LinkedIn ads are becoming more and more popular and setting up a campaign can be hard to understand. You may end up spending far more than you expected to try and get some kind of return on investment and be left at the end of it all with nothing to show for it. Here are a few ways you can optimize your spending on LinkedIn ads.

Click Through Rate

This is one of the most important metrics for any ad campaign. You want the ad you built, curated, tested, and implemented to grab your user’s attention and engage them with your product or service offering. Taking the time from the start to create unique and engaging ads to stand out from the crowd will improve your positioning in the feed and lower your cost-per-conversion. The contrary can also take place should you have poor ads running. You can shape both a picture and a description to execute the messaging you are looking to convey.

Keep Your Bids Low

Constantly monitoring and tweaking your campaigns can keep money from bleeding out of the bottom of the strategy. While LinkedIn provides a range and suggested budgets, you can set your bid to the lowest possible to see how they perform in the limited traffic they receive. You can then audit the return numbers on the day to determine cost-effectiveness and continue iterating through your strategy.

Create Your Audience with Intention

Intentionally creating your audience size and groups within can help your ads perform much better. If you have over targeted, you run the risk of limiting your campaign too much, in turn leaving money on the table and lowering your click-through rate. Lower click-through rates directly correlate to an increased cost per click in the LinkedIn system. Your audience should sit at about 50k or more, depending on who you’re trying to reach. Building out audience groups can be just as important. Grouping specific ads into their own campaigns gives you more detailed data to work off of into the future. For instance, instead of having a “products” campaign for a fly fishing company, it would make sense to have several campaigns including “rods”, “reels”, and “waders” groupings. This lets you see which campaigns are performing better than others.

Have an Enticing Offer

Your offer in the ad is the item that captures their information or interest in some way. Building a story for your viewers to follow in the short amount of information in front of them can increase your click-through rate and lower your cost per click. Supporting information is important content, but the key is to get them to commit to your offer or at least capture their information. Gating your content behind an email submission form can ensure you are getting some type of return for most of the clicks you receive.

LinkedIn can be highly beneficial for lead generation as most of your audience members will be in a business mindset as they browse through their feeds. We are proud of the PPC campaigns we have built. Contact us today if you’d like to start the discussion.

Developing paid advertisements can start off looking like a foreign language and end up looking like your college English class; you feel like you should understand the subject but just can’t get the grades in. There was a point where it was all gibberish to us as well. Through the years we have taken the time to understand which paid ads work and what doesn’t in the outdoor industry. Here are 3 reasons your paid advertisements may not be seeing the success you expected.

Content

Content may not seem like a high ticket item for you on a paid ad campaign. Your landing page has very little words and is “designed to convert” and your ad copy is only a few words total. Surely that can’t be the problem, right? Well, actually, quite the opposite. Content can be the lifeblood of a proper campaign or the downfall of an underproductive one.

Clickability has to be a 21st century word if we’ve ever read one, but it means a lot to your paid media strategy and shouldn’t be treated as industry jargon. Creating clickable ads is what leads to success overall, but what does clickability really mean? Clickability is the desire as a user to click on your ad and learn a little more about what you’re selling.

This all falls down to the content that the user is displayed. And the engagement they may have with it. The first step we usually carry out is a general look at what other market movers are doing. Who has the top of page bid? How are their ads setup? Do we need to make adjustments so that it fits our strategy? These are questions you will soon answer as you progress through the campaign configuration and beyond.

Paid ad content aren’t just about the words. There are various types of ad content such as video ads or display ads for retargeting. Each type of ad has its own set of customizable features and potential headaches. Finding the right partner to build a productive strategy for paid ads keeps your brand and business in front of eyes and on the minds of your potential users.

Targeting

Targeting the right people is the bread and butter of a productive paid media campaign. If you can drill down the types of customers based on buyer personas your paid ads will see success. There are many options when it comes to refining your target audience:

• Demographics
• Keywords
• Content
• Placement
• Intent
• Similar Audiences
• Retargeting

However, each of the options above comes with it’s own unique problems. Establishing proper targets can be tricky. You don’t want to be too refined in your targeting because you’ll alienate a large population of your customers. But at the same time you don’t want to be too broad either. This balance requires constant monitoring and measurement to ensure the proper strategy is deployed.

Budget & Bidding

Budgeting the right amount and more importantly bidding the right amount can be the determining factor in the success of your paid media campaign. If you are not bidding optimally, you could be throwing money down the drain. Handing valuable leads over to your competition who has an automated custom bidding & budget strategy.

Once your content and targeting is honed in, it is time to put some focus on optimizing your campaign(s). Things like campaign budget, CPC vs. conversion bids and ad quality score are important metrics to track. We sometimes factor in time of day, day of the week, and part of the month into our bidding strategies too.

Therefore, taking a hard look at tweaking, testing, and retesting some settings in your bidding strategy, whether it be Google, Facebook or Instagram can help you see success much more quickly. If you are stepping back to take a look at lacking performance, it may be time to switch to a manual route and drill down exactly what you are looking for. Such as acquisition costs and customer lifetime value.

If you are paying $300 for 300 clicks but they are not turning into customers, I’m sure you would be much more willing to pay $300 for 20 clicks that ALL turned into customers.

As you can see, there is a considerable amount that goes into a paid media campaign and we’ve only covered the top 3! Pair this list with our guide to creating an effective call to action, and you’ve got yourself a fine-tuned paid media campaign.