What you need to know before sinking money into Linkedin or YouTube Ads
It has been 10 weeks since I started the Growth Marketing mini degree on CXL and if I’m being honest, it’s was pretty darn hard this last week. Gone was my initial excitement of taking courses created by the top 1% of marketers around the world; I was racing for time. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely thankful to be going through this program and I regret nothing. It has just been A LOT of information especially this week. I processed a lot of information some of which I didn’t quite grab *cough* technical SEO *cough* why in the world is my brain not absorbing this.
This is what happens when you’re brain flatlines.
In my articles, I usually focus on one topic every week and break it down in detail but this time I’ll give a brief overview of 2 topics:
Linkedin Ads and Youtube Ads
Linked Ads
Linkedin is great for doing lead generation for B2B products/services with a lifetime value of over $15,000 because the cost of doing ads is quite high so the numbers have to make sense if you are to use this channel. The elements of a successful campaign boil down to who is seeing your ads (audience), how people are seeing your ads (message), and the value being exchanged (offer).
Pros of this channel:
- Up to date profiles: Users tend to keep their profiles up to date especially as it regards jobs changes. This helps because advertisers are not spending money to target someone who is in a totally different industry or job role. They are targeting users based on current information which helps make the ads more relevant in that context.
- Linkedin allows for robust targeting with no gatekeepers allowing the platform be more personal. The CEO of a million-dollar startup is in more cases than not, the one in charge of his Linkedin account so you don’t have to cozy up to the personal assistant to reach him.
- Larger deal sizes: You tend to bring in big deals when advertising on Linkedin as you’re able to get an in to large corporations.
- Business mentality: People come on Linkedin with a business-oriented mindset. This helps you know to push ads that either augment their career or their job because they’ll be most likely to listen to you as these are the things that are top of mind for them when they are on the platform.
Cons of this channel:
- Cost of advertising: Linkedin ads are expensive with an average of $6–9 per click.
- No device-level bidding: This platform does not allow you to funnel or target your clicks to a specific device type i.e mobile or desktop, unlike other platforms.
- Relevancy Score: Facebook and Google both have relevancy scores that let you know how well your ad is being received by your target audience. In this case, there is no such thing and you can only make assumptions.
Ad Types:
- Text ads: These were the first Linkedin Ads that were created and came out back in about 2007. It appears on the right rail and is for desktop only. Because the image size is 50x50px, it’s recommended you use faces as those work best. Alternatively, you can use the company logo. It has a click-through rate of 0.03% with a CPC that is lower than the other ad types. Text ads are the cheapest way to get traffic on Linkedin.
- Sponsored Content: These appear on the newsfeed and allow for a generous image size of 1200x627px. They have a much better click-through rate than text ads at roughly 0.4%. It is also mostly seen by 70% mobile users and you really don’t have any control over that.
- Sponsored InMail: This is the newest ad type and it’s also the most expensive one. The good thing is you’re able to get roughly 50% open rate and there is a 45 day frequency cap. This means that you own their inbox for the duration of this time and no new InMail can come in. They have to be sent from a user’s profile usually an employee. To get the best from his ad type, you want to use InMails for employment offers or inviting someone to a free event. The way the cost works is you pay at a cost per send between $0.35–0.85.
Youtube Ads (what you need to know in 1 minute)
This is a platform with incredible potential. On a daily basis, about 1.3 billion users visit the platform with sessions lasting approximately 40mins. There are 3 main reasons people visit Youtube:
- To Know: they are looking to learn or understand something.
- To Do: they are going through tutorial style videos so they can do it.
- To Buy: they are looking through reviews to make a purchasing decision.
You want to advertise to them based off their intent listed above. With YouTube, you can advertise to the user by creating a discovery ad that usually appears on the right-hand side of the video you are watching or through an in-stream ad which usually appears when you’re about to watch a video.
For in-stream ads, you only pay for engagement. You pay either when the viewer watches for more than 30 secs, clicks on the link to your website or when they reach the end of the video if it is less than 30 secs.
You don’t want people watching past 30 secs and not converting as you’ll be spending money. You want to get rid of these people early on in the video so they don’t watch up to 30 secs and cost you money. You do this by being really clear about who your ad is for at the start of the video so does who are not the right fit can skip the ad.
To get the best results on Youtube you want to take a numbers approach. By having an understanding of the key numbers that drive your ads, you know how to influence them to get better results.
Your cost per lead is (view rate * cost per view) / (click-through rate * website conversion rate)
To keep your cost low, you want to make sure the CTR and website conversion are high while the view rate and cost per view remain low. The 2 things you can influence are the view rate and click-through rate. You should aim for a 2% CTR, but anything above 0.8% is workable.
Your view rate is the percentage of people that are watching your video past 30 secs because this when you get charged. You want to make sure that those watching past 30 secs find your ad relevant and are willing to convert. If they skip the video before 30 secs elapses, it won’t cost you anything.
Structuring your YouTube ad to lower your view rate:
- You should aim to create video ads that last for about 90 secs because they tend to get the lowest view rate. For 40 secs videos, users are willing to invest more time and watch.
- 20–25% is a sweet spot for a view rate and anything below 15% can lead to poor results.
- At the start of the video, you want to call out the demographics, their intent, and also state who the video is for. This gets the right audience to watch your ads and take the action.
Ways to Increase CTR
- Add countdown timers: adds a bit of subtle scarcity to the viewer and make sure the CTA is clear.
- Telling viewers to get ready to click right before the CTA comes up along with the countdown timer also increases your CTR.
- Split test main sections of your script formula: For example, when creating the intro for the script, create up to 3 variations and test them out to find the best combinations to put together and create your ad. You can do this for the other sections as well.
I hope this was helpful to some degree.
