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Hi! This is Moby.
Welcome to Hunting Leads.
Most LinkedIn ads campaigns waste 20-30% of their ad spend because of bad targeting.
I’m going to share how to not waste your money.
What you can expect today:
Why I give a damn about targeting
How to see who’s going to be seeing your ads
What to cut from your audiences BEFORE you run ads
What to cut from your audience AFTER you run ads
Happy saving money.
Enjoy!
P.S. I scale paid ads programs for companies spending $100,000+/year. If you know someone that I could help, consider forwarding them this newsletter?
I REALLY give a damn about this
I was consulting for an agency new to ads, and helping one of their clients get started with LinkedIn ads.
In call 1, I asked them questions about their ICP.
Then, I went back to build an audience within LinkedIn ads.
In call 2, I spent 45 mins going through it line-by-line to confirm what was right.
Later on, I was pulled aside and asked why I spent too much time with the client on their audience.
It made me speechless.
Spending time with the client to fine-tune a LinkedIn audience is not worth billable time?
LinkedIn is the most expensive ad platform, and we’re NOT going to have the client give feedback on the audience targeting?
If you don’t get your LinkedIn audience right before you run ads, you’re 100% going to lose money.
I have seen countless numbers of companies wasting their money on LinkedIn, and the first problem is almost always the audience targeting.
LinkedIn gives you extreme visibility into your audience before you turn on ads
First off, know this:
LinkedIn lets you choose exactly who you want to spend money to get in front of.
Let’s say I select people in hotels to target on LinkedIn. I can choose titles + industry.
Great! LinkedIn tells you there’s 70k in my target audience:
And now comes the fun part - DATA on more:
Who are the companies I'm targeting?
What are the most common job titles?
What is their job seniority?
I can see the top 100 companies in my audience
Boom. No more guessing what accounts I’ll be advertising to.
Here I can see the top companies I’ll be spending money to advertise to are Hilton, Marriot, Holiday Inn, etc.
I can see the top 100 job titles in my audience
I know how many GMs, Heads of Hospitality, Managers, etc, there are.
I can see the job seniorities of the people in my audience
Below, I can see that’s it’s mostly VPs & Managers.
Now, the job to refine my targeting
Cool. Now what?
This is where people stop, thinking: Oh yeah, that’s good enough.
NOPE.
We exclude irrelevant companies, job titles, seniorities, and company sizes.
Refinement Step 1: Exclude every company that isn’t your ICP
Linkedin gives you the top 100 companies you’re going to be in front of.
Go through ALL of them, and remove each and every one that you don’t want to advertise to.
There’s an Exclude option in the same Audience Manager.
You just type the company you don’t want to get in front of, and LinkedIn will exclude it.
In this example, it’s that damn mouse the Walt Disney Company:
Refinement Step 2: Remove irrelevant job titles from the first 3-5 pages
Now, let’s move on to job titles.
LinkedIn will share the first 100.
Do NOT exclude all of them - there’s always going to be bleed in job titles here.
Go through the first 30-50 (there’s 10 per page), exclude the ones you don’t want.
Step 3: Audit the other variables
For industries, just take a look.
No need to exclude any industries unless the first 1-2 are VERY wrong.
Company size affects a LOT.
The bigger the company, the more expensive the lead
The bigger the company, the slower the sales process
But - the bigger the company, the more money you make in a deal
I audit the size and remove ones that are not a good fit.
I don’t stress too much about functions.
If you’re using job titles, excluding irrelevant ones from the top 3 is enough.
You can also do this on LIVE ads
We’re not Bezos or Musk. We don’t have unlimited money to spend.
So let’s not waste our money.
We can refine our targeting even more, after ads go live.
LinkedIn tells you who is seeing your ads AFTER they’re live
After 5-10 days of spend, go to Professional Demographics.
You can see:
What job titles ARE seeing my ads?
What companies ARE seeing my ads?
What functions ARE seeing my ads?
What job seniorities ARE seeing my ads?
What I do:
I cut ALL irrelevant companies
I cut ALL irrelevant job titles
I study job seniority, company size to see if we need to adjust targeting
And that’s it. You’re now wasting less money.
Hell yeah.
Hope this helps
- Moby | Austin, TX
p.s. I add more context here: Get You Audience Targeting Right - Watch Video
