Your Guide to Advanced LinkedIn Advertising

Are you pouring your B2B marketing budget into LinkedIn ads but struggling to prove their actual impact on revenue? You’re not alone. 

Most marketers get stuck thinking LinkedIn advertising begins and ends with lead generation forms, missing out on sophisticated strategies that can transform prospects into paying customers. The reality is that advanced LinkedIn advertising goes far beyond collecting email addresses – it’s about creating multi-touch experiences that warm prospects, support account-based marketing efforts, and provide clear attribution back to revenue. But how do you move beyond basic tactics to implement strategies that drive measurable business growth?

That’s exactly what AJ Wilcox is here to help us figure out. AJ is the founder and CEO of B2Linked, a LinkedIn Ads specialist agency, and quite literally one of the world’s leading experts on LinkedIn advertising. He’s managed over $20 million in LinkedIn ad spend for clients, hosts The LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, and has cracked the code on making LinkedIn ads profitable at scale. AJ is known for his data-driven approach and ability to help B2B companies achieve serious ROI through sophisticated LinkedIn advertising strategies that most marketers never even consider.

Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton asked AJ Wilcox about:

🧡 Prospect Warming Strategies – How to use LinkedIn ads to warm up prospects for weeks before any sales outreach attempts occur.

🧡 Account-Based Marketing Integration – The specific tactics for targeting key accounts with coordinated LinkedIn campaigns that support your ABM efforts.

🧡 Multi-Touch Attribution Models – How to track and measure the full customer journey from initial LinkedIn ad exposure all the way to closed revenue.

Learn more about AJ Wilcox

• Connect with AJ Wilcox on LinkedIn

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Since you’ve managed all that in LinkedIn ad spend, tell us what the biggest misperception is that B2B marketers have about LinkedIn advertising beyond basic lead generation?

AJ Wilcox: It does lead into the basics of lead generation. Most people who go to advertise on LinkedIn, first of all, we’re paying a premium, and you get access to all of this targeting, where you go, yeah, that’s my exact perfect customer. Amazing. Then they go and go right for the kill. They think they’ve earned the right to say, Hey, hop on a call with our sales rep, or buy now, or take a trial. But the fact of the matter is, most people are not willing and ready to take that step until they already know and trust you. 

So, at that point, the biggest misconception is that we don’t have to nurture our traffic. We’re going to be able to convert people right from the start. And no, you do need to make sure that you are warming this traffic, getting them to know and trust you before you ever ask them for any sort of information.

So, walk us through what that prospect warming looks like in practice. How do you use LinkedIn ads to prep prospects before that kind of sales outreach?

AJ Wilcox: When someone is just getting to know your brand, it’s really important to help them get to know an individual first, because we, as humans, are so good at attributing this know and trust factor to a face and so much less to a company logo.

So about two and a half years ago, LinkedIn gave us access to a new ad format called Thought Leader Ads. And this is where we can promote an individual’s post to our audiences on LinkedIn, rather than a company post, which is what we’ve always had to do. 

What’s so great about this is that by just showing a face, someone’s actual profile is shown. We tend to get engagement rates that are like three to five times LinkedIn’s average. And when you get that much higher engagement rate, your costs per engagement come way down. And so what I love to do is start with these personal posts, these Thought Leader Ads, they’re great as either video or text, whatever.

And then anyone who engages with or watches, let’s say, at least 50% of one of the videos on these, then I retarget them and target them down in the next stage, where now they’re a little bit warmer. At least we know they’ve heard of us. Once they get past that stage of interacting with the individual at the company, this could be your owner, head of sales, an employee, an internal influencer, whatever.

Now I want all of the next ads to come from the company so that we can transfer that know and trust factor from what they’ve built with the individual. We want them to attribute that to the company, ’cause now they’re going to be engaging with the company’s ads from now on.

Mike Allton: Love that approach. We’ve tested that. We’ve used that in Agorapulse, particularly for some of the podcasts. We’re going to be doing that with this podcast. 

My own experience, though, has been that those Thought Leader Ads felt very complicated to work with. It was often hard to get the post in the exact right format that LinkedIn wanted to accept as a thought leader ad, and sometimes it’s hard to find the person with whom. 

Has that been your experience as well? 

AJ Wilcox: Yeah. The way that LinkedIn set it up it’s. It’s difficult. I have a whole podcast episode about how to create Thought Leader Ads just because they were so hard. But the basics are that you have to choose one of two objectives. 

And I will say go with engagement. It’s way better than brand awareness. Then you have to choose the ad type. If it’s a video, you have to choose a video. If it’s a single image or just text, you choose a single image. If your campaign is set up with both of those factors, then by the time you get to the next page where you get to choose the ad, your post should show up.

But it is a little bit of a hoop to jump through first.

Mike Allton: Okay? So I’m going to find that episode and listen to it and get ready, and I’ll link to that in the show notes for you guys. Folks, below, if you want to try these Thought Leader Ads because they are. Killer. It’s a fantastic approach.

Our LinkedIn rep, our partner rep, told me about him a year ago. And we were thrilled with it. Now, one of the things I know you’ve talked about is uploading prospect lists as matched audiences. 

What’s the actual strategic approach to this, and how long should you warm prospects before you start to reach out with some of those middle-funnel-type, company-branded page ads?

AJ Wilcox: Amazing question, okay, you may have to steer me here if I forget to take an angle. But there are two kinds of lists that we can upload to LinkedIn. 

The first is that we can upload contact lists. This would be a list of individuals, like your mailing list or anything like that. And that’s great. You can pull the list from anywhere. We can do a contact list on any platform out there. You can do that on Meta and Google, it’s not all that special for LinkedIn, what is special is the second kind of list that we can upload is a list of company names.

So if you’re doing account-based marketing or ABM, this is where we can say, Hey, here’s a list of all of the companies that we know we’d be a perfect fit for. Let’s upload that list to LinkedIn. And then when we go to advertise, we can say, use this list. Plus, any of the specific roles or other targeting we want to put on top. So that’s what you want to do. It’s great, in this case, where we’re talking about warming up an audience. I love it cause you work with your sales team, get a list of all of the companies that they’re doing outreach to, and you say, for a month or two before your sales team gets to reach out to these people, I want to be showing them ads.

So by the time someone reaches out, reaches out to them, they go, Oh, I’ve heard of this company before. They seem legit. Yeah. And now they’re going to be a lot more likely to respond when sales reach out. If you do this right, the warming process, your sales team will report higher response rates.

That’s how you know that this is successful.

Mike Allton: I love that approach. We are going to be doing that for sure. I’m taking all kinds of notes on how we can better leverage this podcast for that kinda activity. But for the folks listening, maybe they’re just not quite as familiar with ABM, maybe they haven’t had the opportunity in their business to think about it, break it down for them a little bit more, if you wouldn’t mind.

How does that work? How do LinkedIn Ads benefit? You mentioned you just tossed that out there. By the way, your sales teams will close at a higher rate. Why is that?

AJ Wilcox: When you upload a list to LinkedIn, they’re going to go and match that list and make sure that they know and recognize all of those companies.

They won’t ever match it a hundred percent. And that’s okay, if you’re like 90 plus percent, you’re doing great. You can source this list by working with your sales team, deciding who the ideal target audience is. Who are these companies? Specifically by name, because this is something that you can’t do on any other network anywhere else that you’d advertise.

They don’t have the data to know, like what company someone works for, but LinkedIn does know. It’s one of the very first things you put on your profile.

Mike Allton: Yeah. So we were uploading a list of target companies, and we’re telling LinkedIn. Okay, so we want to target, let’s say, I’m uploading a list of agencies in North America, and I want to talk to marketing agencies in North America. So, generally speaking, we would want to talk to the CEO or the owner. So we’re putting in some of those kinds of filters. 

Are there other targeting tactics that you would use beyond those kinds of obvious ones?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah, the basic targeting that I like to use anytime I get a chance. Number one is job function with seniority. So that would be like, if you want to hit an owner, that would be, you could just do seniority of owner, or you can do chief level and above. There are all kinds that you can do to hit that audience.

But then you also have a job function, which is what department someone sits in. And the owner specifically, they’re, they got categorized for some reason as business development. So you choose business development if you want to get them, or just leave it off. So that’s number one. It’s the broadest way of reaching people by their level of seniority and their department.

But then the next one is going to make a lot of sense to you. This is a job title. You can say, on top of this list of companies, I only want to reach people with this job title. It’s the first place everyone goes, so it’s a little bit more competitive. You might pay a little bit more. Yeah. Per click for it.

But then I also really like to do skills with seniority and groups with seniority. If there are enough people in that audience, or if you can identify specific groups or skills. But those four are great kinds of targeting to put on top of that company list.

Mike Allton: Oh, that’s fascinating. With the seniority, can you do like a,
A range or underneath a certain age. So maybe ’cause maybe you’re not looking for decision makers, maybe you’re looking for somebody who might be using your products in a particular organization.

AJ Wilcox: Yeah. You could do LinkedIn calls as a senior. That’s their contributor. So you could do senior, you can do manager, director, VP, C-level. You can even go down to the entry level. So lots of different ranges you can use there.

What LinkedIn does is they look at someone’s job title and then, from the title, they try to determine what seniority someone would fit under. Okay, it might be, you might see some weird things, like, oh, I’m someone who was too low in seniority, came in when I was targeting the manager and above. You might see things occasionally like that, but most of the time it’s pretty good.

Mike Allton: I like that too, because particularly the more we use LinkedIn, I see more and more creative titles, I’ll put it that way. Very right. Where it might be the same as the owner, but they didn’t put the owner; they put something else. Or whatever position you’re looking for in an organization. So if you look more by department and by seniority, you’re much more likely to capture those, again, let’s just say, creative titles that you would not have captured that person before ’cause they’re not using one of the standard titles that you would’ve normally put in that field. Absolutely.

AJ Wilcox: Yeah. That’s why I like going with seniority and job function first. Because then all of those creative job titles, they’re usually bucketed under the correct function and seniority.
It’s a great place to start.

Mike Allton: Makes sense. Folks are talking with AJ Wilcox about advanced LinkedIn advertising strategies that drive pipeline and revenue. In a moment, he’s going to teach me, I mean us, how to attribute multi-touch. But first, let’s make sure you’ve got a system in place to track it all.

Thanks to Agorapulse’s new LinkedIn ads reporting.

Advert: Actually can’t say enough great things about the reporting with Agorapulse. I feel like that is. My job security is every month. My clients aren’t that active on social media, which is why they have me manage their profiles for them. And when they get that report, it verifies that they’re making a good investment.

The metrics downloads are so simple and easy to read, and they really help me show where we are doing things right on social media and where we need to improve. So I think one of the main reasons why we decided to move to Agorapulse is. Is because it’s a more comprehensive, integrated tool for all of our marketing needs.

So rather than what we have had to do historically with Sprout, which is use certain parts of that fe, that platform that worked really well, and then supplement it with other outside tools. By moving to Agora Pulse, we were able to keep all of that in one. Into one technology platform, which is not only a time saver, but it also makes sure that our analytics and all of our reporting’s on point because we’re pulling all from the same source.

It’s a great platform for agencies. It makes it really easy to manage, but gives me really robust information that actually helps me develop better strategies for my clients and better plans of action.

Mike Allton: AJ, if you’re building campaigns, we talked from the outset, a lot of folks they’re using LinkedIn ads for lead generation. 

How do you structure campaigns differently when the goal is revenue attribution?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah, it’s, this one’s hard because LinkedIn right from the very beginning, they struggled with what we talked about at the top of the show, which is like people see the audience they want to go after, and they want to go right for the kill. If you do get an audience who says, Oh yeah, I’ll talk to someone in sales right up front, great attribution is super easy. It’s, you had some UTMs on it. They click it, they convert. Awesome. But we know that in B2B, especially with these longer sales cycles and bigger deals, it takes multiple touches. And LinkedIn realized this.

So about two years ago, they started making really heavy investments into their measurement suite, which is what they call it. And. There are two types of tools. I think eventually there’ll be one, but right now there are two that I think make a lot of sense for advertisers. The first is called the revenue attribution report.

So what happens is you connect it to your CRM, and your CRM will say, Hey, someone just became a sales-qualified lead. Or it’ll say, someone just closed. It’ll send that information back to LinkedIn and say this company just became a sales-qualified lead or just closed. LinkedIn looks at it and goes, Ooh, this company, how many ads did I serve to them in the last 180 days?

How many people clicked on it? How much do we spend? And they can report on this. So, of course, it could come across oh, LinkedIn’s trying to take credit for all of the deals that were closed from other platforms. But don’t read it like that. Don’t read it like it’s trying to take credit.

Read it as, how did LinkedIn contribute to all of these deals that we closed, that otherwise we’d have no idea what sort of involvement LinkedIn had in it. And that’s free. All these integrations are free, and they work with most major CRMs.

So I would suggest doing that, and then you can start to see, like, where does LinkedIn play if let’s say, you’re trying to do attribution for your LinkedIn ads, and you’re like, oh, LinkedIn ads are only 80% profitable. We’re losing 20% there. If you could tell that LinkedIn was propping up another channel that was 140%, 160% profitable, when you combine those, you realize they are better together, and you don’t have to just hold one platform accountable.

Because LinkedIn is really good at reaching on top of the funnel audiences. It’s not the place where people come close. Most of the time, we still get closed deals from LinkedIn, but most of the time, it’s introducing the brand.

Mike Allton: Got it. So let’s unpack this for a second. So you connect LinkedIn with your CRM, like Salesforce or HubSpot. Your sales team closes a deal, and LinkedIn sees that and looks at the contact or contacts. Presumably, it could do multi-threaded sales and determine you know what you served ads to this person on x, y, z dates and provide that in the reporting native to LinkedIn, or does that get integrated into the CRM data as well?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah, it’s in LinkedIn’s native reporting, so you can go right to LinkedIn, see how this, see how LinkedIn has contributed, and what I could see for the future. I could see every ad platform doing this kind of thing, too. The problem is that the other ad platforms don’t know where you work. They have no idea how, yeah, Google has no idea how one person could have seen an ad, passed it to their coworker, and then the coworker closed.
They couldn’t figure that out, but LinkedIn does, and so I think we should all be using this feature.

Mike Allton: So this is a huge tip and I want to make sure everybody heard this, because you’re probably going to need to tell your ops team about this because your ops team is likely focused on Salesforce reporting, which, to your point, that’s only going to show first touch or last touch attribution, they’re going to need to look at, which means you’re going to to give ’em access unless you want to give ’em the reports, your LinkedIn adds data.

And make sure that this integration is set up between Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever CRM you’re using, and LinkedIn, so that LinkedIn can see that and incorporate that kind of reporting. Did I get that right? Yep, that’s exactly right. Okay, awesome. I’m going to tell my ops team as soon as we’re done talking.

AJ Wilcox: CRM’s. Good. I think that’s the easiest and best way to start. There’s also another one called the Conversions API or CAPI. LinkedIn’s late to the game here. Google and Facebook have had this for years. But it’s new on LinkedIn. This can also come from your CRM, or you can connect it to something like Google Tag Manager and fire these. But what’s cool about this is you can report back to LinkedIn when someone converted, and it does not require a cookie.

Most of the conversion tracking that you’re doing in your account right now relies on a cookie being present in your browser. And we know that the internet is waging war against cookies. They’re not going to be around forever. They’re not a reliable way of tracking, and so you might be losing 20 to 30% of your conversions just because they didn’t retain the cookie between the time when they click the ad to when they converted.

But with Conversions API, you can tell LinkedIn, Hey, this person just converted on my site, and LinkedIn can look back at it and go, Ooh, I remember when I served them the ad. Let’s give the credit for that conversion to this ad and this campaign. It gives you a more complete view of what your LinkedIn ads are actually doing in contributing.

Mike Allton: That is fantastic. 

I know my team, I’m sure everybody listening is excited about digging into this. If they’re ready to move beyond, let’s say, basic LinkedIn lead gen ads, what’s the first advanced strategy that they should implement, and what resources do you recommend that they turn to for staying current on LinkedIn Advertising best practices?

AJ Wilcox: Alright, so for resources, I’m going to give a little bit of a shameless plug here on LinkedIn, if you come follow me or send a connection request. Just say that you heard me on Mike’s show. I’d love to connect with you, but I’m constantly sharing really good stuff. I also have the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, where every week we dive into a deep, dark, advanced area of LinkedIn ads that you need to know about.

So those are great places to stay caught up. We even have a little community. It’s called the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics, where we have like four courses and obviously the community, there’s even an upgraded membership where we get on a group call every week. So I would say go check those out.

You can see it all at our site, b2linked.com. So I think that’s a good place to get caught up in being advanced for the next strategy. After you’re gone, I would probably take a step back. This is going to sound really simple, but it’s not on LinkedIn. So here’s the story.

LinkedIn used to have a product that they called LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, and it was a really foolproof way of building funnels like a three-stage funnel, and where it would involve retargeting, it would exclude audiences so that they were graduating down properly.LinkedIn shut that down back before it was back when they announced it was back before the Microsoft acquisition.

So we still want that functionality because when we build three-stage funnels and we take audiences through multiple touches of ads with our company, what we find is that every subsequent stage that we get them down to their conversion rate is five times higher. If you just go right for the kill, you’re going to get a less than 1% conversion rate.

But if you retarget the people who inter, who interact with your company, like we talked about with Thought Leader Ads, at the second stage, they may have a 5% conversion rate, and then when you get them down another stage, you may have a 25% conversion rate. It’s pretty amazing. But that three-stage funnel is really difficult to build on LinkedIn.

It’s an advanced process. I’ll give you a rundown of how you built this. Your stage one campaigns are your cold audiences. What you do is you create a retargeting audience that says, anyone who interacts with these, create the audience. And then you immediately exclude that audience from all of your stage one campaigns.

What you just set up is that once they interact with the ads, they’re taken out of the audience, and they’re no longer being targeted with that ad. That’s what you want. Then, when you build a stage two campaign, this is a retargeting campaign. When it asks you what audience you want to target, you set that audience that you just created.

It’s the people who interact with your top of the funnel. So now you’ve just created, and it’s a little bit technical, but you’ve just created a mechanism where someone has served an ad. Once they interact, they are removed from that audience and then targeted at one funnel stage down. You do the same thing with a stage three, and now you have a functional three-stage funnel where it’s evergreen.

It’s constantly just nurturing everyone from your ideal target audience, getting them warmer and hotter, where you can actually then get real, like sales results from them. I know it sounds simple, or I know it sounds complex, but it is, I think it is the simplest thing that most advanced advertisers are forgetting.

Mike Allton: That does make a lot of sense. I’m familiar with, I’m sure folks listening are familiar with using Facebook pixels and retargeting individuals who visited a specific page. So it’s very similar in concept to that. You’re retargeting these people who have expressed some interest in whatever it is that you were talking about.

AJ Wilcox: All of the retargeting that I’m talking about is. The actions that someone can take with one of your LinkedIn ads, and what I love about using these audiences, is that LinkedIn has a 100% match rate.

When they do something, when they interact with a post, LinkedIn remembers exactly who it was and what they did. So you have these amazing hundred percent match rates. If you can do retargeting just like you can do on other platforms as well, where you say, if someone landed on this page or anyone anywhere on my site, let’s retarget them.
But that’s a hundred percent cookie-based. And so it’s like trying to fill up a leaky bucket and get water somewhere. It’s just not great. So yeah, I do suggest using it, like work that into your three-stage funnel on LinkedIn. But. It’s not going to be as powerful as using the engagement retargeting.

So then, to your question about what kinds of, like, how narrowly can you segment what kinds of actions someone took? You segment by. The action that they took on which ad type, but it doesn’t let you separate between whether they liked it, or if they commented on a post, or if they clicked see more.
All three of those actions would be called the same thing. I wish we had a little bit more granularity there, but this is an awesome question.

Mike Allton: Yeah. So then, just, folks listening, you simply wanted to make sure when you get to that middle of the funnel or even the bottom of the funnel, that third stage, you’re not assuming they’ve seen.
The landing page, if that’s what you were trying to do with part of the ad. They saw the ad, and they engaged with the ad in some way. Maybe they clicked through, maybe they didn’t. So don’t make that assumption.

AJ Wilcox: Yeah. You could create your audience based on who clicked on who created a chargeable click on the ad. That you could set that to be the only chargeable click is when they go to my website, but your retargeting audiences need to be at least 300 people in order to run. And you could imagine if you’re paying, let’s say $8 a click to get, 300 people times $8, you’d spend a lot of money getting a retargeting audience built.
Yeah, so you may not want to, but if you’re a big spender, you could do that easily.

Mike Allton: Isn’t everybody who advertises on LinkedIn a big spender?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah. They have to be. It’s changed in past years, like we’re now getting clicks for one to $2 because of these Thought Leader Ads doing so well.
Whereas in the past, before those happened, we were paying like, seven to $9 kind of minimum. So yeah, it’s gotten better because of this, but it’s still very much a premium.

Given that there is like a minimum viable budget that businesses should be thinking about when it comes to LinkedIn ads on a monthly spend?

AJ Wilcox: A really good question. This depends on what it is that you want to actually do with it. If you want to do that motion, like we talked about earlier, where we’re just warming audiences so that sales can reach out to ’em, you don’t need very much budget at all. What you could do is say, I only want to target this specific list of people at this specific list of companies and just drip content to them.
Maybe it’s these Thought Leader Ads. You probably wouldn’t, unless your list is huge, you probably wouldn’t need to spend more than, like, a thousand dollars a month on something like that. But if your goal is to take cold traffic from your ideal audiences and turn them into warm sales-ready leads, I wouldn’t suggest spending anything less than about $5,000 a month to run that whole three-stage funnel, push different content at each stage, and fully warm people up over time.

Mike Allton: When you say a huge list, what is that number in your mind?

AJ Wilcox: If, let’s say, your sales team gives you a list of like 30 companies at a time, that’s going to create a very small list, and you might, yeah, you might only spend eight, $10 a day on it. So I would call that a small list, but if they give you a list of thousands of companies that we might be reaching out to, you could spend pretty decent money on that.

Mike Allton: Got it.. Yeah. I often joke that I’m picking the brains of experts when I do these interviews, and so hopefully, folks, you found these questions interesting because this is entirely for my benefit. Yeah, no, ’cause yeah, I know the kinds of lists that my sales team has come up with, and they’ve numbered in the thousands. So in your mind that those would be huge lists. That we would want to earmark a significant monthly budget if we were doing this kind of setup for

AJ Wilcox: Oh, yeah. Especially if you’re trying to reach multiple people at each company. You could have a 500,000 or 800,000-person-sized list in that case. Yeah, you could spend a few grand a month on just this warming, nurturing kind of motion.

Mike Allton: Fantastic. AJ, you’ve been so insightful. This has been a really powerful interview. I know folks are probably going to want to go back and listen to it a couple of times, really just let it soak in. But if they’ve got more questions, where’s the best place to reach out to you?

AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn is great. Reach out to me there, follow me on LinkedIn, reach out to me there. My DMs are free and they’re open. Just don’t drop a sales pitch on me. Done with that. But yeah, that’s probably the easiest way. Otherwise, subscribe to the podcast. Check us out on B2linked.com. We try to constantly publish free awesome stuff everywhere we can get it.

Mike Allton: Love it. We will, of course, have all of AJ’s links in the show notes below everything we’ve talked about today, including some of those podcast episodes and the overall podcast itself. But that’s all the time we’ve got for today.

Friends, don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast on Apple and drop us a review. Let me know what you thought of this episode, and please join our exclusive community on Facebook, Social Pulse Community, the network with our podcast guests like AJ, other social media pros, and gain access to helpful content resources. You’ll find the link in the show notes or just search “Social Pulse Community” on Facebook. Until next time.