When you run an ad campaign on LinkedIn, you expect all the accounts in your audience list to view your ad, right? However, our research reveals a shocking truth: 80% of your ads are shown to only the top 10% of the accounts 🤯
The best way to avoid losing pipeline due to such uneven ad distribution is to use a tool that allows you to control how your ads are shown to your prospects and evenly distribute impressions across your target account list.
In this article, we’ll explain how our newest feature, “Smart Reach,” can put an end to your impression distribution worries ⬇️
The Challenge
“Control is an illusion” – a quote that most B2B marketers relate to when they launch their ad campaigns and leave it all to the algorithms to show their ads to the right people and accounts. A couple of accounts may have viewed your ad too many times, whereas many may not have seen the ad enough.
Here’s an example to help you understand how impression frequency works on LinkedIn:
Suppose you have a target account list of 500 accounts, including SMBs and large companies, with the top 10 accounts being enterprises with 1000+ employees. Since enterprise companies have more employees that match your ICP, LinkedIn will more likely show your ads to larger companies, neglecting the rest of your account list.
This causes a handful of issues like:
- Ad fatigue and underexposure to your ads: Since your ads aren’t evenly distributed across your account list, some prospects would face ad fatigue, whereas others may not have seen them enough.
- Losing out on potential deals: If a sufficient number of ads are not shown to the majority of your accounts, you risk missing out on high-value deals and costing your company significant opportunities.
- Wasted ad spend: If 10% of your accounts consume 80% of the impressions, there is much room for improvement in marketing efficiency.
A lack of frequency capping becomes a major problem, especially when launching brand awareness campaigns, where your main objective is to maximize reach.
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You could maneuver this issue by creating smaller audiences across different campaigns. However, the smaller the audience size for a campaign, the higher the CPMs - which again results in wasted ad spend. Not to mention, it would get increasingly tedious to manage multiple smaller campaigns.
💡Check out our research in detail here: LinkedIn Frequency Capping: Impact Measurement
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So how do you possibly win in this lose-lose situation? 2 words: Smart Reach.
“LinkedIn budgets can scale very quickly — and if you’re unsure you’re reaching the right people, you’re essentially setting your money on fire. With Smart Reach, we’ve been able to reach the largest spread of accounts visiting our website without putting too much undue weightage on larger accounts.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.
Introducing: Smart Reach
Our newest feature allows you to manage the frequency with which your ads are displayed to each account, ensuring maximum reach, lower CPMs, and impact. Plus, with intent-based impression control, you can ensure that your ads are only shown to relevant and high-intent accounts.
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Here’s an example of how Descope uses Smart Reach to improve its ad distribution:
We analyzed Descope’s LinkedIn ad metrics to examine how Smart Reach affects campaign reach and ad spend. Our research revealed that without setting a frequency cap, the ads reached 8214 accounts, and the top 25 target accounts consumed 35% of ad impressions. This led to an ad spend of approximately $4700.
We set up a cap of 2000 impressions at an account level across all campaign groups to analyze whether there would be an impact on reach. After a month, we noticed the following improvements:
- Impressions consumed by the top 25 companies have decreased by 17% within a month.
- Descope was able to redistribute around 158,841 impressions that were earlier consumed by the top 25 companies.
- Ad spend was reduced by 22% ($1,000 less!), with CPM going down from $7 to $4
- The reach was reduced by only 6%
This proves that Smart Reach not only saves your ad spend but also ensures that your reach remains intact.
3 key benefits of Smart Reach
Better reach per dollar spent
Imagine investing a good chunk of your budget on LinkedIn ads, only to realize your ads don’t reach all the accounts in your audience list. Well, with Factors, you don’t have to imagine. Smart Reach allows you to redistribute impressions to reach more accounts per dollar spent, helping you make the most of your ad spend.
Intent-based ad distribution
Saying that all prospects are equal sounds good in theory, but in reality, that’s not the case. Ideally, sales-ready accounts should receive more ads than others. However, after analyzing 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts, we’ve found that most ads are distributed to large companies. With Factors, you can configure Smart Reach rules so that the high-intent accounts who visit the pricing page, engage with G2 pages, open emails, etc., receive ads more frequently than others.
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Conversely, accounts that have already booked a demo or expressed negative interest in a sales email should be shown fewer ads. Factors empowers intent-based ad distribution to ensure an appropriate ad frequency for each account based on intent levels.
Avoid over and underexposure
Just like Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, there should never be too much or too little of anything, whether porridge or LinkedIn ads. Your high-intent prospects shouldn’t have to deal with seeing the same ad over and over again, but they should also see your ads enough times to consider your product for their needs. Smart Reach ensures that your impression distribution is just right – automatically showing the right frequency of ads to the right accounts.
“Within a month of setting up our frequency capping rules with Factors, we’ve saved 216,448 ad impressions and reached the largest spread of accounts per dollar spent. We’re excited to scale this up in the future.”—Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.
Join the waitlist today
Every marketer launches their campaigns, hoping their ads reach all the relevant accounts at the right time. With Smart Reach, you can make it happen. Factors AdPilot offers a comprehensive range of features that ensures you make the most of your ad spend while increasing revenue via LinkedIn ads. Contact our sales team to learn how you can use AdPilot to take your LinkedIn game to the next level.