1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000 Having trouble pacing out your LinkedIn ads campaigns the whole month? You're not alone. We're talking about the best ways to pace your campaigns on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ads show. 2 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000 Welcome to the LinkedIn ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 3 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:03,000 Hey, hey there, LinkedIn ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn ads show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. You'd think that pacing would be super simple on LinkedIn ads, but that's definitely not the case. Whatever method of pacing you choose comes with a whole host of pros and cons. To make you the absolute LinkedIn ads experts, we're covering all of the pacing methods here this week. 4 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000 The LinkedIn ads show is proudly brought to you by B2LINKED.com. The LinkedIn ads experts. 5 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:05,000 That's right. B2LINKED is the ad agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been since 2014, you know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team. You won't get any sort of a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us. You work only with experts. Plus with all the strategies that we've developed over the years, plus our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients way more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads, schedule your free discovery call today at B2LINKED.com/discovery. If you've been listening to the last couple of episodes, you'll know I'm doing something new. I have a lot of swag shirts that I've been given at conferences and stuff. I thought it'd be fun to wear a new one for each episode of the podcast. This one is Libsyn. This happens to be our podcast host. And I love this shirt. If you can't see it on video, it just says hashtag podcaster. Every once in a while while I'm traveling, I'll have someone stop me and ask me about my podcast. Like, Oh, what podcast do you run? It's kind of fun. I like having a shirt saying that I'm a podcaster. All right. So if you want to send me your company's swag and I can talk about you on the show, DM me on LinkedIn, I'd be happy to make that happen. All right. Do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? You can message me on LinkedIn or email podcast@B2LINKED.com. If you want to attach a link to a voice recording from you, I can play it live right here on the show. I'm also happy to keep you anonymous or shout out your details. I want to feature you. All right. With that being said, let's hit it. I'm used to telling clients that budget pacing is near impossible to get perfect on LinkedIn. And I just take this for a given in our normal account management workflow. But after getting a couple of questions from you, LinkedIn ads fanatics out there recently, I wanted to cover it in more depth. Pacing out your budget should be really easy, right? You just give LinkedIn your daily budget and it keeps to it. Unfortunately, this is not how it works. If you set a daily budget and you're bidding by max delivery, most of the time that campaign, from my experience, will overspend your budget by 50% every day and it doesn't ever catch up. So you're stuck overspending your budget halfway through the month, unless you artificially lower your daily budgets by 50%. So the overspend actually spends what you want. But of course, if you do that, you're still stuck using LinkedIn's max delivery bidding, which I've mentioned many times on the podcast is probably the reason that you're paying two to four times what you actually should be for your clicks. Then if you're bidding manually, good job, pat yourself on the back. You can still overspend your budget by 50% every day. But if you are, that just tells you that you're bidding too aggressively. And you can simply lower your bid to spend closer to what you actually want to. This is what we do. This is the method I prefer, but it's still not exact. You don't know whether you're going to slightly overspend or slightly underspend, and you have to watch it every day, especially towards the end of a month. But I can hear you saying right now, but AJ, there's a lifetime budget and an end date feature on a campaign. Why don't you just use that? Yes. In the campaign, you can give it a lifetime budget. And as soon as it spends that amount, it shuts off and you're safe. But I can confirm this is actually problematic for a couple of reasons. When the campaign shuts off, it goes into completed status, which takes manual intervention to get it back up and active. And if you happen to miss the fact that it's shut off and like us, your managing on an ongoing monthly budget, you might go hours or even days without noticing that one of your campaigns is off and then trying to catch up with the monthly spend that you should be on can lead to inefficient spending. I wish it were as easy as just unpause the campaign and let it go, but no, you have to edit the campaign, put in a new total budget and relaunch the campaign. It's really not great for evergreen spending. And then you get the same challenge with putting an end date on the campaign. When it goes down, it stays down until you catch it and you go manually intervene to start it for another month. This can be super annoying, especially if you're managing an account budget every month and even if having a total budget on your campaign keeps you from overspending your total budget, it does its job and it saves you, right? Yes, but you're still going to have to have a hard conversation with your boss or your client about how you blew the whole month's budget early and why the account is going to be dark for the next days or weeks. It's not worth leaving it up to LinkedIn. It would be great if there were tools that could help you with budgeting and don't worry, there are, there are several new budgeting tools that have been popping up and I will for sure talk about them in future episodes. But the one tool that has made budgeting so much easier for us over the last six years that we use is called shape.io. If you haven't heard of it, check out episode 55 of the show and we even have a coupon code for you down in the show notes. I don't remember how much it saves, but I think it saves something. So try it out. If you want to go check out shape shape is budget monitoring and even budget adjustment software specifically for all of your ad platforms and it does have a direct integration with LinkedIn. There's lots of different options. One of those options will allow you to automatically pause an account once it's hit its monthly budget, and then it will automatically unpause at the beginning of the next month. This is the best insurance policy I've ever had against overspending a client's budget. There's also an option to automatically add new campaigns to the budget that you're tracking, which is great because if you're only tracking the spend on some campaigns and then you go and create a new one, you have to remember to go add that one to the rule. Otherwise you start overspending because your campaigns were not included in the rule. There's also a pacing option where shape can change your daily budgets for you, but we actually don't use that since we still adjust our bidding manually since I've actually found that to result in the best cost performance. So check that one out. I'm extremely pleased with shape. Now there's another pitfall that I see advertisers falling into when they're bidding manually and that's leaving the box checked. That's called enable bid adjustment for high value clicks. It sounds totally fine in theory. If you're going to miss showing your ad to someone really valuable who is ready to take action. Yes. Allow it to exceed your bid to show up anyway. Sounds fine in practice though, by leaving it checked, we routinely see daily budgets being overspent and costs per click increasing by 40%. 6 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:06,000 And of course this option is checked by default. This is a LinkedIn standard. What it's actually doing is it's letting LinkedIn bid above your bid by 45%. So I do the quick math here in my head, check me if I'm wrong, but to have your CPCs rise by 40% when it's bidding 45% above your bid. I think that means that LinkedIn thinks that 90% of your clicks are high value and you should be bidding so much higher. That's pretty crazy. I would absolutely suggest unchecking that box in every case. If you're not spending what you actually want to each day, you'll just increase your bids manually. Don't leave that up to LinkedIn since you won't be happy with the costs. Then there's another budgeting option that I think is totally worthless and you'll want to avoid and that's called campaign group budget optimization. Again, this concept sounds really helpful. Let LinkedIn adjust your budgets for you so that you can hit your budget and that budget gets routed to the campaigns that are already performing the best in practice, though, the only way that LinkedIn can tell which campaigns are performing better than others is if all the campaigns share the same objective. Yikes. So you set a daily budget for an inflexible group of campaigns and you're forced to use the same objective. We'll have a future episode about which objectives should be used in which case, but suffice it to say it is very rare when I'm running multiple ad types using the same objective. So of course, if I were using this option, I would have to have multiple campaign groups so that I can run multiple objectives, which just creates a giant mess and really makes the whole budget optimization piece not worthwhile. So let me save you the trouble. When you go to create your campaign group, just deselect the option to select an objective for the group. It absolutely boggles my mind that the default option during the creation is to bind every campaign in your group to a single objective. When you get your bidding and budgeting right, you are bidding just high enough to spend what you want to every day. And notice, I didn't say your daily budget. To learn more about bidding, check out our most popular episode of the podcast. That's episode 89 all about bidding and budgeting. And yes, it sounds like a lot of manual intervention and babysitting to be doing all of this budget optimization manually. But after you've done it for your campaign for a month or two, it becomes predictable and from then on, you'll only need tiny adjustments, maybe slightly bigger ones if you launch a new set of ads or new offers in those campaigns. We're in our clients ad accounts all day, every day. So we watch budgets closely. So it's really easy for us to say this, but definitely feel free to use options like total campaign budget and end dates. If you need them, I've just found that they tend to overcomplicate things for us. All right. If you are a LinkedIn ads fanatic, you need to be a member of our LinkedIn ads fanatics community for one low monthly price. You get access to all four courses that are meant to take you from absolute LinkedIn ads beginner to total expert. Plus you get access to all of the top minds and LinkedIn ads. And there's even an upgrade option to get on a weekly group call with me, where I can give you direct feedback on your campaigns, check that out at fanatics. B two linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button so you can hear us again next week. And if you are not a new listener, thank you for coming back and being so loyal. Please consider doing me the great honor of going to Apple podcasts and leaving a review for the show with any questions, suggestions, or even corrections, reach out to us at podcast at B two linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiative.