When it comes to paid advertising options for B2B, LinkedIn Ads is frequently the first that comes to mind. The platform offers a unique opportunity to capture prospects while they are in “work mode” instead of running the risk of interrupting their personal time. As a result, the platform often performs better when it comes to KPIs like click-through rate and cost per lead.
This guide fully breaks down the key LinkedIn Ads offerings for B2B companies, what kind of content performs best on the platform and how much you can expect to pay.
It’s also very easy to drain a tremendous amount of budget on poorly-executed LinkedIn Ads campaigns. I’ll be telling you the key pitfalls your business should avoid if you want to maximise that tasty ROI.
Overall, I’ll be answering the question “Is LinkedIn Ads worth it?” - so read on if you are a CMO, marketing, commercial or programme director looking to weigh up the pros and cons of the platform…
It’s a long one, so here are some chapters:
Get an overview of the key paid advertising options on channels like LinkedIn Ads and Google. Includes average costs, KPIs plus an example LinkedIn Ads campaign. Download Now.
There are a wealth of advertising options available to businesses today including Google search ads, Facebook ads and inventory from online publishers in your niche. So what makes LinkedIn Ads so special?
There are a couple of clear USPs, especially in the context of B2B advertising:
Of course the impact of these USPs on your results will vary depending on the type of campaign you choose. Let’s breakdown three formats that your business could leverage to generate touchpoints, leads and engagement with prospects during different stages of the buying journey.
LinkedIn Ads’ inventory has increased somewhat since the platform was launched in 2005. Below are some available campaign types I think work particularly well for industries like SaaS and technology, although of course they can be applied to most sectors.
1st party data is becoming increasingly important, especially with the tightening of GDPR legislation and Google’s proposed sunsetting of 3rd party cookies. So for B2B organisations acquiring this data through an interface that allows you to display GDPR text and link to a privacy policy is a plus. Add to this pre-populated fields and the ability to convert without leaving the LinkedIn platform - this is Lead Generation Forms.
Creating the form itself couldn’t be easier and as well as core LinkedIn data like email, company name, job title etc, you can use custom fields to ask pertinent questions that will help score the lead. You can also use hidden fields to capture any tracking information and custom checkboxes to collect contact consent. Once you’re happy, you simply save the form and it will be ready to use in an ad campaign of your choosing.
💡Top tip
You cannot edit fields, custom questions, checkboxes etc once you have saved the form. So triple check you are happy with these. The form headline, details and privacy policy text can be edited later on.
Lead Generation forms are compatible with the following ad formats.
Message ads were discontinued in May 2023 and conversation ads (also known as Sponsored Messages) have been discontinued in the EU.
However, LinkedIn added a new ad format in late 2022 which businesses can leverage for a variety of purposes, including displaying a multi-page preview of a resource or measuring engagement metrics with an audience further on in the buying journey.
Although technically an ad format rather than a campaign type, the robust reporting available for tracking engagement makes document ads a real asset to your digital advertising strategy.
By going to your campaign manager dashboard and selecting “Documents” from the columns menu, you get access to your bog-standard KPIs (impressions, clicks, CTR etc) PLUS the following more granular metrics:
Note that here “Viral” simply means these results were acquired from a user sharing your document ad with their network and “Displays” are the percentage of preview pages the user viewed. “Completions” means the user viewed 100% of your preview-able pages.
These reporting metrics means document ads have a number of possible applications:
💡Top tip
Ensure that your targeting is finely tuned for brand awareness campaigns and utilise the exclusion filters to explicitly sift out any anti-personas. You can easily waste a lot of budget broadcasting your thought-leadership piece to the wrong users.
So yes, all in all, I am a fan of document ads.
When it comes to retargeting prospects or site users, it’s no secret that video is one of the most powerful formats of choice. And the good news is that LinkedIn has a number of ways you can add video touchpoints to the buying journey.
What type of video content you retarget users with really depends on your objectives and their stage in the buying journey. Testimonial videos are a firm favourite among SaaS businesses but may be too much for someone who has only visited your website once or twice. The previously accepted statistic of 7 marketing touchpoints before a B2B purchase is highly debatable, especially for businesses with a high average order value. So think carefully about the action you really want your prospects to take next based on where they are psychologically at that exact moment.
Above: Testimonial videos don’t have to be fancy - this one from Chili Piper keeps production values simple and focuses on results.
As stated above this depends on your objective and your audiences but in theory a wide variety of content types could be leveraged with LinkedIn ads.
Here are some examples with the targeting and ad formats you might use (but please note this isn’t a rulebook):
Okay, I’ll get to the point.
LinkedIn Ads are expensive.
In fact, putting any less than $500 behind a campaign will stop you from getting the best out of LinkedIn Ads. I know this because LinkedIn told me themselves at the B2B Marketing Expo a few years ago. They also gave me a free $400 voucher to prove it (and I love a freebie - what a good day that was).
The platform seems especially pricey in comparison to other paid advertising platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads or newcomers such as Reddit Ads.
Here are some averages I took from this excellent summary of LinkedIn Ads by The B2B House.
💡Top tip
Remember that these will vary based on your industry, your location and your audience. According to Itelus, the average CTR globally is between 0.39% and 0.65%.
The global CPC for LinkedIn Ads is thought to be $5.58 USD, although this varies depending on demographics like job function. The cost of a click from someone in IT averages at $7.90, whereas a click from someone working in education averages at $5.00.
This is what CMOs and commercial directors are most interested in and I’m sorry to say it varies wildly - between $15 to $350.
And again, this depends on a variety of factors. Back to our job function examples, the average CPA of a contact in IT sits at around $125 and at $64 for a contact in Education.
Don’t be dismayed by the averages above. With good targeting practices it’s easy to achieve a high percentage of leads that closely match your ideal customer persona(s).
That said, it’s also very easy to waste money on LinkedIn Ads. I mean A LOT of money.
Here’s some pitfalls to avoid.
These are easily rectified, but if your business is using LinkedIn Ads for the first time it might be best to hire a digital marketing professional to advise you.
“We want the contact to buy our product/service” is not an adequate objective. In the B2B sector, where price points are often far higher than B2C and have a long approval chain, it is simply not realistic to think that someone will go from browsing their LinkedIn feed to purchasing your product, or even requesting a demo, with only an ad to bridge the gap.
Given the target audience and where they’re at in the buying journey - what exact action do you ideally want them to take at this point? Based on this, what metrics should you closely examine during your campaign?
For example, for a document ads campaign showcasing a buying guide targeted at MOFU contacts, an appropriate objective might be “I would like my prospect to browse at least 60% of the guide, and maybe search for our company on Google”.
In this scenario, you should also be closely tracking brand search data on Google Search Console and organic traffic data on Google Analytics, as well as the engagement tracking for the ad campaign on LinkedIn.
A lack of clear objectives also leads to poor decisions on call-to-actions. A generic ad with a link to your website homepage is a great way to waste tremendous amounts of budget and generate no meaningful results.
Remember that your target audience is most likely browsing their feed on LinkedIn, and that engaging with your ad is an interruption to their day. Remove the friction and tell them exactly what they should do next, don’t leave them guessing.
LinkedIn’s targeting capability is without doubt its standout feature, so don’t throw your budget down the toilet by not utilizing this to its full capacity.
Before your campaign:
When setting up your campaign:
During your campaign:
With all the resources available regarding best practice for LinkedIn Ads, there’s no excuse for poorly-optimised ad text or generic images.
As a vague guide, your ad text should tell your prospect three things:
Less is more. Say what you need to concisely. LinkedIn recommends ad headlines of no longer than 150 characters. For reference, this paragraph is 150.
You should experiment with at least 4 ad variations per campaign. As a bare minimum for single image ads, I usually like to have two different versions of the copy and two different images to test.
Get some advice on best practices from the below sources:
Given its high average price point, you might think that the LinkedIn platform has no disadvantages.
Unfortunately there are a couple of things that you should be aware of.
A large number of people register on LinkedIn with their personal email. Although the narrative on personal emails being less valuable than their business counterparts is changing, there are still a couple of reasons why this is a sticking point.
That said, personal email addresses are not all bad. In the post-COVID era the line between work and home has been increasingly blurred. Additionally, the second a contact leaves a company their business email address becomes redundant. You can continue to nurture them through personal email even when they are between jobs or at their next role.
💡Top tip
Linkedin lead generation forms has two email field options - “Email” and “Work Email”. If you really want to acquire business emails, you can use the latter option. The “Work Email” field will populate automatically if it detects the user’s registered email is a business address, but the user will have to fill this in manually if they are registered with a personal email. This change will affect your conversion rates and lead quality, so run a test first!
Unlike email, phone number is not a required field when you sign up to LinkedIn - so users will have to enter this manually on lead generation forms. If you make this a compulsory field, your form completion rate will be lower than if all field data was auto-populated.
The minimum audience size on LinkedIn Ads is 300 users. Although this is easily achievable with the demographic targeting options, it can be difficult when uploading a list of contacts to be targeted. Match rates can vary, so you may want to upload a list much larger than 300 contacts to ensure it qualifies for targeting.
The targeting options available, as well as being the largest business social network in the world, makes LinkedIn a good choice for businesses looking to acquire new high-quality leads, nurturing existing prospects and create touchpoints with BOFU-stage prospects.
However, it’s absolutely critical that the objective, content and targeting for the campaign is clear-cut. Blindly throwing money at this platform will be an extremely costly mistake.
If you are a business looking for high-growth, LinkedIn ads can provide amazing results for you. But it’s wise to consult an expert who can advise you on the best way to maximise the budget you have.
With a decade of experience in running LinkedIn Ad campaigns in a variety of industries, I might be the right person to help you. Book a free consultation and let’s see how we can work together to grow your pipeline fast.