This is another common question as people tend to be a bit anxious to start getting leads and closing deals as soon as possible.
I’ll level with you a bit here. If you aren’t aware of this yet, I'll be the bearer of somewhat bad news. Marketing is a long-term play that builds momentum over time and is not as quick and transactional as you might hope it to be in the beginning.
By that, I mean that any new channel has its growing pains, optimization time, and momentum-building time periods.
So what exactly does that look like for LinkedIn paid ads? Depends. This depends on if you are running other channels, what your budget is, and also how long your normal sales cycle is.
Not quite the answer you expected? I know and I’m sorry. I really wish I could give you some guru advice of averages that gave you a warm fuzzy feeling that you could know leads and revenue would just start dropping in after the 35-day mark but that’s just not how it works all the time.
So here are the most common scenarios I see and how they play out.
Linkedin ads in a silo -No other channels
This is the toughest situation to be in terms of probably having to really set realistic expectations. Carving out your first paid ads channel is no joke and takes some time and consistency but here is how it works.
- First 30 days you’ll be putting cold ads in front of your target audience and trying to drive down the cost per click while you build up the retargeting audience. Don't expect many if any conversions in the first 30 days.
Depending on your budget, you could expect to get into retargeting phase after the 30-45 day mark which is when you start seeing your first signs of actual life.
During the initial retargeting phase the audience size is small and a $10/day budget for the retargeting side is enough to dominate their feeds. You’ll notice cost per click drop dramatically from cold to retargeting.
As the retargeting audience grows from 300 up to 2,000 or so, the $10/day is usually still enough and you should really start to see leads/conversions start dropping in.
At this point, you’ve had the time and data to really optimize your cold campaign and maybe boiled it down to the top 2 ads and hopefully even gotten some likes/comments on your ads which helps further drive down the cost per click.
There are also all sorts of retargeting strategies and layers that can come into play at this point to really move the needle and improve conversion rates but we can get into that on a later episode with advanced retargeting. For now, just know it might take 3-4 months to carve out a profitable ROI on Linkedin ads if it’s your first paid ads channel or you run it in a sllo.
Listen to full episode for the rest of info...
How long does it take to start seeing leads/results?
This is another common question as people tend to be a bit anxious to start getting leads and closing deals as soon as possible.
I’ll level with you a bit here. If you aren’t aware of this yet, I'll be the bearer of somewhat bad news. Marketing is a long-term play that builds momentum over time and is not as quick and transactional as you might hope it to be in the beginning.
By that I mean that any new channel has its growing pains, optimization time, and momentum building time periods.
So what exactly does that look like for LinkedIn paid ads? Depends. This depends on if you are running other channels, what your budget is, and also how long your normal sales cycle is.
Not quite the answer you expected? I know and I’m sorry. I really wish I could give you some guru advice of averages that gave you a warm fuzzy feeling that you could know leads and revenue would just start dropping in after the 35-day mark but that’s just not how it works all the time.
So here are the most common scenarios I see and how they play out.
Linkedin ads in a silo -No other channels
This is the toughest situation to be in terms of probably having to really set realistic expectations. Carving out your first paid ads channel is no joke and takes some time and consistency but here is how it works.
- First 30 days you’ll be putting cold ads in front of your target audience and trying to drive down the cost per click while you build up the retargeting audience. Don't expect many if any conversions in the first 30 days.
Depending on your budget, you could expect to get into retargeting phase after the 30-45 day mark which is when you start seeing your first signs of actual life.
During the initial retargeting phase the audience size is small and a $10/day budget for the retargeting side is enough to dominate their feeds. You’ll notice cost per click drop dramatically from cold to retargeting.
As the retargeting audience grows from 300 up to 2,000 or so, the $10/day is usually still enough and you should really start to see leads/conversions start dropping in.
At this point, you’ve had the time and data to really optimize your cold campaign and maybe boiled it down to the top 2 ads and hopefully even gotten some likes/comments on your ads which helps further drive down the cost per click.
There are also all sorts of retargeting strategies and layers that can come into play at this point to really move the needle and improve conversion rates but we can get into that on a later episode with advanced retargeting. For now, just know it might take 3-4 months to carve out a profitable ROI on Linkedin ads if it’s your first paid ads channel or you run it in a sllo.
Small google ads campaign going, some basic Facebook retargeting, or some ok organic traffic already
This is a slightly better situation than the first one as we can piggyback a bit off our other channels traffic and get into retargeting a bit faster.
When you have traffic from other channels to leverage we can set up a website visitor audience that fills up even faster and almost guarantees that we get into retargeting after the initial 30 day period.
You also likely have a better idea of the images/copy and even targeting that your offer resonates with which is all great info that helps improve our chances at seeing conversions sooner.
With this scenario, I’d estimate seeing traction on conversions happening between 2-3 months.
I’d actually recommend if this is your situation that you get the Linkedin insights tag installed onto your website as soon as possible and get your custom audiences set up asap so that they can just be collecting info on your website visitors.
You could actually just leave that collecting for a few months before you actually start running Linkedin ads. This way you could actually just start with Linkedin retargeting vs trying to go through the headache of carving it out as a stand-alone channel.
Strong Google or Facebook channel already established and/or really solid organic traffic and established website.
Here is obviously my favorite scenario to run into. The client is running 10k/month on Google ads, 3-4k on Facebook and they just haven't had the chance to add Linkedin to the mix but know they should.
If this is you...then just stop your procrastination and get Linkedin ads going today..you can’t lose.
Here is what that would look like.
You’d get the Linkedin insights tag installed and your custom audiences created and maybe $3,000/month Linkedin ads budget for month 1.
You won’t see a ton of action yet but your retargeting audience will fill up super fast and you’ll start month 2 off with 600+ in your audience. You’ll see your first leads/conversion in month 2 and those numbers will double into month 3.
You’d want someone who knows the advanced strategies because I’d actually advise you to segment your google ads traffic separated out from the rest of your website traffic and then another segment of all paid ads traffic as well.
With that level of traffic, there is so much you can do to segment and isolate different streams of traffic and get more retargeting layers in play as well.
You’ll really have the full arsenal of Linkedin tactics at your disposal and the 90-day outlook will really make you smile.
Hopefully, that shed some light on the subject. If you guys are following along with these, you’ll really start to see a pattern not just about Linkedin ads but marketing in general and the overall mindset and strategy that plays out long-term.