#7 - How long does it take to start seeing results from Linkedin Paid Ads?

This is another common question as people tend to be a bit anxious to start getting leads and closing deals as soon as possible. 

I’ll level with you a bit here. If you aren’t aware of this yet, I'll be the bearer of somewhat bad news. Marketing is a long-term play that builds momentum over time and is not as quick and transactional as you might hope it to be in the beginning. 

By that, I mean that any new channel has its growing pains, optimization time, and momentum-building time periods. 

So what exactly does that look like for LinkedIn paid ads? Depends. This depends on if you are running other channels, what your budget is, and also how long your normal sales cycle is. 

Not quite the answer you expected? I know and I’m sorry. I really wish I could give you some guru advice of averages that gave you a warm fuzzy feeling that you could know leads and revenue would just start dropping in after the 35-day mark but that’s just not how it works all the time. 

So here are the most common scenarios I see and how they play out. 

1. 
   Linkedin ads in a silo -No other channels
   
   

This is the toughest situation to be in terms of probably having to really set realistic expectations. Carving out your first paid ads channel is no joke and takes some time and consistency but here is how it works. 

1. First 30 days you’ll be putting cold ads in front of your target audience and trying to drive down the cost per click while you build up the retargeting audience. Don't expect many if any conversions in the first 30 days. 

Depending on your budget, you could expect to get into retargeting phase after the 30-45 day mark which is when you start seeing your first signs of actual life. 

During the initial retargeting phase the audience size is small and a $10/day budget for the retargeting side is enough to dominate their feeds. You’ll notice cost per click drop dramatically from cold to retargeting. 

As the retargeting audience grows from 300 up to 2,000 or so, the $10/day is usually still enough and you should really start to see leads/conversions start dropping in. 

At this point, you’ve had the time and data to really optimize your cold campaign and maybe boiled it down to the top 2 ads and hopefully even gotten some likes/comments on your ads which helps further drive down the cost per click. 

There are also all sorts of retargeting strategies and layers that can come into play at this point to really move the needle and improve conversion rates but we can get into that on a later episode with advanced retargeting. For now, just know it might take 3-4 months to carve out a profitable ROI on Linkedin ads if it’s your first paid ads channel or you run it in a sllo. 

Listen to full episode for the rest of info...