LinkedIn Ads Boosted Posts LinkedIn Ads Show

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NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox
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Show Transcript On LinkedIn, what's a boosted post? And how is it different from a standard LinkedIn ad? What is direct sponsored content? When should you use them? We're going to discuss all of this in this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get the question from advertisers probably monthly about boosted posts, dark posts on LinkedIn and I think we're going to be getting it a lot more often with the moves that LinkedIn is making. It really is a pretty simple question with some mostly simple answers, but also a lot to unpack and a lot of nuances. So here we go. First of all, I hope everyone had an amazing holiday season and break no matter what you celebrate. My kids and I had a really fun Christmas where we stayed home and relaxed. I'm really excited to be back sharing all of my favorite tips and tricks on LinkedIn ads with you, of course, and hopefully we're back to a weekly cadence here. Thanks for your patience with me. And I hope you all have an amazing 2022 advertising on LinkedIn.
All right, let's hit it. First, we need to define what a boosted post is. Because this is something that Facebook actually pioneered, and then of course, LinkedIn adopted later. What it is, it's where you create a company page post organically and then you push that post out in your ad campaigns as an ad. When LinkedIn very first released sponsored content back in 2013, it was called Sponsored Updates. And boosting posts like Facebook has, were the only option. I was so proud to be one of the pilot users and in fact, I was so early of a user that LinkedIn actually gave us 1000s of dollars in free adspend just for running them and giving them feedback. Oh, boy, those were the days. At the time, I had launched 32 campaigns. So of course, that meant I had to go and create 64 sponsored content ads, no big deal, right? Well, at the time, I had no bulk tools. So I put headphones on, I locked it in and I just crank them out at about one per minute doing copy, paste, post. Copy, paste post. Not the most glorious work, but let's be honest, everyone listening here is too highly compensated to do so many of the tasks that LinkedIn's Ads platform makes us do on the regular. I was very used to it by this time. The ads of course performed really, really well. Surprise, surprise, it was the first time that anyone had seen an ad that looked like this on LinkedIn, because everything was just text ads before it. There was a pretty significant downside to this strategy, though. Because as I went through and created 64 organic company page posts in a row, I realized how confusing this must be to our company page followers. You see a company page post that looks eerily like an ad and you brush it off, you're not interested. And then a few posts down, there's another one that looks exactly the same, then another, than another. The most active of our followers, we're getting inundated by the same message. This was also really problematic for my tracking and attribution. Because like a good technical marketer, I had specific URL tracking parameters in each of those ads, so I could associate their performance with their ad spend. The problem is that this wasn't a very pure test. A company page follower might see this post and then convert, and then someone in my advertising audience saw it and converted. And you look at both of those conversions, they are at very different stages of the funnel and they are very different audiences. The company page follower already has a high degree of affinity for your brand. They're following you, they're fans maybe, and watching them convert, they're going to convert at a much higher rate. They're going to be a much more