The secret habits of highly successful LinkedIn Ads accounts.

I've been running LinkedIn Ads campaigns for B2B tech clients for 9 years now, longer than I’ve done anything else in my life.?

I’ve worked on some of the largest accounts in the world, and cracked/scaled/managed over 15 $100K/month budgets, in addition to the other 150+ accounts I’ve personally worked on over these years.?

Honestly, I think only AJ has more experience than I do at this stuff.

Some accounts, some clients, just seem to work better.?

Here are 5 things that some of the most successful accounts have in common:

№1 → High Demand!?

The accounts I’ve worked on that absolutely rocked it? There was already some deep demand for the product in the market. Often for obscure niches that you don’t think about often, that solves a real problem in a unique way.?

It’s in that scenario, where you can run direct response campaigns that capture demand, and get very good results - and the sales has no problem booking meetings with those leads.?

I was shocked when I saw that happen for the first time. I was conditioned to believe that it has to be hard - that CPLs are high, and SQL rates are low - but when there’s high demand for what you’re offering, those rules simply don’t apply.?

This is demand that was “generated”, this genuine demand for your offer.

Imagine you walked down the street offering free $100 bills.?

Engagement rate would be 100%, conversion rate would be 100%.

The closer your offer is to offering people free money, the better your campaigns will perform.?

№2 → Hungry, hungry SDRs.

Another really strong indicator of success has been when our campaigns have been partnered with insanely hungry SDRs - that figure out how to work the leads we generate, build that playbook, and are able to get beat benchmark rates of meetings scheduled.?

This isn’t to blame the ones that don’t manage to do that as lazy or incapable of doing that - there might be other issues at play here. But I’ll say that a hungry SDR can be there difference between an intro call rate of 10% and 30% - which can be what makes your cost per meeting cost $1,000 instead of $3,000 - and maybe making the whole thing viable.

№3 → Simplicity wins.

Almost all the most successful accounts and campaigns I’ve worked on were much more simple than you imagine.

Often it’s as simple as gated content on the cold layer, demo request on the retargeting layer.?

Maybe 3-4 different assets, possibly some video ads on both the cold and retargeting layers, but ultimately - there are typically not too many moving parts, by design.

№4 → Don’t stress attribution too much.

It took me a long time to learn to put less trust in attribution than I previously believed.?

Where I learned this the most was working with clients that were starting with totally fresh CRMs or Hubspot instances - with LinkedIn Ads being literally the first Go-to-Market push designed to generate leads.?

Almost any time this was the case, it was very very clear and obvious that a large amount of leads were coming in not attributed to the source.?

Sometimes this was because of technical reasons - but the biggest reason is “dark paid social”.?

You’re advertising - people are seeing your brand - and if you do a good enough job, when they need you, they’ll look for you.

You’ll often see that if you are only running LinkedIn Ads, and nothing else, you’ll get around 10%-20% more leads unattributed to LinkedIn than you are accounting for.?

The opposite is often true.?

With clients that have CRM data that goes back 12 years, and multiple sources for leads to come in (events, podcasts, search, whatever) it becomes much more difficult to discover those “missing” attributed leads. It’s important to know they are there, even if you can’t see them - since it means your numbers are usually better than what you can technically report on.?

№5 → Whatever works.

LinkedIn is absolutely flooded with free advice.?

Gated content? Dead.

SEO? Dead.

Cold calling? Dead.

The perfect playbook is perfectly generic.?

The brands that do the best - do so for all sorts of reasons. Lean into what’s working.

Double down. Triple down.?

Maybe it’s something everyone else is doing, maybe it’s something that no one has ever done before. But if you find that thing that brings in results that beat the benchmarks - you need to lean into that.

The truth is - the most successful accounts are rarely successful because they followed the rules and the playbooks - they figured out their own playbooks for what worked for them, and then scaled that up massively.

What do you think?

Have you worked on a wildly successful LinkedIn Ads account? What worked for that account?