LinkedIn made a big push this year to tell advertisers not to pause their ads over the holidays, suggesting lower costs. Was it true? I'm sharing the results of $185,000 of holiday ad spend on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey, hey, 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 are trying to evolve and master their LinkedIn Ads craft and achieve true pro status. I hope you all had wonderful holidays. If you celebrated, I hope you had a blessed, peaceful Christmas. And happy new year. I wish to all of you that you only accidentally write 24 on your dates only three times instead of for two months like I usually do.
All right. So question for you. Did you run your LinkedIn Ads over the holidays or did you pause them? Lots of the advertisers I spoke to planned on pausing them, but I kept getting messages from LinkedIn reps practically begging us not to pause. So I compiled the performance results for many different ads accounts and over $185,000 in spend. And I'm walking you through my recommendations of whether you should pause over the holidays or listen to LinkedIn and leave them unpause to get better performance.
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All right, without further ado, let's get to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. You may have gotten these two. I got a ton of emails from LinkedIn reps. They were saying something along the lines of, Hey, for the month of December, don't pause your ads because lots of B2B businesses pause their campaigns leading to less clutter in the ad space, which leads to lower costs per click for you and more visibility for your brand. And then they went on to talk about lots of other benefits to not pausing over the holidays. I totally see why LinkedIn would do this. They don't want us to pause our ads because they make less money. And so they want to convince us that we should keep our ads running over the holidays. When I've done deep data analysis about this in the past, I haven't found there to actually be better performance over the holidays. So I wanted to test this again this year. So here's my methodology for how I tested this. I collected all of the ad accounts that we manage that I knew didn't make any major changes across the holidays. So that way I could rule out any sort of human intervention or changes in the account. I pulled the data for all of these accounts by day, all the way from November 1st through January 2nd. Now the vast majority of the spend in these accounts was targeting North America, which is LinkedIn's most competitive market. So that means we should have seen swings due to the holidays much more clearly. The total spend of the accounts, like I mentioned in the intro was over $185,000 over this period. So it's not a small sample size. I looked at the performance on each of the major US holidays that was Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. But I also compared the performance on the day before the holiday and then the day immediately after the holiday. And then just for fun, I also compared the metrics of the period in between Christmas and New Year's just to see if there was that whole week period where things may have lifted or fallen. This is a time where many people in the US take time off, LinkedIn employees included. So I thought this would be a really interesting look. I then compared all of those days specifically in their performance with the normal averages from November 1st until the holiday period started. And that became our baseline for what we judge all of the other metrics by. I broke the performance out by ad format and objective. Those seem to be the most interesting and the most telling. And I also calculated a bunch of custom metrics that I use to evaluate performance. For instance, instead of looking at just the normal click-through rate metric, I actually calculate a variant that I call link click-through rate. It's the combination of clicks to the landing page plus sponsored messaging clicks plus lead form opens. And I divide that by the impressions. This allows me to calculate the propensity of someone to click to a position where they can now convert. And this is the same metric across all different ad formats and all objectives. So I can use the same definition of a metric across everything. It's really cool. I also use the same definition of a link click to calculate a cost per link click. I find that to be a much more accurate measure across objectives for how much did I have to pay to put someone into a position where they can now convert. Now I found the most variants and the most interesting things by breaking them out by ad format.
Now, for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you will see my eyes look over to reference specific metrics and I won't be making eye contact with you the whole time. That's because I actually want to share with you the real metrics. All right, here we go. Single image ads. What we noticed is that engagement rates dropped across the board over the holidays. The baseline engagement rate was 0.87% and then all of the holidays, the before, during, after, and the between holidays, they were all significantly lower. They were between about 0.75 to 0.8%. So significantly less of an engagement rate, which definitely tells me that people during the holidays are less engaged. I also looked at link click through rate here because yes, they were engaging with ads less, but what if they were more likely to click on something that could then put them in a position to convert. And this kind of surprised me. Link click through rates only slightly. They did increase during our holiday times. Our average normal was 0.34% on a link click through rate basis, where in the holiday periods, that means the before, during, the day after each of these holidays, as well as the time between Christmas and new year's we saw 0.35 to 0.36. So not a huge rise, but it was a rise nonetheless. Now what about calculating this cost per link click? Because if what LinkedIn is saying is real that fewer people are running ads, so we should see costs drop, that should affect our cost per link click. And we do see this to a very small degree. The average cost per link click in the dataset was $8.70. And then we saw on the holiday, we were getting an average of $8.55. So about 15 cents less, maybe nothing to write home about, but it is a drop. The day after the holiday though, dropped down to $8.29. What was so interesting was the day before the holidays had a significantly higher cost per link click. We're averaging $10.88 over the $8.70 average. What about CPMs? We actually found that CPMs were slightly higher over the holidays than normal, but it really was just slightly. The average CPM that we were tracking was just about $30. And then we saw the holiday and the day after dropping to a little under $30. Again, the day before the holiday was more expensive though. They were averaging $36 CPM. All right. So all of those engagement metrics are one thing, but if we care about conversions, tell me about that. Well, conversion rates were lower across all the holidays that all led to higher costs per lead, especially during that break between Christmas and new year's. Now my cost per lead metric, this is costs divided by click conversions as well as leads. So it combines if you're driving conversions from the website or leads through LinkedIn lead gen forms. So our average cost per lead was about $139. The day before the holiday and on the holiday, we were averaging 199. So it really spiked higher costs per lead there. The day after the holiday dropped down to 156, which is still significantly over our normal of 139. All right. So here's my recommendation for next year. When you hear your reps saying what you should and shouldn't do, remember that engagement was down costs were up and conversions cost more across the whole board. So for single image ads specifically, I would scale way back on those or pause entirely. I just didn't see great performance from those.
All right. Next is conversation ads. When we look at the metric of open rate, that shows us how members are engaging with their messages. It shows us that they're in there when they hit open, we know they are engaging even if it is just to mark a message as red. We see low open rates on the holiday itself and then much higher open rates during the break between Christmas and new year's. This totally makes sense to me. It signals that people were logging in and they were receiving these messages on the holidays, but they weren't actually opening them until after and during the break. For example, our normal open rate here across the dataset was around 41%. On holidays, it was about 31%. So quite a bit lower. But then if we look at the period between Christmas and new year's, we see a 46.9% open rate. Definitely people catching up. I also looked at this cost per link click metric we see on the holiday itself. Cost per link click was significantly higher. It was almost $30 when normal is about 21. Then because we had so many opens between Christmas and new year's in the period that I'll call the break that cost per link click drop down to $17. So about $5 less than average universally across the board. Conversion rates were lower during the holidays. Normal average conversion rate here across the dataset is about 24%. It was averaging during the holidays of about 21%. It did spike a little bit during the break. It spiked up to 25%. Now, if I had to guess, I would say that during the break is when people are having a lot fewer emails come in. They're able to think a little bit more. They're not quite as busy. And that's when they're opening and converting on some of those conversation ads. So my recommendation next year, go ahead and pause sponsored messaging on the day of the holiday, but then turn right back on immediately after. Next are thought leader ads. Thought leader ads are so interesting because it tells us a lot about how members are interacting with their newsfeed during the holiday. We see engagement rates are higher than average before and during the holiday, but actually dropped the day after. But those are engagement rates. When we look at link click through rates, which is usually what I'm most interested in. If you have a thought leader ad that will drive to some sort of a link or a landing page, our link click through rate was about 0.18%. The day before the holiday, it was 0.4. So it was over double on the holiday itself, still higher than normal. And then the day after it drops down to 0.12%. The break in between was about 0.3%. So still almost double the average. I'm not quite sure over holidays why we'd see engagement rates drop, but link click through rates increase. Not totally sure, but I'd love to hear your ideas on that. Now, normal CPMs on thought leader ads were about $31. The day before holidays, they spiked up to $38. But then on the day of the holiday and the day after they dropped a little bit from average. Strangely enough, during the break, CPMs were about $5 higher than they were on average. So based off of those findings, my recommendation next year is go ahead and pause your thought leader ads on the holiday itself, but keep active before and after. All right, now how about video consumption on holidays? Are you running video ads? I love them. This one actually really surprised me. View rates for video ads were universally depressed compared to the average. The average is about 23% view rates, but then during the holidays, either before and after, they were hovered between about 16 to 19%. So definitely seems like fewer people are willing to actually start engaging with video content. I tracked a cost per 25% view metric, a cost per 50%, cost per 75% and cost per completion. And what we noticed is that cost per 25% view, 50% and 75% were all lower than the average. So this is kind of cool. For example, here cost per 25% video view hovered around 31% on average, but it jumped between about 0.12 and 0.29 during the holidays. Cost per completion was only higher on the holiday itself and the rest of the holidays, it was lower than the average. So having lower video view rates, but also lower costs signals to me a drop in competition, just like LinkedIn says, we're getting slightly better video costing here because other advertisers are pausing their ads. And even though there are fewer people to see the ads, it all lowers down and costs us less. Video completion rate was a really interesting metric here because they are higher across the board than average, meaning fewer people are starting to watch the videos, but the ones who do, they end up watching longer. This is really encouraging for video content. To put some numbers here, the average video completion rate was 3.4%. And then the day before the holiday, 5.3, the day of the holiday, 4.7 and the day after 5.2. Then that break in between, we're at 5.6. So crazy high video completion rates. That's really interesting. So my recommendation for next year, keep running video ads during the holidays. Doesn't seem like you can go wrong. For all of these metrics, I combined the holidays, but we have to ask ourselves which holiday actually wins here. So I pulled each holiday out individually to analyze it. Interestingly enough, Thanksgiving has the highest ad engagement rates and the lowest cost per engagement. I don't know what to credit that to, except maybe if we're advertising to the entire North American continent, the Canadian audience, though smaller, if they're not actually celebrating Thanksgiving, then maybe we'd see engagement rates that didn't fall as much. New Year's Day had the highest video view rate and the very best consumption metrics for video. So I think people were sitting back on New Year's Day as they were lounging around and watching video content. Works for me. Thanksgiving had the best link click through rate, but New Year's had the lowest cost per link click. Thanksgiving won the award for having the lowest cost per conversion. Now Christmas didn't have the best metrics for anything, but I'm going to give it an award for my favorite holiday simply because of how much I love Jesus.
So as for takeaways, would I advertise over the holidays with my own money? No, I probably wouldn't. I would keep video ads running and in fact I'd still go video thought leader ads. I think they're still going to perform really well, but pretty much the rest of the metrics across the board weren't impressive to me. I wouldn't go out of my way to advertise on those days. Now one major caveat here is that all of these accounts, because they are under our management, we are bidding really carefully for the majority of these were bidding manual CPC, which means if there were major spikes in CPMs and CPCs, we wouldn't see it. We would just see less volume. So it is totally possible that some of you saw costs super spike, especially when those engagement rates dropped and it's because you're bidding by maximum delivery, which I get it's LinkedIn's default. So you might just select it thinking that that's going to be the best thing, but if you did see your costs spike, remember, go check out episode 89 of the podcast where we talk about bidding strategies. A manual CPC bid is going to get you the lowest costs 90% of the time. I would love to hear how your ads performed over the holidays or even just a simple note saying we didn't take the bait. We paused all our ads. If so, good for you.
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