What are the different ad objective types?
Brand Awareness
Website visit
Engagement
Video Views
Lead Generation
WEbsite conversion
Job applications
Funnel Concept - Stages of a prospect
If you haven't been in the b2b world for too long then you might not be familiar with some of the ever so popular funnel images that show the different states of a prospect.
It looks like this - Awareness is the top of the funnel.
Consideration is the middle of the funnel.
And then conversion is the bottom of the funnel.
The idea is that a buyer starts off having never heard of you before and knowing nothing about your company or offerings. So it makes sense that just hitting them over the head with “buy now” type ads wouldn’t be very high converting unless you have an ecomm product that is just impulse buy/transactional.
Typically you first have to just get on the prospect's radar with an awareness-type campaign as their first exposure to you.
Here the goal is just first impression - not conversion.
So our first LinkedIn paid ads objective is “awareness” Let's dive in.
Linkedin Lead Generation Ad
Here we go! The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Lead generation objective for Linkedin ads. Yes, this is the infamous Lead gen forms that you can run.
But let’s hurry up and wait on this one. That’s my expert opinion about lead generation forms. You want to really be careful about using them.
I’ll tell you why I don’t recommend starting with these, why you should be careful about using them, and where you should use them, and I’ll also tell you why other marketing agencies freaking love them and why they don't have your best interest in mind.
Ok so for starters and for those who don’t actually know what the Linkedin lead generation objective is, I’ll explain.
With this objective, you can only run lead generation ads which are the ads that try to capture prospects' information inside of Linkedin without sending them outside of the platform.
They will see one of your ads in their feed and click the call to action button.
Typically these are used with ebooks or some checklist or something downloadable.
They click - download and a form pops up and asks for basic information such as name, email, and company name.
Since Linkedin already has all of that information it just auto-populates for the prospect which allows them to just hit submit and for you to capture their info really easily.
This is the quickest and easiest way to generate “leads” from Linkedin ads. This is why most marketing agencies love using them because they can show leads sooner.
My issue with lead generation ads is that they produce really low-quality leads usually. 8-10 of these won’t be responsive when you try to follow up via email and if you are passing them off to the sales team, they will usually be very frustrated with them as they waste lots of time.
My advice is to not use these as cold ads but instead put them in the retargeting layer. Wait until they have at least visited your website first before using lead gen forms. This will improve the quality of the leads dramatically.
Listen to the full episode for all objective types!
#5 Linkedin Ad objectives and ad types
What are the different ad objective types?
Funnel Concept - Stages of a prospect
If you haven't been in the b2b world for too long then you might not be familiar with some of the ever so popular funnel images that show the different states of a prospect.
It looks like this - Awareness is the top of the funnel.
Consideration is the middle of the funnel.
And then conversion is the bottom of the funnel.
The idea is that a buyer starts off having never heard of you before and knowing nothing about your company or offerings. So it makes sense that just hitting them over the head with “buy now” type ads wouldn’t be very high converting unless you have an ecomm product that is just impulse buy/transactional.
Typically you first have to just get on the prospect's radar with an awareness-type campaign as their first exposure to you.
Here the goal is just first impression - not conversion.
So our first LinkedIn paid ads objective is “awareness” Let's dive in.
- Brand Awareness
I think I teed this one up well enough to explain but we can talk these through from a Linkedin ads perspective. The awareness objective here simply seeks exposure. This means that it will go after impressions vs clicks or conversions. You really just want your initial cold ads to show up on your prospects feed for now and are not too concerned with actions yet.
Website Visits
Website visit is under the consideration phase. During this phase, you are usually looking to give the prospect more information about your solution, who you are, and let them get to know you better.
Website visits as an objective just mean that our goal is to get them to click on your website or landing page. Again, not really looking to convert here yet.
It’s likely their first time visiting your website and even if they are in research/buying mode currently, they still have some legwork to do with looking at other options and also getting to know you better.
I think the most recent stat I saw is that it takes over 14 interactions with a brand on average before the prospect feels comfortable enough to reach out and talk or buy. So this just step one.
Don’t get yourself in the situation of having unrealistic expectations on initial website visits.
You’re website still has to do its job here as well.
Also, you and use this ad objective to drive traffic to a Linkedin event.
Engagement
Here is another one under the consideration phase of the funnel.
This type of Linkedin ad objective is good for building up..you guessed it..Linkedin engagement. This would involve likes/comments and company page follows.
Why would you want to use this type of objective?
Glad you asked. In addition to a paid ads strategy, many brands are looking to increase the following and engagement of their company page posts and community. You can help speed up this process by blending a paid ads approach with your organic efforts. Posting something to your company page and then boosting it from the paid ads campaign is a great way to merge the two sides.
A big reason this type of play works well is that it increases the effectiveness of your organic efforts.
Let’s say you have 100 company page followers - You can post content and market to this group for free. So it makes sense that increasing that number from 100 to 1000 would then increase the effectiveness of your organic efforts by 10x with the same cost/effort.
This is a big difference compared to paid ads where it’s pretty much the same transactional benefit for the same cost each month.
My pro tip? At least throw in a follower ad in your retargeting layer. Those that visit your company page or website would then get hit with a simple follower ad so that you can slowly grow you following and organic reach.
Video Views
Yes - this is pretty straightforward. If you run video ads for Linkeidn paid ads, you’ll want to use this objective to optimize for video views.
Now I will say this. You can actually run video ads under other ad objectives so it’s not just a given that you need to use this objective with Linkedin video ads.
With this objective, the goal is maximum exposure. Those who are most likely to stop and watch your video.
A few important notes here.
- You can retarget anyone who watches 25% or more of a Linkedin Video
- You can use website visit or conversion objectives with video ads as well.
Lead Generation
Here we go! The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Lead generation objective for Linkedin ads. Yes, this is the infamous Lead gen forms that you can run.
But let’s hurry up and wait on this one. That’s my expert opinion about lead generation forms. You want to really be careful about using them.
I’ll tell you why I don’t recommend starting with these, why you should be careful about using them, and where you should use them, and I’ll also tell you why other marketing agencies freaking love them and why they dont have your best interest in mind.
Ok so for starters and for those who don’t actually know what the Linkedin lead generation objective is, I’ll explain.
With this objective, you can only run lead generation ads which are the ads that try to capture prospects information inside of Linkedin without sending them outside of the platform.
They will see one of your ads in their feed and click the call to action button.
Typically these are used with ebooks or some checklist or something downloadable.
They click - download and a form pops up and asks for basic information such as name, email, and company name.
Since Linkedin already has all of that information it just auto-populates for the prospect which allows them to just hit submit and for you to capture their info really easily.
This is the quickest and easiest way to generate “leads” from Linkedin ads. This is why most marketing agencies love using them because they can show leads sooner.
My issue with lead generation ads is that they produce really low-quality leads usually. 8-10 of these won’t be responsive when you try to follow up via email and if you are passing them off to the sales team, they will usually be very frustrated with them as they waste losts of time.
My advice is to not use these as cold ads but instead put them in the retargeting layer. Wait until they have at least visited your website first before using lead gen forms. This will improve the quality of the leads dramatically.
Website Conversions
And here is the next big one most are chomping at the bit to get into. This is the website conversion objective.
This would be the objective to use if you are sending them to your website to convert and can track those actions/conversions as well.
Basic example of this would be sending them to your website with the goal of them filling out the “contact us” form and assuming you have the proper conversion tracking in place to see those conversions come through and know which campaign and ad they came from.
My advice here is that it’s usually best practice to wait till you have a decent amount of conversions already tracked and showing in your ads account before trying to make this the objective. Just like other ads channels, Linkedin actually needs data in order to know what conversions look like, what prospects, actions, and signals will lead to conversions.
Until you have a well-seasoned ads account, it’s best to just drive traffic to your website for now.
Job Applicants
Yes, for those who didn’t know - you can actually use Linkedin paid ads to drive job applicants. This objective will optimize and show to those most likely to apply for or be interested in a job posting.
There are a variety of ways you can use Linkedin ads to drive interest in job postings and stir up applicants but this is a good start.
Next, up we will talk about the different types of Linkedin ad formats you can run in a campaign.