I'm super excited to have you here. I know it's tough to kick the week off and jump right into something like this, but the month's going too fast. That's for sure. For those of you that don't know, my name is Evan Hughes VP of Marketing here at Refine Labs.
And we're hosting these kind of monthly series focused around specific topics that we are having whether internally with clients or specific to like playbooks that we're rolling out and just some of our strategy and philosophical alignment. So this week we are going to be diving into LinkedIn, paid social and kind of our approach and philosophy around that. We were really strong believers in the value of LinkedIn to create brand awareness, generate demand for a specific niche product, vertical or problem. We are since 2020, this is kind of what Lured Media Refine Labs was this idea that LinkedIn wasn't the tool to drive contacts and email addresses.
It was like really used as a tool to create this awareness, educate the market, talk a little bit more about your brand and organic way. And that's going to be maintained that for the last five years. And I think that that's one thing that holds true about just kind of anchoring on the value of this platform and the growth that it has. So today I'm joined with CRN Libby who are going to just talk through our playbook, our philosophy really set us up and then post call will be able to share this recording on our YouTube channel so you'll get access to it there as well as a follow up.
But kind of with that, I'd love to tee it off. Jump in, Sierra. Cool. Hey, everyone.
Thanks so much for joining us this morning or afternoon wherever you're at in the world. I'm living out excited to chat with you guys today. I know we kicked off kind of our road show of chatting through different channels and so we'll get really tactical today. And so if you have any tactical questions for us, please put them in the chat or even even straight teach your questions for us.
Please put those in the chat. But LinkedIn is a really crucial and important channel, at least with our clients and in the B2B marketing space. We use it with almost every single one of our clients. There's only a few clients that don't utilize LinkedIn for purposes that their target audience isn't on there, which we will be talking about audience today.
But most of our clients are utilizing LinkedIn as we all know on this call. It's the most premium targeting that we have available in any of our social channels. So it's one of the channels we really focus on the most. And we also have a really good relationship with the LinkedIn team and we're utilizing the platform every single day, spending money on the platform every single day.
And so we have a lot of ideas for optimization and things that we want to improve with the platform, which stems from all the way from UI to reporting. And so we're going to talk about some of that today. But I think the most exciting thing that has evolved in the LinkedIn world in the last few years is that they're just getting a little bit better at allowing us to see some more data. And so we're going to talk a little bit about the data that we can see, some of the insights that we're pulling from this channel that kind of helps us make a little bit more strategic and smart decisions with some of our clients' business goals and who we want to target on LinkedIn for our clients.
And so we're really excited to chat through some of that today. And then of course, like I said, please feel free to jump on and ask questions or pop in the chat and we'll make sure to kind of make this more of a discussion as we go through the next 50 minutes with y'all. So Libby, I'll let you kick it off. I think we're going to chat about a few things today.
We'll start with Audience, which is the most important. And our favorite reason that we are targeting on LinkedIn is because it has the most premium targeting. So Libby, feel free to kick off and we'll go from there. That was perfect.
Thanks so much, Sarah. Hey, everyone. Well, I pull up my slides. My name is Libby Shell.
I am a demand-gen manager at Refine Labs. I am in the platform every single day. I've been running LinkedIn ads. I think we're going up on eight to nine years.
So I've seen this platform evolve from the very basics of maybe we can run ads here to all of the different objectives and ad types that we're seeing today. So I've kind of seen it evolve over time and I'm really happy to talk with you today just to walk you through some strategies about how to use this channel to the best of our abilities. And I'll just recap to you all before we get into Libby's section is we've been just trying to revamp some of our playbooks internally. And this is the introduction of our new LinkedIn playbook.
And some of our biggest changes, like I said, is going to be around some of the reporting features, some of the updates that LinkedIn has made in platform. But our general strategy, like what Evan alluded to at the beginning of this call, is we really still focus on LinkedIn for our brand awareness and getting more eyeballs to your ICP. And we use LinkedIn because it obviously has the most premium targeting. And so that strategy hasn't changed.
It's just how we utilize the platform with new features and some of the benefits that LinkedIn has increased over the years is getting more strategic and more actionable. So we'll talk about that soon. Sorry, Libby. Thank you.
Go ahead. No problem. Thanks for tuning in up there. Perfectly Ciara.
So basically when we're thinking about LinkedIn as a platform, the very, very first thing that I'm going to think about when I'm setting up a campaign is audience. And the way we get to our target audience is by narrowing in on targeting. There's a lot of different native targeting criteria that LinkedIn offers to us, which is really why we're saying it is that premium targeting solution. It is that kind of crumbly crumb of marketing platforms and advertising platforms for a B2B practitioner.
And one of those things that we can target on LinkedIn and really on every single channel is location. So there are a number of different nuances that we want to dig in on here. But really first and foremost, the biggest thing that we're that we want to do here is toggle away from recent or permanent location to only select those people who are in your permanent target location. This will really help to narrow in and ensure that you're only reaching people who are actually in your target GEOs and you don't have people sneaking into your audience that might actually be outside of those target GEOs or recently there or just doing some research.
So that is the first thing that you'll want to do when you're setting up a campaign. The default is going to be set to recent or permanent location, but you'll want to make that really quick and easy switch to permanent location. The other thing that you can do here is just go through and list every single country that you are open to accepting new business from and those will be the target locations for your campaign. There are some sub regions you can say and put in your targeting United Kingdom or the EU.
You can also separate your audiences by kind of geographical regions. So North America, Amia, APAC, and Australian, New Zealand and some of those are blended in there as well. The other thing that I would want to call out here is that there is also an option to localize by language. So by default, English will be your kind of go to language.
But if you are running localized content, and by that I mean locally translated content, you will want to specify the appropriate language to go with that target GEO. Yeah, and then I'll just hear Libby too. Location is I would say most of our clients are separating by location in some way in their LinkedIn account. So we have a lot of folks that are global and they'll have, like Libby said, Amia or APAC or Amair regions and really separate that out.
We do have a few clients that will just do a global campaign, but it totally depends on your audience and who you're trying to target. We do find that most of our clients that make sense to separate their campaign structure by GEO because of the way some of their internal system are set up or just the sheer size of audience to make sure that we're reaching the most people with the budget and also with the most relevant content. So location is definitely one of the most important things that we start with when we consider audience targeting. And it's definitely something that we never overlook.
So very important. Yeah, I would also say that I've tried recently blending audiences together by GEO just to just to consolidate and not split our budget across so many different campaigns and targets. But what we found is that the majority of our budget was actually getting spent very early in the morning, US time. It was mostly getting spent in the Amia region because LinkedIn runs advertising off of the global clock.
So there isn't any way to control when your ads start to show. So we had started by blending everything together and actually had to break everything out into GEO segment to campaigns to ensure that there was still daily budget left for our US audience, which in that case was the primary audience. I'm seeing a question come through in the chat about have you noticed a difference in performance when using the language filter? So Emily, I have seen a difference in performance.
I think that those regions, most specifically where I've seen it necessary to localize is in France, in Germany, and in those regions, I have seen an improved performance if the localization content has been built out. Now, if you wanted to just run a campaign and say, yes, we'll target English and French and German and you're only running content that's in English, you're not going to see that lift in performance. With that in mind, I think it's also important to consider, do you have the resources internally to localize content? Because that can be a very big lift.
And especially if the end result isn't especially stronger than what we would see with just a standard English language campaign, it may not be worth the time and effort to build up all of those localized assets. But when I have run localized campaigns, I have seen a slight lift. And then with the Nordics, I've found that English language has been a pretty strong performer, but I would honestly play that by ear, depending on what your sales team is saying about the perception of content, do you have a localized sales team for that region? Or are you able to run with the global team and not have someone who's boots on the ground locally?
So that was probably how I would go about thinking about running a localized language campaign versus just sticking to all English. And I think for the Nordics specifically, too, it's like, keeping in mind the sector or what you're actually serving or who your audience is. So like government adjacent sectors are highly regulated. In market language, it's probably the best to target because our regional nuance is there.
But I'm more broadly open-based, commonality around like SAS or general practitioners, I think English is still a good starting point. Absolutely. Any other questions about targeting before we move on? If something comes up, we can always go back to it at the end.
So one of the other things that we're going to want to think about with targeting is that divide between job-titled targeting versus job-function targeting. So when we are building out that audience, we have a couple of options. With LinkedIn, we're not able to combine job titles and job functions or seniority. It is kind of a very stark divide.
But we can layer in job titles or job functions based off of what we're looking to do and how specific our target audience is. So on the job-titled side, I would say, yes, this is fantastic. It gives you a lot more specificity and control over who is and who is not allowed within your audience. But it can be a bit complex to build because there is not a master list of recognized job titles that LinkedIn shares with the larger public.
You're also limited to 100 job titles. These job titles are both in the targeted titles and then the excluded titles. So if you have a lot of exclusions, you may be limiting the number of titles that you can actually reach. And then there's also the concept of larger bucket titles where not every single job title is kind of considered an independent criteria.
Some of those are lumped together into these larger job-titled buckets. And we don't necessarily know what every single subtitle is within those larger buckets. So when you're running a job title campaign, you can often find some job titles or slipping in that maybe aren't the seniority that you're looking for or feel a little more junior level because job titles on LinkedIn are something that every single user inputs manually. So there isn't a whole lot of exact control over what we can do there.
Now on the other side, we can always build out an audience using job function and seniority level. So this is much easier to build. It allows you to include or exclude titles. So if you want to go in and say, I'm looking to only target folks who are senior level and above.
So that would be senior manager, director, C-suite, owner and partner. Then you can go in and select all of those and then also layer that on with I'm looking for all of those seniorities, but only in the marketing function or only in the information technology function or operations so that you can narrow down and really segment those folks who are going to be the decision makers within those specific sub industries. The concern here is that if there is a decision maker that's outside of that job function, so if we're trying to just target IT, but there might be some, we might want to include someone on the finance team because they actually hold the purse strings, the job function targeting wouldn't be the best way to incorporate them into our target because technically they don't fall within that IT function. So that is the downside of job function and seniority level.
I would say when you're setting up a campaign, sometimes it can be helpful just to build a job title version of your target audience and then a job function version of your target audience and see exactly how large those audiences are and comparing contrast to understand what's working, which audience is larger, which audience is better aligned with my budget and then you can make that a better informed decision about which one you want to launch with. The other thing about LinkedIn is that if you launch with job title targeting and it's not working, you're just having a lot of irrelevant titles and folks come in, you can always pivot to job function and seniority. It's something I've done many times just to see if we can improve overall reach or even improve cost efficiency by not targeting such niche job titles and focusing more on the overall kind of field of contention here and think about the influencers as well as those decision makers in the process. And Libby, I know we've done some testing with some of our clients too with job title versus job function.
We'll let you hear your thoughts when I know at least just from my experience, the job function and seniority again has worked better if you have just a little bit more budget, maybe you want to also see a lower CPM, you're running a potentially a reach campaign just to get more eyeballs on your ads. And so and then job title is also good for reach campaign too, just depending on your ICP, but job title is going to be a little bit more expensive depending on the size of it. So we do see clients testing both scenarios and sometimes they'll go for job function if they're really focused on CPM or job title if they're focused on increase engagement, reach in more of those specific correct job titles. Absolutely.
Yeah, I think that personally my preference would be to go with job function because it creates a wider starting place, especially if you're working as an outside practitioner and you may not know the ICP, all of the nuances of the ICP or all of those specific job titles that you really do need to include in the audience. It is a bit of a catch all. I also think that job function targeting allows us to layer some of those other more nuanced criteria like group targeting or skills or member interests on top. And that can create a much more nuanced way of targeting that if you were to layer job title plus company groups and or interest, your audience would be very, very small, very quickly.
And this allows you to have that level of specificity while also getting a little more in the weeds with your targeting, but not excluding too many people. I'm seeing that David had a question about groups. So I have used groups. I think that they can be wonderful, but finding groups that are relevant to your ICP and are still active can be a really big challenge.
If you know of an existing group where it is an active group, there are people having conversations in there and you're already aware of what that group title is, fantastic. Let's include it in our targeting. But I don't go out of my way to seek those out because they can be fairly stale. I know I'm personally in groups that I joined when I was right out of college and I don't think I've looked at them ever again.
So we have to think that that is a possibility here. I think it's also worth noting who's active in those groups, right? So there could be passive users that are necessarily relevant to who you want to target that are interested in that subject or subject matter experts, so then you're kind of spending budget on someone that's not necessarily influenced in that. For sure.
If you're not worried about it, it's active or not, then why do you care to target a group? Because someone exhibited an interest in that topic enough to try and join it. Sometimes you have to become approved for it. And the fact that LinkedIn groups are no longer as popular now as they were before means that you may have joined them when they were more popular.
You didn't leave the group yet, kind of passively still there. It might mean you're a bit more senior as a person without having to check off a seniority box. So I find if I could find the right memberships and there are so many groups that I can target by what someone studied and their interests as far as LinkedIn groups go, perhaps skills but that's a bit tougher too. And it kind of gets me around the job title thing, especially for certain types of IT jobs or IT roles that are distributed across all sorts of different jobs depending on the kind of company and how they decide to structure it.
So you're an IT person, you study this type of thing in college, you've got these certifications in school and then you're interested in, I'm going to make up a figure, right? Think about it. Whatever. And other type one.
And I want fruit buyers in IT departments. That's how I find it. So being active isn't really important. You've just exhibited interest in that topic enough that you at one point thought you wanted to be part of the conversation.
The very interesting perspective I've kind of appreciated that and challenged in that lens a bit more because I've been kind of an anti-targeting groups for a long time. Just from somebody's experience I've had but you really bring up some valid points on a time like the time and then being actually open to wanting to stay a part of that group even though they're not as active as they were before. I've had good success with targeting violin tin groups. Skills are good too but again, as you say, they're not fashionable so people aren't necessarily joining up for these types of things now but they did five or ten years ago or going back to them further if they are still alive.
Very valid points I appreciate that perspective. Absolutely. With that in mind I think that what I do and taking that into consideration is I would use an or modifier and really say I'm looking for someone who's active in these groups or they have self-identified as having these skills or they have these memory interests and that helps me layer on and take advantage of all of those different criteria to really try and get the widest possible audience. That is still relevant.
That is still aware of the solution that you're offering. I may have missed this because I joined a little bit later. That's my loss. How small a group are you willing to target?
That's a great question. And one that we haven't actually talked about. It's very dependent on your budget. I am running some campaigns that I am only reaching about 7,500 people in total but when we are approaching LinkedIn targeting we're very likely not going to reach more than 30 to 40%.
That is approximately the amount of folks on LinkedIn that are truly active on the platform. So when we are coming up with those estimated audience sizes we have to assume that at best we're probably not even going to reach 50% of that. So the other factor that I'm looking at is budget. And when we have a small audience we have a bit more leeway to utilize as much budget as we want.
But when we're going on the larger side I probably wouldn't recommend going any higher than about 300,000 in terms of your overall audience size just because things start to get very unwieldy at that point. Some of the very large campaigns that I'm running now they actually struggle with reaching their full even the 30 to 40%. They may be reaching 10 to 15. So I think that there's a happy medium between the 10,000 to the 300,000 range.
And I probably aim if you're setting up a campaign for somewhere in the 75,000 to about 120,000 member audience. You can always go up or down from there. But I like to think of that as a good starting point for audience size. Yeah.
The other thing with audience just very quickly is that when we're talking about audience I just want to quickly touch on this. You don't want to go overboard with exclusions for your retargeting audiences. It's a really common trap that a lot of marketers fall into, myself included because it can seem like a really good way to control audience overlap. But when you're layering on native targeting plus remarketing audiences, you are going to limit your reach so severely that your audiences may not even be viable enough to run.
So that is something that I do want to caution. It can seem like a great idea. But when it comes to retargeting, I would really recommend starting broad and then very strategically layering on native criteria if you feel like it's absolutely necessary. But with that caveat of the fact that it will make your audience incredibly small and then you have to think is it worth running a campaign to an audience of under a thousand people?
Sometimes the cost benefit analysis doesn't really weigh out in favor of retargeting in that case. No, let's just skip on through. We're going to escape through here and talk about campaign objectives. So when we're thinking about the platform, there are four core campaign objectives and choosing the appropriate campaign objective for your campaign can be a maker break just in terms of overall performance.
So those primary campaign objectives are going to be brand awareness, engagement, video views and website visits. And each one of those, at least when you're using LinkedIn for a brand awareness kind of top of funnel educational motion, you'll want to focus more on those awareness and consideration objectives versus the conversion of focused objectives, which are more bottom of funnel. They're using this channel as a capture channel. So when we're thinking about the rebind lab strategy, we're going to much more align with that awareness and consideration phase.
So that first one that we're going to talk through is brand awareness, also known as reach. And this is the most common objective that we recommend for kind of that brand awareness in feed consumption method of advertising on LinkedIn. This is the best way to get in front of the largest percentage of your target audience and to get in front of that audience in a really cost effective way. The benefit of this objective is really you're getting a greater audience penetration.
So you're getting in front of the largest amount of people that you possibly can within your budget and you're getting in front of them at a really efficient cost per user. You're going to see because we're optimizing for infant consumption and just getting in front of as many people as possible, is that we're not showing ads to the people that are most likely to click. These are folks who are going to just maybe passively consume your content. But the fact that we're going to be really improving, sorry, let me rewind there.
Basically what we're doing here is we're just trying to get our ads in front of the most people. We're not thinking about optimizing for click-through rate or not optimizing for conversions. And that is going to affect our cost efficiency because we're just showing ads to as many people as possible. We're not necessarily focusing on those who are going to drive a better interaction.
So David, just to call out your question, what's LinkedIn doing differently between these different objectives? It's all about how LinkedIn is really optimizing your content and who LinkedIn is showing your advertising content to. So if we're looking at an engagement, this is a really great objective for document ads or content that you really just want to get a lot of likes and comments on. This is a really good way to reach your cold audiences because essentially you're trying to drive a lot of engagement on your or on your post.
LinkedIn is going because you've self-selected the engagement objective. LinkedIn is going to show your ads to people who are more likely to click on or react to your posts versus just passively engage or kind of lurk in the feed on the platform. You are going to see a lower audience penetration here and significantly higher CPMs than what you'd see with reach campaigns because the pool of people who are going to engage with your post is smaller. So it's going to cost more to reach those people versus that larger pool of truly anyone who could engage.
They may not. And that does tend to drive up that price in terms of cost per thousand impressions. Another one that is more in that engagement vein is video views. This one is only applicable for videos.
And I like to think of it as the engagement objective for video assets. So if you are running a video asset or campaign, you're going to want to optimize for video views. This allows us to really ensure that we're showing this ad content to people who are very likely to watch it. And when we're optimizing for this campaign, we're using video duration and video views as the primary success metric.
So when we're running campaigns like this, this drives really strong in feed engagement. And this is a fantastic way to build up a retargeting audience based off of, did they watch 25% of your video, 50% of your video, 75% or 97% of your video. The downside here is that you do tend to get lower audience penetration than you would with a reach or brand awareness objective campaign, but you are going to see higher CPMs as well because your audience is just a little bit smaller than what you would see with a reach campaign. Okay.
And then finally, the last campaign objective that we typically are going to be using is website visits. This may seem like it's a little counterintuitive to the in the consumption philosophy, but this is a really, really solid option for warmer audiences that are maybe a little more familiar with your brand or your product. You would want to use this for something where you're promoting existing content, maybe like a very high level retargeting audience or even a matched account list audience. You're going to see much stronger engagement here.
It's going to be higher click throughs, higher website visits, higher engagement rates, especially compared to a brand awareness objective. And this is a really good option for ads where you really just want to drive traffic to the website, whether that is promoting a blog post or a case study or just independent and of research and investigation on your website. The downside of this is that we're going to have much lower audience penetration and higher CPMs, which seems to be a common thing with basically every objective that isn't brand awareness. I actually have a couple of clients who are interested in actually moving away from that brand awareness objective to website visits because website visits are much easier to quantify in terms of the impact of a LinkedIn campaign.
Yes, it is much, much easier to measure, but I have kind of caution with switching everything over to a website of visits objective. We are potentially going to miss out on reach and it could actually limit our overall kind of audience pool in the long term, even though we are driving more traffic to the website. So this is a conversation that I'm having fairly often with our target audience or with my clients about what is the best way to use the platform. And it's something that I know a number of or fine labs folks have tested over the years as well.
Yeah, I think something too, Libby, that's really important about these campaign objectives is how you talk about them internally with your stakeholders or folks who are measuring out the performance of your campaigns too. So the other day I got a question from a client to say, why is my CTR not very high? I'm like, well, the objective that you have on this campaign is actually a reach a brand awareness objective. So what this objective is focused on is getting more eyeballs, increasing the audience penetration, of course, increasing the time that you're looking at the ads, but your CTR is not meant to increase clicks.
And so it's really important to make sure that you are measuring different KPIs for different objectives because LinkedIn is focused on different KPIs for different objectives and different cost structure for different objectives, whether it's CPM, CPC, CPV. And so it's really important to know those things as you're going into creating a campaign and really understanding the goal of this campaign is to either get clicks or engagements or views on my videos or eyeballs on my ads. And then that's how you talk about the success of that campaign. Yep, that is a great call at CRR.
I think that that's something that I had kind of glossed over, but each one of these campaign objectives has a different way of measuring success. And it's important to understand exactly how success will be measured when you are choosing your campaign objective because if you potentially choose the incorrect objective, you're going to be optimizing your campaign for something that isn't especially relevant to you and you're also going to be kind of measuring in a way that's not conducive to reporting on success. Are there any other questions about objectives before we move on to just optimizing and kind of making the best of your budget? Okay, then I will hop on over to some of those slides.
So the best way, first and foremost, to think about and ensure that you are using your budget effectively is by setting up appropriate reporting protocol. And the best way to do that is UTM tagging parameters. This allows you to pass identified information back to your CRM, back to GA4 and really see what is working, what campaigns, what ads are driving, website traffic or engagement or conversions, what have you. There is a native integration now on LinkedIn where you can build out dynamic UTM's and some of these, this can cut down on the time it takes to build UTM's rather significantly.
But if you are working with a client or your internal organization has more complex UTM parameters, sometimes you are going to have to build those out externally and put those in place on each specific ad. I tend to work with folks who have more complicated UTM parameters, but when I'm building out a campaign, I am making sure to tag every single ad so that I can see down to the ad level what is working, what is not working, and then run reports to find out are there specific campaigns that are driving more traffic to the website that are driving more clicks that are getting more engagement. It's also a great way to determine what ads are working and what ads are not so that you can conserve budget, pause the underperformers and really double down on what is working for you. Yeah, I know CRD call out, you can breathe a little easier and now that those dynamic UTM's are functioning across the entirety of LinkedIn, it allows you to just put them in place once and not have to worry continuously about, did I mess this up through some kind of manual error?
And it's definitely something that you want to have in place. If you're running campaigns without UTM parameters, I would very much kind of question why and strongly urge that you want to get those in place as soon as possible. And then in terms of just continuing to optimize and ensure that you're making the best of your budget, you're also going to dig in a bit on reporting and measuring success. So there are specific KPIs that you're going to want to be tracking on the media side.
Rifenlabs has done a really solid job compiling and creating a paid media KPI tracker that we can use to track all kinds of metrics from funnel convergence to in-platform performance. And then on LinkedIn, we're going to look at those channel specific performance metrics, like CPCs, CPVs, REACH, frequency, and look at the aggregate of what's working, what's not, and making sure that we have a very close and constant eye on overall performance so that we can clearly identify trends in positive things that we're seeing in platform and then negative things so that we can quickly pivot and adjust our programs to make the best use of our budget. Yeah, that's something too about the KPIs. LinkedIn is a good job of releasing new metrics.
And so it's really important to just keep an eye on those. And we, of course, can help you guide you in the right direction as well as these metrics come out. But there's two metrics that have come out in the last six to eight months that have been really great for us as Audience Penetration, which Olivia has mentioned. And then, of course, dwell time is a really good one for the brand awareness.
Just see how long people are actually staying on your ads. So all of these metrics, we're not going to go over to each every one of them today, of course. But it's really important to stay in touch with some of LinkedIn's new releases because there could be some metrics in there that's going to be a golden nugget for you all to use to show performance of your campaigns. Absolutely.
Great call about dwell time. That is probably my favorite metric to report on right now, especially when running campaigns optimized for reach because dwell time really allows us to figure out, okay, which ads are stopping the scroll, which ads are effectively catching someone's attention. And then we can dig in and figure out, okay, is it because we have a lot of text on this ad that's maybe way too small and they're having a hard time reading it, or does it stand out from everything else in feed? And this is a really fantastic creative insight that I like to pass along to my designers to say, you know, maybe this ad didn't get quite as many clicks, but we did see a high level of just scroll stopping behavior.
And the longer they spend on this ad, the longer we have to really effectively make a brand impression. And that's something that I'm really challenging the teams to design around because we do want to have that scroll stopping behavior. And then on the LinkedIn side, they're recommending that the ideal dwell time that we should be optimizing for a summer between, you know, 3.5 to 4 seconds, which feels like a very long time when you're just looking at overall dwell time. So I know that that's kind of a standard of performance that I'm always chasing after with my clients and it's something that I'm looking at over time as well to see how that changes as we release different iterations of ad variations into market.
Another fantastic source of data on the LinkedIn side is their revenue attribution reporting. This is a fantastic way to really tie this front end platform to your pipeline and help to make those conversations about the effectiveness of LinkedIn a little easier. It's no secret that LinkedIn is an expensive channel to advertise on. It's simply, it's just very, very expensive.
And that can be a cost that's very hard to justify for many, many people because it's hard to see exactly what that cost is doing. But it's important to remember that when we're thinking about LinkedIn, we're not just, you know, advertising, we're not paying for traffic, we're paying for precision. We're paying to get in front of those people who are the most relevant to our ICP. We are drilling down using all of those targeting criteria, both the native criteria list that we upload, third party integrations, a formographic research, and we're compiling all of this together to get in front of the best folks for a B2B audience.
That's why it's so expensive. You know, when we're comparing the CPMs and CPCs of LinkedIn compared with another platform, none of those other platforms have this level of specificity in terms of targeting. So it's not comparing apples to apples. It's really comparing, you know, apples to oranges.
I don't even know if I would consider it that to be the case. It's just drastically different. So when we're thinking about cost efficiency, it's really important for us to connect those high advertising costs with the impact that they have on our overall revenue, on our overall pipeline so that we can convince executive leadership, your board, your CMO, that this investment is worthwhile. And we're not just burning money on LinkedIn because we think it's the appropriate platform to reach your audience.
In order to get revenue attribution reporting set up, you will need to connect your CRM to LinkedIn and then you can drill in and update your attribution model and determine, you know, what do we want to classify as a touch? Whether that is every single impression we want to call a touch, every four impressions and further and so on. You can also look at just a period of anywhere from 365 to 7 days depending on how fast your sales cycle is. And this gives you a really, really solid view into what is working without having to add any other tools or integrations or things like that.
So I would highly recommend building out your revenue attribution report. You would do that through business manager. If you don't already have this set up, I would recommend reaching out to your LinkedIn reps. They can help you get this built out.
But I know that this report is something that I'm referring to on a weekly basis with my clients and helping them contextualize so that they can share this information upstream so that we can better contextualize overall as spent. Yep. And revenue attribution report also is a fairly new LinkedIn feature so they're continually improving it. So something just to keep an eye on if it's what you are utilizing to internally at your own companies.
All right, Libby, we're going to wrap it after the slide. I want to go to the next one with companies and then we'll let folks ask some questions for the last few minutes. Absolutely. Thanks for the time reminder.
I'm a bit of a talker. So I tend to ramble. But the last thing that you want to take advantage of is the company tab within LinkedIn. This is a really solid way to look at all of the specific companies that are engaging with your content over a set period of time.
You can see organic impressions and engagements. You can see paid impressions and engagements and then also look at an engagement level. And this will tell you, okay, how engaged is this audience compared to all of the other folks that we're getting in touch with? So this is a really helpful way to look at, you know, at least from an ABM perspective, who are we getting in front of and not just looking at it in terms of, well, this is the larger audience and here's our overall reach and here's our overall impressions.
This report breaks it down at the company level. This used to be something that you had to request directly from your LinkedIn reps and now it's available within the campaign manager platform. And it's night and day. I used to have to request this on a very regular basis to compare just overall performance and overall reach of our target accounts.
And now that's something that's more of a self-serve, which is a major improvement for using the platform. That it is. I use a daily. Especially making this question of who are we reaching?
Yes. Some great stuff here. I think there's a lot of good features that LinkedIn is rolling out. I think worse well to some degree because we do have a bit of a seat at the table and some of these discussions around reporting and how to think about the future of LinkedIn's reporting capabilities, so sitting in directly on measurement discussions.
So we always try to synthesize those, test them out, bring them forward with some sort of learnings or ideas. But oftentimes too, we are equally the guinea pigs in this. So we'll continue to be transparent about what we're learning, but also push back where sometimes there are features sometimes that are a little bit more fluff than value. And so that's something that we like to hold true to ourselves.
But there's a couple questions going around text ads that I actually wanted to touch on a little bit because I know it's a bit of an unconventional, at least an art playbook for how to use LinkedIn. David Kay, specifically, are running these now. It sounds like, right? I saw you and Tracy going back for it.
Yes, I am. And I'm just curious what your experience has been with them, but your thoughts about them. I love text ads. I love text ads.
I love spotlight ads. I think they're a fantastic, very low-cost way to get in front of your audience. And it's not a direct way of saying, hey, here I am. It's more of that periphery brand mention because it just in nature of the placement of these ads, it truly is in the periphery of your LinkedIn page.
It's on that sidebar. And you really are optimizing here for impressions. The majority of your engagements here, they're not going to click on these ads. But the way that I position it is that spotlight ads or text ads are a great way to have just a little reminder of, hey, don't forget about me.
And I've run them to cold audiences. I've run them to remarketing audiences. And you can be very direct with your messaging or you can be just as cheeky as you want. I've run one that's mostly just emojis and it covered it fairly well.
So I think that there's a lot of opportunity to continue to test with text ads and spotlight ads just because they're not as flashy as the image ads or a video ad doesn't mean they're not effective. And they can be a great supporting character in the overall just landscape of your LinkedIn, of the diversity of your LinkedIn advertising. I think you nailed it too. Let me talk about the low cost inventory.
David, I'd be curious what's your objective primarily that you're utilizing this for now. Now that I've been able to whittle down some of my clients message into the number of characters that you're allowed, right? I'm teasing them with something that I think that they want. And they're going like, what is this?
I don't mention the brand because unfortunately the brand names are too many letters in my client. They've got a cool logo and an offer, but rather an idea. They're like, I want that because it's rare. So I've had success.
And success is also because I'm bidding like way low. That's another thing that I'm kind of curious about what other people are doing. LinkedIn suggests $100 or whatever the suggested range is. And I'm like, the way I'm paying for that.
So I'm offering like 10% many times of what it's requesting and doing okay. I mean, one thing I have done is I tried that based on some input I think from the vault was to segregate those campaigns into their all those campaigns into their own campaign group just so that I can have different reporting because they have completely different metrics as far as numbers and click through rates and so forth. So they kind of contaminate overall reporting unless you kind of pull them out. And while I have an opportunity, do you do promoted posts?
What's your experience or guidance on doing better with promoted posts? I've run promoted posts. I think I haven't run them in a while to be very transparent with you. The reason I didn't love them historically is that you couldn't add you to tracking to them.
And it was very hard to just measure the impact of the promoted post. What I have done is you know, you run something on organic, you find that it's a really strong performer and then you build that exact same thing as an ad. And that allows you to use all of that kind of crowd sourced top performing insight, but you're then able to track it on a more nuanced level. So I think it's worth trying.
The biggest limitation is that lack of reporting. Well, I know it's Monday, which for a lot of us and some of us, it's a shorter week as we go into the holiday weekend here in the US. But again, we really enjoy these conversations. I think it's just a way for us to bring the community together and discuss these more.
So some of them are more engaging others. We're just kind of learning from each other. So always want you to bring questions, ideas. You have a future session that you'd like us to go over, feel free to email us, let us know.
We will be rolling us out again on our YouTube channel, this recording here in the next week or so. And then next month, we'll be also, we have a few playbooks in the work. So Facebook, Reddit, ABM, and we also just a little teaser that we're going to do kind of a micro show. I might be getting my hands up saying this.
But all around brand measurement and how we really think about brand measurement and that evolution. So kind of putting a stake in the ground on the core metrics that matters. So we'll let you know when we get closer to that. But it's going to be a busy few months for us and we're excited.
So with that said, Sierra, Libby, thank you both for walking us through there. Everybody that joined, we really appreciate you. We'll see you soon. Thanks, all.
Thank you.