:29]:
So it's good advice for like all of marketing. Yeah. Not just ads. Right, Cool.

Anthony Blatner [00:27:35]:
And real quick tell somebody said we've dodged the cost question. Sorry, I'll jump back to that real quick. So if you're looking to just test out LinkedIn, you know, it just depends on what you're looking to do. But I'd say like, if you're really just trying to like test it out, like, hey, can we squeeze a couple of leads out of this platform? Then maybe you start with a really simple lead gen content download campaign just to like, hey, can we squeeze out a couple of downloads on this platform? Yes or no? Usually about 3k is a good little test budget to start with. Again, doesn't have to be that much, but that's usually a good starter test budget. You'll see what your performance looks like, you'll squeeze out a couple of leads and then. All right, are these leads that people want to target? Great, let's build out some more stuff on the platform. That said, you can start as little as 10 bucks a day with LinkedIn ads.

Anthony Blatner [00:28:14]:
And then if you're doing thought leader ads, because you can bid really low, you can get better costs. So you don't need like a full 3K to really test thought leader ads. But for most People, I'd say plan to spend at least 3k to test it out, more or less, depending on your budget.

Danielle Messler [00:28:26]:
What would we spend? Exit Five is the 5,000 we started with. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this live, but I'm going to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Sorry, guys.

Anthony Blatner [00:28:35]:
Somewhere between five and ten.

Danielle Messler [00:28:36]:
Yeah, I'll say.

Tagg Bozied [00:28:39]:
The way that I think of it is try to take what is a benchmark cost of whatever historical cost is your impression cost, and then take what your budget is and then understand exactly how many impressions that's going to give you. And then when you have your audience size, you can divide your audience size by the projected amount of impressions and you have a nice understanding of frequency. And so the frequency for me in the budget planning is something that's very important because I want to make sure how much I want to know and be calculated and how much visibility an individual ad is going to get to that audience. And so that's the way that I do it, as opposed to just going, oh, Well, I have $5,000 and that's going to be for the audience. No, I have $5,000. The historical CPM cost for me is 50 bucks. Okay. So that's going to buy me this amount of impressions.

Tagg Bozied [00:29:24]:
And if my audience is that size, is it giving me the visibility that I want? So I definitely think of not only the budget amount, but also the audience size and how much visibility that's going to give me.

Anthony Blatner [00:29:36]:
Yeah.

Tagg Bozied [00:29:36]:
Did that address the cost question? I don't know if that.

Danielle Messler [00:29:39]:
Yeah. Do we have any other burning questions on cost? Throw them in the chat. We'll get to them. What is the ideal frequency number? I think, Anthony, you had this. It was like, I don't know. I'm not going to try and answer that.

Anthony Blatner [00:29:52]:
Yeah. I think tag mentioned 12 at some.

Tagg Bozied [00:29:55]:
Point for 12 and like 30 days. I try not to exceed that.

Anthony Blatner [00:29:58]:
Yeah.

Danielle Messler [00:29:58]:
And that's the amount of ads that people see.

Tagg Bozied [00:30:01]:
That's the amount of 1 AD.

Danielle Messler [00:30:03]:
1 AD.

Tagg Bozied [00:30:03]:
They're probably going to see a multitude of ads for me, but I don't want them to see one of them more than 12 in 30 days.

Danielle Messler [00:30:10]:
Okay, cool. I'm going to go to Giselle's question because I think I saw this earlier in the chat too about ROI. So it's been really challenging to show ROI for top of funnel LinkedIn campaigns. Can you share best practices? And then someone else in the chat was saying, I have a lot of hard time justifying the kind of brand awareness spend that you were talking about earlier tags, maybe we can also add some element of that in there too.

Tagg Bozied [00:30:33]:
Yeah. So this took a while for to manage up on this and I totally get it. I'm three years into my work here with Docebo and I would say that year one, this was probably the biggest issue. What helped was a mutual agreement on leading and lagging indicators. I think it's the leading indicators and it's the understanding that if you can get buy in on what you're leading indicators are and what your lagging indicators are, that's the best way to get buy in. For us, in what seemed to be the magic, I guess you could say, or whatever the mechanism was that got buy in was our branded impressions. And so while we know that our customer journeys are nine to 12 months and we know that if we're going to pursue bigger clients that it's going to take longer, how do we piece in some sort of a quantifiable metric that is going to be meaningful before we know what the business bottom line is going to be? So what we built was basically a doter brand tracker that takes into all of the organic impressions, the branded paid impressions, and we have a graphical look to see what the trend is basically of how often people are going to a search bar and typing our brand name that was on a month to month basis or on a quarter to quarter basis before we're seeing business outcomes to be able to prove stuff out that was like the leading indicator that our programs are being successful because our brand impressions were growing. So for us in particularly, and I think that this is a challenge that would be unique to each individual organization and even the personality of its leaders.

Tagg Bozied [00:32:10]:
But that was an example of what really worked for us in getting buy in on this brand awareness initiative.

Danielle Messler [00:32:16]:
How are you reporting on those branded impressions? Kerry asked that in the chat.

Tagg Bozied [00:32:20]:
Yeah, Google Analytics.

Danielle Messler [00:32:22]:
Google Analytics. All right. Anthony, what about you?

Anthony Blatner [00:32:25]:
Yeah, I've had lots of different teams care kind of about different metrics, but if you're starting just top of funnel in the beginning, it can be hard to kind of show what's been the impact of these ads. If we're just getting impressions out there or people seeing us at the top level. LinkedIn's got the new companies report which has been handy. So if you have a target list of companies you're going after, you could upload that to LinkedIn and then you can monitor how many impressions you're serving to these companies. So that's usually a good front end thing to start with is like, are we reaching the target accounts that we want to be reaching? Sometimes in B2B it's hard to just get any impressions to certain companies because you're going so niche to certain companies and certain job titles at those companies. So at the beginning, are we at least getting coverage to our target accounts? Are we getting those great past that you will want to have conversion tracking set up to see are those brand awareness campaigns, are people getting to the website, are they getting to high intent pages? Are they submitting those forms? So your standard conversion could be like a form submission conversion that most people set up. But you can also have page view conversions. So you could set one up for if somebody visits any page.

Anthony Blatner [00:33:27]:
Boom, that's the conversion. And then you can have high intent pages like your pricing page or your get a demo page. So are they going to the pricing page, are they going to get a demo page and then you can show, okay, we've driven X amount of people to our website from LinkedIn. We've driven X amount of people to the pricing page, X amount to the demo page. Even if we don't have a demo request yet, we've at least gotten that far. And then boom. Do you eventually start to see people submitting that demo form and kind of going from there? So those are things you can put in place and then on the in like a competitive sense you can on the LinkedIn company page there are some competitor reports and you can see how your brand is doing with some pages that you've written down as your competitors. And you know how many engagements have you had versus them and paid can definitely impact that a lot.

Anthony Blatner [00:34:11]:
So you can see are we getting more engagements than our competitor or not? And a lot of companies care about that. And then taking that a step further, LinkedIn reps can pull like a share of voice report, it's called share of Feed. Whereas like on LinkedIn to this audience, are you winning more of a share of voice versus your competitors or not? And a lot of brand teams care a lot about that. Those are all kind of all different things you can look at to tell how much share of voice are you taking on LinkedIn and like you know, are you reaching those right companies and then are those people making you the website stuff like that. One more thing I'll add in there is that there are also brand studies you can do with LinkedIn if you have a really big budget. There's like Nielsen studies like that are very official that you can do with LinkedIn. It is like an extra Fee to do that. So you gotta have like a big budget.

Anthony Blatner [00:34:53]:
But there are a couple built in ones that if you're spending like 20k a month more than that, then you can unlock these brand studies and it's like built right into LinkedIn. If you go to like the test tab, you can access them. There's. So there's some things like brand lift, product consideration, like stuff like that, questions you can like survey your audience to see they can answer the question. You can get some results there.

Tagg Bozied [00:35:12]:
On this topic, the definition of influence versus trigger, I think typically in the demo campaigns and when leadership in terms of managing up, they always want to know like, well, what did it produce? Well, I think in the brand awareness side it's about influence. And so for instance the Leaders in Learning content series that I was speaking of, the award winning Leaders in Learning content series, so we weren't able to say, well it sourced this amount of revenue for the company. What we were able to say is that 80% of the pipeline had seen at least one impression. So understanding what you want to discover, understanding the frame, the words that you're going to use to actually define what's important. Did Leaders in Learning, did our award winning content series, did it generate all of these customers? That's the wrong lens to look at it through. It influenced 80% of our pipeline. That's value. That's value.

Danielle Messler [00:36:09]:
Yeah, that's a really good point. And it kind of goes into the next question I want to get to from Tierra. Sorry if I'm saying that wrong. Tierra asks, what are some best practices for reporting on LinkedIn ads? We seem to be seeing different data in different places within our campaign manager account. I've had this experience too where like within LinkedIn it maybe reports something and then our website reports something different. And are there any best practices or tools that you use to help here?

Tagg Bozied [00:36:34]:
So we're an enterprise organization, so I feel like the data and the business intelligence team really leads this conversation. It also means that there is a small variety of what I think we would call sources of truth in terms of our reporting and the platforms that we use. Our business intelligence team pretty much considers tableau to be our source of truth. I use Metadata IO for our ad server and also for our site, our account, engagement reporting, and then also pair that in tandem with what we do with LinkedIn. So for us it's a LinkedIn Campaign Manager metadata IO and a tableau that's tied into Salesforce. So it's a combination of four things that really Go in to our quote unquote reporting and sources of Truth.

Anthony Blatner [00:37:23]:
Yeah, a couple others I'll throw in there. I think somebody in the Chat mentioned the LinkedIn revenue attribution report. So that is like a built in tool that you can set up in Business Manager and connect Salesforce to LinkedIn. It is very like limited in what you can see, but it's at least something that's a free tool you can set up very easily. Past that when I can get the CRM data to be able to combine the CRM Data with your LinkedIn data and if you can figure out what campaign a lead came from and then put some charts together with that so you can blend data and Looker so you could have it pulling from your CRM Salesforce or wherever that's coming from. And then there's lots of integration tools to pull data from LinkedIn so you can have those kind of both pulling into Looker and then you could set up your blends and Looker and Tableau can do the same thing and like all these other platforms do the same thing. But there's a lot of like data tools that can pull it from LinkedIn. Then you can blend it, put in a dashboard like Looker or something like that.

Anthony Blatner [00:38:13]:
And then past that there's a lot of new tools that are coming out that have been great to like connect all your different platforms. So like Hockey Stack and Dream Data are a couple relatively new platforms and those do like leverage like APIs to. Similar to how the RAR. The LinkedIn RAR can just based off impressions tell you if LinkedIn's making an impact. Hockey stack, LinkedIn RAR. The revenue attribution Report. Sorry I was like dinosaur the rar. Yeah, I say that way too often.

Anthony Blatner [00:38:40]:
But yeah, some of these new platforms can do a lot of cool stuff too. And like you can connect all your different tools and all your different advertising platforms. They can start to put together like the journey. Journey to see like oh, somebody saw you on LinkedIn and they Google's for you and then they ended up in your. Then they requested a demo and kind of being able to see that journey is very insightful. There are.

Danielle Messler [00:38:59]:
I was like what? Awesome. That was great. Cool. This one I think is fun. So I'm going to throw to this one. What are some little known targeting features in LinkedIn that can be highly effective? Any secrets that you guys are willing to share?

Anthony Blatner [00:39:16]:
Targeting secrets, features, features.

Tagg Bozied [00:39:19]:
I'm trying to like the features I think is throwing me off. I'll say this as A standard best practice. Every time I set up a campaign I like preload. Even if it never gets used and even if there's not even creative that goes in it, I basically pre make its retargeting campaign. That's just been like mindful for me. So like standard in the process you make the campaign go out then for me to like make the next step, like that was kind of my challenge for me and my stakeholders when I First got into B2B is like we always try to think, we only think like one step in advance, right? And oh, we're going to run a campaign, we're going to show them this. Well the reality is, particularly in B2B, whatever you show them, they need a lot more of that and they need more time and you need to be impressionable during that time. I wouldn't call it a feature, but just the best practice of mine is that if they see one ad, I'm going to already have it set up.

Tagg Bozied [00:40:09]:
I'm going to take the couple extra, the 90 seconds or two minutes and have it set up and have it be named in accordance with what the original campaign was. If anything else. That keeps me thinking about what's next for the audience and I feel that that served it well. But also I just think you always have to be thinking about what are they going to see, what are they going to watch, what are they going to see next. And that has really helped me extend the, I guess you would call it entertainment value to my target audience.

Anthony Blatner [00:40:42]:
Make sure they see everywhere after that first touch.

Tagg Bozied [00:40:45]:
Universal discoverability is pretty big deal.

Anthony Blatner [00:40:48]:
Yeah, I don't know if I have too many little known features but I think like one of my favorite things to do is like if you're using HubSpot or any CRM like that, a lot of them can sync lists to LinkedIn. So very common to have like sync your target account list and then as salespeople add and remove accounts from that list that'll automatically push to LinkedIn and automatically update your campaigns. And then same for your open opportunities list, as you close deals then that list or like as deals enter the pipeline and as you close deals you're updating that list in HubSpot and then that's automatically syncing to LinkedIn and automatically syncing to your campaigns that are running. So I love using that otherwise little known features for targeting. If you have a LinkedIn rep, there's actually like a bunch of like ones that you can't see on LinkedIn. Most of them are not useful but There was one that I've used a bunch of times to only target members with one open job. Because one of the challenges LinkedIn targeting is that if somebody has multiple jobs in their profile, LinkedIn will consider all those when looking at targeting. So if you're trying to target CEOs of tech companies of a certain size, somebody could be like a software developer at Microsoft, but then be CEO of their own side hustle and then they look like the CEO of Microsoft because that's how the targeting adds everything together.

Anthony Blatner [00:42:04]:
You could use something like this to, you know, limit it to just people with one open job. You can also just exclude the opposites of the targeting facets when you're setting up your targeting. But yeah, LinkedIn reps have some other targeting options they can add. Most of them haven't been super useful, but there are a handful of them in there that can be useful. So if you have a LinkedIn rep and you're spending a good amount, ask them for that list and they can share it with you.

Danielle Messler [00:42:26]:
All right, I think we have time for like one to two more questions so I'm going to throw it to this one by Christina. Do you have any great frameworks or approaches for AB testing? Different ad sets? We haven't really talked about testing a lot so I'm curious to hear you guys thoughts.

Anthony Blatner [00:42:38]:
Yeah, as far as AB testing, so you can use the LinkedIn built in tool to do like the official AB testing and it'll like keep the impression separate. The audience is separate test like that. Different teams I work with prefer different methods of testing so we do use that for some accounts. But I'd say more common is just kind of launching those ads in the campaign because then you can keep running them. When the A B test runs it's kind of like it's done. It's often on its own. You can't reactivate it other than that like a B testing. Something I think about a lot is like be careful not to test things that are too small.

Anthony Blatner [00:43:07]:
I think I had a post about this last week of like I call it swath testing. A lot of times like I want to find those big differences or those new ads that are, you know, a whole new type of ad that's going to work for this audience. So I'll test like very different things more often because if I just change the button color, if I just like play with my headline a little bit, like I learn a little bit but then also like over time and social like that's going to fatigue and I'm going to need to find something new. So I like to test, like bigger things and like learn more by testing bigger differences.

Danielle Messler [00:43:36]:
Not between two different shades of blue, right?

Anthony Blatner [00:43:38]:
Yeah, yeah. The red button or the blue button get more clicks.

Danielle Messler [00:43:42]:
It's like, Jack, I know you have some interesting experience with a B testing, especially like the text of ads.

Tagg Bozied [00:43:48]:
Yeah. That was the first thing that came to my mind too. And when we talked about this. So we had a test that was very simple ad design. Color based in basically one sentence. Right. It was a lessons learned deal. So lesson number 276, fill in the blank, and that's the ad.

Tagg Bozied [00:44:06]:
So we ran about half million impressions. So 500,000 impressions each, exact same look and feel. The only thing that changed was like the one lesson or the one sentence that was the lesson in the ad. The first 500,000 impressions, I would call it a generic sentence. It wasn't very bold. They were kind of just middle of the road folklore or general wisdom that would apply to our icp. The second looked exactly the same. There's really, at first glance, absolutely nothing.

Tagg Bozied [00:44:38]:
But then when you actually read the sentence, the second one had. I asked our writer, I go, what's the difference? He goes, I chose the side of the fence. The engagement was exponential. So the exact same audience, exact same look and feel of the ad. And this almost works against kind of what Anthony was saying in terms of thinking bigger, or maybe this is in the category of thinking big, but taking and making it exactly the same, but changing the one sentence, which is the centerpiece of the ad. It went from 0 comments to 8. It was shared, this ad set. The B test of this was 8 comments compared to 0.

Tagg Bozied [00:45:14]:
11 shares compared to 0. And the engagement rate, I think was 5x total just from one sentence. Just exact same design, look and feel, served the exact same audience the same amount of times. And having one sentence that was kind of controversial, if I'm honest, kind of controversial made that much of a difference in the engagement. Yeah.

Anthony Blatner [00:45:36]:
One of the things I liked when you said when we talked last time was that kind of the first test that didn't do as well was kind of like maybe average copy, you'd call it. And then the other alternative was like you said today, like choosing a side, like being more controversial, that stands out a lot more to people. So, you know, things like that. That is great to test. Like you do want to be testing that you're phrasing, what's your point of view and stuff like that. So if you just write Average copy that's generated by ChatGPT, that's just the average of what that's scanning out there. Then you're going to get middle of the road stuff that's can be okay. But then if you like really choose a strong point of view, you have a lot better chance of like grabbing someone's attention also.

Danielle Messler [00:46:14]:
Well, yeah, copy matters. I love it. Thank you guys so much for joining today. We are gonna wrap up here. I'm gonna throw a poll on the screen where you can rate on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is the best on how you felt about this session. And then I'm just gonna do that right now. Yay. And then Anthony, we can find you on LinkedIn Tagg, we can find you on LinkedIn as well.

Danielle Messler [00:46:36]:
And Anthony, I know you're always in the community as well. So thank you guys so much for joining us today. I hope this was helpful. Maybe we'll do another one on this if it was useful. I feel like we had so many questions and we obviously didn't get to all of them. So thank you guys for joining today. I really appreciate it.

Anthony Blatner [00:46:51]:
Of course. Thanks for having us.

Tagg Bozied [00:46:53]:
Yeah, thank you.

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