LinkedIn Conversation Ads | When to Use Sponsored Messaging | The LinkedIn Ads Show - Ep145

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Show Notes Summary:

Key Takeaways:

1. Introduction to Conversation Ads:

• Conversation Ads are part of LinkedIn's Sponsored Messaging ad formats.
• They are distinct from other ad formats because they appear in the LinkedIn messaging inbox rather than in the newsfeed, making them feel more personal and direct..

2. Cost and Performance Considerations:

• Conversation Ads are pay-per-send, which can make them more expensive, especially for cold audiences.
• They tend to perform better with retargeting campaigns, where the audience is already familiar with the brand.

3. Use Cases for Conversation Ads:

• Ideal for personalized invitations, event meet-ups, or exclusive offers.
• Successful in scenarios like inviting event attendees to meetups or offering demos in exchange for gift cards.

4. Challenges and Limitations:

• Building Conversation Ads can be cumbersome due to the need for multiple text options and flowchart designs.
• There are limitations in targeting, such as the inability to use these ads in the EU due to GDPR restrictions.

5. New Features and Metrics:

• LinkedIn introduced a new metric called "audience penetration," which measures how much of your target audience you’re reaching with your ads.
• The frequency cap for Conversation Ads has become more dynamic, ranging from 7 to 18 days based on user activity.

6. Tips for Success:

• Keep messages short and the number of options limited to avoid overwhelming the recipient.
• Use believable senders who are not too senior or obviously sales-oriented to maintain the personal touch.
• Focus on warm audiences for better performance and cost-effectiveness.

Conclusion:

This episode provides a comprehensive guide to leveraging LinkedIn Conversation Ads effectively, including practical advice on when and how to use them, the challenges involved, and how to optimize performance. For advanced B2B marketers, this episode is packed with actionable insights that can help refine LinkedIn advertising strategies.

Whether you’re looking to retarget an audience or send personalized invitations, Conversation Ads can be a powerful tool when used correctly.

Show Transcript:

Let’s sit down and have a conversation, a conversation about Conversation Ads. That’s right. We’re diving into this interesting ad format on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

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 who want to evolve their craft and master LinkedIn Ads.

So there’s this ad format called Conversation Ads, and I realized we’ve never had a full podcast episode about them, which is actually funny because I use them really often. I’m gonna share the ins and outs of them, when to use them, and also what makes them perform.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

B2Linked is the ad agency, 100 percent 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. Plus, you get to work directly with me and my local team. You won’t get a cookie cutter approach or any standard account templates with us. Plus, with the strategies that we’ve developed and our mastery of the platform, we save our clients way more than we charge. So it’s kind of like you’re getting the best in the biz for free. If saving money and increasing your ROI sounds interesting, and you want to explore partnering with us, schedule your free discovery call at B2Linked.com/discovery.

Alright, first off in the news, there’s a new metric coming to campaign manager, and I just heard about it today. I’m really excited. It’s called audience penetration. Now what this is, is it’s a measure of how many people from our total target audience that we’ve reached with at least one impression. And I think the way it’s calculated is your unique reach divided by the total audience size that you’re going after. So we have reach, and we have our audience size. Why is this interesting? Well, there’s no report that we can generate from LinkedIn to tell us our audience sizes. So if you wanted to calculate this, you would have to go one by one through each campaign to extract it to do the math. Also, the reach number is really suspect, because like we’ve talked about before, it’s It’s averaged together in buckets to try to preserve anonymity in some way. I still don’t know how this works but what it means is I can’t ever trust our frequency numbers or our reach numbers to be precise. But what’s really cool about this number is it seems to react however, you change your time range inside of campaign manager, the number changes. And so I actually have a lot of faith that this is a way that we’re going to be able to calculate. And not worry about the issues that have plagued our, our reach and our frequency numbers.

So watch for this coming to your account in coming weeks. I’m guessing it’s either going to be under columns, delivery or columns, engagement, maybe both. Cause I could see it really affecting both, but when you export an ads or a campaigns report, it will be the last column and it’ll be called audience penetration, and it’s a percentage.

Once we get this, I’m really interested in running some bidding tests to see if, if you bid higher over a period of time, you can see how much more penetration you got by ranking higher, scoring higher in the auction. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how that auction lever moves to show you, if you’re willing to bid higher, how much more of your audience can you reach. Think it’s also going to give us a clue, if we bid higher, and we can see how high that goes, but won’t go any higher, that can give us a clue of what percentage of that audience is inactive, which is also really good information to know.

Alright, do you have a question, a review for the show that I can play live, or feedback? Please message me on LinkedIn. My DMs are free and open. You can also email us at [email protected]. You can attach a link to a voice recording, and I’ll play you right here live on the show. Or you can send me a boring text answer, or whatever, and I can respond to you there, and read it here on the show. Of course, I’m happy to keep you anonymous, so just let me know if you’d like that, or I can share your details as well and give you a shout out. As always, I want to feature you, LinkedIn Ads fanatics.

Alright, without further ado, let’s hit it. We’re talking about conversation ads. First of all, what are conversation ads? How are they different from other ad formats? Most of the ad formats that LinkedIn has, show up right in your newsfeed. And those are what we call sponsored content. And there are lots of those. Single image, video, document, etc. Conversation ads are one of the ad formats under sponsored messaging, and where they’re different, they’re not in the newsfeed. They actually only come to you when you are in your messaging box on LinkedIn. I think it’s cute they call it the Inbox because LinkedIn’s in. Anyway. Because they show up as a message, it feels really personal. They actually come from an individual. You get to choose who the individual in your company is. That the message is being sent from. So it feels very personal. It feels very like, very much like an invite, very VIP.

As opposed to all the other ad formats where you can say, I only want to pay when someone clicks and takes action. These are a hundred percent pay per send.

So you send it to someone with no guarantee that they will see that they got it. Or open it. Or end up clicking on what you want them to click on. And so costs on these, especially to cold audiences can be really high. We oftentimes see these in the like $20 to $55 per click range.

And for quite a while, we’ve had message ads that act like this. Then we got conversation ads. It’s probably been threeish years ago. Conversation ads where it’s the same kind of thing, like message ads, but you get to give people multiple options. It’s not just an email that comes to you and you say, I want to do that or don’t. It actually gives you multiple calls to action as buttons. And when you click them, you can show them something based off of what they clicked on.

So they’re really good for things that would work well as a personal invitation. If it’s like, because of who you are in the industry, we want to give you early access, or a sneak peek at something. That’s where the sponsored messaging ad formats work really well.

This also works really well if you want to give people multiple options. Back with just message ads, we could only ever give them one option. And if they’re not interested in that one option, let’s say it’s a, get a demo. If they’re not interested in a demo right now, they just leave the message. There’s nothing else they can do. But with conversation ads, you can say, click here. If you want a demo, click on this one. If you want to see more, click over here. If you want to join a webinar and learn more, etc.

Because the performance and cost of these are a hundred percent related to whether people open and click. These work a lot better for retargeting than they do for cold audiences. If you end up sending these to cold audiences, they don’t know who you are. They don’t know, like, and trust you. And so when they get your message, they might click open just to see because they’re curious. Or they just want to mark it as read so it doesn’t take up space in their inbox. But they’re probably not going to take the next step. But if this is a retargeting audience, you already have some sort of a relationship built. It feels very personal. And they can perform very, very well.

Also, the auction for sponsored content is extremely competitive. We’ve seen that you might have to bid $1, $2, $3 higher to see really big changes happen. But with sponsored messaging, the auction is not very competitive. this video. And so we find that even raising your bid a few cents per send can make a big difference in reaching more people. It’s even totally possible to spend your whole budget without having to bid more than the minimum. It’s pretty cool.

I think we need to ask, as ads managers, why isn’t the auction very competitive? Why are more marketers not using these? I think a big part of that comes down to the fact that they are very expensive, if you’re looking at just a cost per someone taking action. So they’re kind of limited in use to really special kinds of invites or something for like a tight retargeting audience. Also, they’re really cumbersome to build. If you imagine some sort of a sponsored content ad, you can type, you can hop into a design program, and put together words and an image, and be ready to actually have an ad launch very quickly.

But with sponsored messaging ads, there’s a lot of text, and especially with these conversation ads, not only do you have to come up with text, but you have to come up with the whole design of if they click this, then we give them this text. If they click over here, then we show them something different. So they are cumbersome to build, and the conversations are actually also really hard to work with. Once you have one of these ads, you would expect that it would be really easy to copy the conversation over to another ad. You can’t. You can’t duplicate the ads. You have to duplicate the whole campaign if you want to make a copy of that ad.

Then I noticed on the left hand rail in Campaign Manager under Assets, there’s a link called Conversations. And I would totally expect that you could just build a whole conversation flow there once, and then anytime you build a conversation ad, you can just link it in. But you can’t. That’s actually only used for click to message ads. They apparently have a thought about wanting to use the same conversation for conversation ads. And I don’t know how much this limitation is going to affect all of you, but for me, whenever I export data from Campaign Manager, I actually can’t differentiate between conversation ads and message ads easily. And this is true with most LinkedIn ad formats I do wish the data said very clearly, this is a lead generation video sponsored content campaign.

But if you have the same issue, I have noticed that if you look underneath ad headline, it’ll show sponsored conversation. And aside from actually putting like CA for conversation ad in the campaign name, that’s the only way I’ve been able to figure out how to differentiate these ad formats when you’re looking just at the data.

Something I’ve really liked about this messaging format, because it comes across as such a personal kind of touch, LinkedIn also allows us to include what they call macros. These are dynamic insertion, and you can dynamically insert into these messages first name, last name, company name, industry, job title, and that sounds really cool, but I will say I get a lot of these, and as a warning, I would just stick to just first name. And that’s because all the other fields might say something that they don’t identify as. For instance, if you insert job title, it might just be LinkedIn putting the job title that It categorizes their job as, but it’s not the job title that they would have claimed on their profile.

Quite often, I’ll get some of these where they dynamically insert my company name, and it’ll say, I see you run B2Linked, LinkedIn Ads Performance Agency. And I can tell immediately that it’s not an actual person, that that was just dynamically inserted. But I found if I just say, Hey, first name, that’s a great way to start it off to feel personal. And it doesn’t end up inserting anything that they’re going to say, well, that’s not my job title, or that’s not my industry.

There is an additional limitation. Right now you can’t use any of the sponsored messaging ad formats inside of the EU or in the European Union, all because of GDPR. Right when that rolled out, we had a client who was just killing it with message ads in the EU, and when that shut off, it was a sad day for all of us. But listen on, I will have a workaround for you here in just a little bit.

To give you a little bit of a history lesson here, conversation ads were actually meant to replace message ads, and message ads actually got sunsetted earlier this year in 2024. They took them away from us. And then after getting some pressure from advertisers who really liked them, they brought them back. And I’ll tell you, I was totally okay with them doing away with message ads, because you can do exactly the same thing with conversation ads that you do with message ads. It didn’t used to be the case. It used to be that conversation ads, the big difference, is they didn’t have a subject line. So it was, whatever the beginning of your message was, like the first 60 characters, that’s what showed up as the subject line. And so conversation ads had a lower open rate than message ads. So of course, advertisers screamed and said, No, we don’t want conversation ads. We want to go back to message ads where we could customize our subject line and get higher open rates. So then LinkedIn gave conversation ads the subject line, and ever since then, I’ve never looked back. I use conversation ads every time that I would want to use a message ad.

To have them look indistinguishable from each other, all you have to do is just only put one call to action in a conversation ad, and then it’s just a message ad. Plus, here’s the kicker, the biggest benefit that you get by running conversation ads rather than message ads. Now you can create retargeting audiences from those who either open or click on one of your calls to action. Which you can’t do with message ads. If you’re running message ads, you can’t retarget any of that traffic, but conversation ads, yeah, they can feed your, your middle of funnel or bottom of funnel, whatever retargeting audience you want to create.

LinkedIn product team. I have a feature request for you. We want to exclude the people that we’ve sent many of these to, and they’ve never taken action, because we don’t want to keep spending money sending them to people who are never going to be interested.

Alright, let’s talk about the specs and what actually goes into a conversation ad. Because if you’re excited now and you want to go run them, you’re probably going to want to know what goes into it, what you should prepare.

So, first off, our subject line, we have 60 characters, that includes spaces, punctuation, all of that. You also get a free banner ad with these. It’s optional, but if you don’t include one, they’re gonna show someone else who might be a competitor. So you might as well include one of these. When they get clicked, it’s free traffic. The only trick is, it only shows up on desktop. So that’s like, what, 20 percent of your, your traffic might end up seeing this banner? But like I said, it’s free, it’s optional, you might as well take advantage of it.

Then you get your intro message. So this is the first message that you send them, and it can be huge. You can go up to 8,0000 characters. But I won’t recommend going that far. I would recommend keeping at least the first message quite short. I’ve found in many instances that short outperforms long here. You can also include up to 10 emojis in the intro message, before your ad gets disapproved.

It will give you options, like being able to do what LinkedIn calls rich text. Things like adding bullets, italics, linking out. But I will say the simpler it looks, the more believable it’s going to be that it came from a person and not a marketing department.

Like I said, you can insert macros. You can see a little dropdown of the different macro fields. I would just do first name, but you can use any of the fields that you want. You can also add up to five call to action buttons in every step of the message. Those call to action buttons. They can be up to 25 characters and they’re totally customizable. You can write whatever you want. You are limited to 50 buttons in a single conversation. So if on every screen you give people five calls to actions, that’s a lot to build, but also you’re probably going to run out of calls to action.

It’s also important to note, if you run these as a lead generation objective, you’re hoping to have lead gen forms make it really easy for people to convert. But you can only associate one lead gen form per conversation. So if you’re giving people lots of different calls to action, it’s important to pick and choose. You can only grab your favorite lead gen form and then the rest have to be links that you send to your website or just show more information. The way that you create these, when you create your campaign, you have to choose one of the objectives that it accepts. So that would be like, probably lead gen or website visit would be my, my favorite. Lead gen, if you’re going to use a lead gen form, website visit, if you’re going to send people to your website, I probably wouldn’t do any other objective other than that. Then when you get down to the ad types, you’ll see conversation ad as one of your options. To make it a little easier, LinkedIn does give you templates that you can start with. So if you create one of the ads from a template, cool. Now you can just kind of edit and customize and it saves you a lot of time having to wrap your head around like, Oh, what do I do to create another screen and, show a result based off of that.

As you’re creating and editing the ad, there is also a flowchart option. And that’s a really nice, easy way of seeing your whole conversation visualized, just in case they get really complex.

So here’s a limitation. When you go to actually build these, you’re going to want to preview them. You want to see what the ad looks like. It’s actually really hard. You’ll go in to look at the ad, but there’s nothing for LinkedIn to show you because it’s, it’s a whole conglomerated conversation with multiple pages.

So instead what you can do, is on the ads edit menu, over to the right, you click on the three dots, and one of those options is to send you a test message. I actually really like this functionality, because no matter what I’m doing with a conversation ad or message ad, I can click that, and immediately I go check my LinkedIn inbox, and I can see a copy of the message, and it’s, if I inserted a field like first name, it’s using my first name, and I can point out any problems very quickly.

All right, when you start running these. You’re going to want to know what kind of performance you can expect. Like we mentioned, you do pay on a cost per send basis, and the floor price of what you can pay, it is dynamic. It moves based off of how much competition there is for that audience. I’ve found that usually my range is in the range of like 40 cents to 80 cents per person I send it to. Some I’ve been able to bid all the way down to like 25 cents or 20 cents. So it just depends on how competitive LinkedIn thinks that audience is.

As you send these, you’ll see your open rate. And the open rate basically says how interesting is my subject line that people want to open it. The benchmark average is about 55%, so if you’re doing better than 55%, you have a good, compelling message. Once someone opens it, then you obviously want them to click on one of your calls to action. And your click through rate, which LinkedIn will call your click to open rate, LinkedIn It depends on how you’re using it, but it’s usually going to be somewhere between about 3 to 10%. So if you’re doing better than that, great. If you’re doing about the same or maybe even less, okay, there is work to do. One really awesome redeeming factor about conversation ads, though, is that they tend to have really high conversion rates. Much higher than sponsored content or text ads or anything else in the stable.

I will mention that there is a delay in when you actually want to report on these because you’ll send them to people and I’ve found a delay on average about three days. So you send it to someone, about three days later, you’ll start to see a lot of opens. And then about three days after that, you’ll start to see the clicks rolling in. And because there is this delay, every time you send the ads out, Then it means that when you stop them, if you pause, like, let’s say you pause two weeks in, when you keep watching your stats, they’re going to keep getting better as more of the people that you’ve already paid for are now opening and clicking. So I do like reporting on these after the fact. After they bake out is what I call it. The performance just keeps looking better and better.

There is a cool report that you can run for these. If you go to export in campaign manager, and then you choose the option of conversation ad CTA performance, you can end up getting an ad report where it will actually break down the performance of each of your calls to action. So if you have four things you’re asking people to do, you can actually see which one people are clicking on more.

If you’re going to stay inside of campaign manager to report on these, you want to choose columns, sponsored messaging. That’s really the only place that you’re going to see the metrics that you really want, which are going to be sends, opens, and clicks.

Now, since you pay by the send and not by the click, you do want to watch these really closely, because they can get incredibly expensive to the, let’s say, cost per click, if you’re not keeping a close eye on them.

Now, you know, the option is available on LinkedIn Ads inside the ads edit for rotate ads evenly or optimize for performance. This is the one ad format where I recommend rotate evenly because you actually will get an even A B test out of these. If you have two ads in there, LinkedIn will send one to one ad and then the next one to the other and you have a near 50 50 split. Really good for A B testing.

When you decide who it is that you want to be your sender, you have to send them an invitation. It’s kind of like thought leader ads and they have to accept it. You do have to be a first degree connection to someone to send, which I think is kind of dumb, but okay.

When they accept the permissions to have them show up as a sender, they are actually given limited access to your ads account so that they can see just the campaigns that are using their personality.

I have noticed that a lot of people will end up not seeing the email from LinkedIn asking them to grant approval. But you, as the ads manager, you can copy the request URL and message them privately and say, Hey, can you make sure you go and accept this?

We have gotten some updates here. As of pretty recently, LinkedIn rolled out the ability to bid by maximum delivery. It used to be that we would have to choose what is the bid amount to send, it was all manual, but now LinkedIn added max delivery, which, as we know, it basically means that they can bid as high as they want to, to spend your whole budget.

I don’t recommend max delivery, unless it’s just a limited test, just to see what it is they bid, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if you bid max delivery, if you’re, if you would be bidding like 60 cents per send, I could totally see LinkedIn bidding like, 1.20 per, and it could get really expensive, really fast.

I want to give a huge thank you to Anthony Blatner. He’s one of our super fanatics in the fanatics group. He recently mentioned on one of his podcast episodes that he heard LinkedIn changed the frequency cap on conversation ads. It used to be every 30 days someone could receive one of these. Then it got lowered down fairly recently to every 21 days. Now it’s different. It’s a dynamic range of anywhere between 7 to 18 days. If you’re really active in your messaging box, you can probably receive one of these every week. But if you’re not super active, you might be more on the like once every 18 days kind of track.

LinkedIn also recently released a new not interested button that gets automatically applied to all of your conversations. It’s your, your opening conversation.

And we talked about this on a previous episode, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing for advertisers, so we’ll have to see once it’s fully rolled out.

I mentioned before, we do have the ability to re target people who’ve opened or clicked on one of our calls to action, so I think this is really cool. It’s also really important to know that the only people who will ever receive one of these, meaning, that you’ll have to pay for. It’s because they are logged into LinkedIn, looking at their messages.

So LinkedIn is not going to charge you to send it to someone who hasn’t logged in, you know, six years.

So, I mentioned before that there was a workaround to being able to run these in the European Union, and this is called click to message ads. I didn’t think I was going to like them, but I actually really like these. I just started testing them recently. The way it works is it starts out like a single image ad in the newsfeed. So, there’s no frequency cap, basically. You could show one of these like every 24 hours or maybe even a little bit more often. And when someone interacts with the single image ad, it then takes them to their messaging box where they have a conversation ad from you. So these are kind of cumbersome to build because you have to build a single image ad and a conversation ad all at once. But I do like the way that they get charged because you get the functionality of a conversation ad with that sole focus of having their, their full attention at the price of a newsfeed click. So rather than paying like $25 to $50 per click to cold audiences, you can end up paying, you know, $7, $8 whatever you end up paying for your top of funnel, sponsored content ads.

After running a lot of conversation ads, I’ve got some learnings and I want to share with you what I’ve learned from this.

First of all, I kind of mentioned this before, but try to keep your messages shorter. You want it to feel a little bit more like a text, like a friend texting you, rather than a marketing department trying to dump everything on you.

Also, don’t give too many options. I’ve found that two to three options is plenty. If you give people more than that, then they end up going, Oh, I don’t know, there’s so many options, and it’s just easier for them to scroll on to another message than click one of your options.

Also, as you’re selecting who the sender is going to be, make it someone believable. Don’t make it like the CEO of your big company, because no one’s going to believe that the CEO cared enough about them to send them a message. You also don’t want to send to someone with like, a sales title, because then they’ll feel like, oh, this is just a sales outreach.

Warm audiences definitely work better here. You’re gonna pay the same whether someone is warm or cold, but when they’re warm, they’re going to open at a higher rate and click at a higher rate. And that’s going to bring your overall cost per click and cost per conversion way down.

We’ve recently had a whole bunch of successes with conversation ads, and so I’ll share some of the things that made these a success.

One was we were sending these out to people who were going to be at an event as an invite to meet up or invite them to dinner. And that worked really well. It comes across as like a personal invite, and that’s exactly what you’d want if you were gonna say, Hey, come join me for dinner, or come join one of our, like, a group hosted dinner.

We’ve also run quite a few of these as like a demo request, in exchange for a gift card. So, you look qualified, you have the issue that we solve, And if you’re willing to hop on for a demo, we’ll also give you a free gift card. I’m not a huge fan of this call to action. It does work sometimes, so it’s certainly worth trying.

We’re also having a lot of success with these in higher ed. So specifically for like, recruiting people for MBA programs.

If you’re not already a member of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, what are you waiting for? For a very low monthly cost, you get access to all four of our courses that take you from absolute LinkedIn Ads beginner to LinkedIn Ads hero. Plus, you get to rub shoulders with many of the top minds in LinkedIn Ads. There’s also an upgrade that gets you on a weekly group calls with me. So if that sounds interesting, definitely check it out. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com. Or if you can’t spell fanatics, reach out to me on LinkedIn and I’m super happy to give you the link. 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 in your ears next week as well. But if you’re a loyal listener, the very biggest compliment you could pay us is to go over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. And as a reminder, if you do, I’ll shout you out live here on the show. With any questions, suggestions, or if I need it corrections, reach out to us at [email protected] or you can reach out to me privately on LinkedIn. With all that being said, we’ll see you back here next week, and I’m always cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.