LinkedIn Ads vs Google Ads: 7 Ways to Supercharge Your ROI

Google is the main channel that people start with when running marketing. You can get pretty decent quality leads by capturing searches that show intent.

A little while ago, we took over the account of a funded payment tech startup and managed to double their conversion rates without actually increasing their overall ad spend. Surprised? We’d be too had we not known the secret sauce.

You see the B2B client already had a healthy Google Ads spend and were trying out LinkedIn in parallel. They were looking to carve out a new channel but were witnessing some high conversion costs. That’s where we got involved and tweaked their LinkedIn advertising strategy. We simply pulled their Google Ads traffic and retargeted them on LinkedIn instead of starting from scratch.

You’d be thinking, “Oh, so you were being lazy!”

No, we weren’t – we were being smart. Unlike the popular strategy of going “all-out” and doing a multi-channel promotion, the real game-changer lies in building the right funnel to get the right audience to convert faster. You don’t want 10 million uninterested users coming from all directions – you just want 1 million interested ones coming your way and heading in the right direction a.k.a towards conversion.

That’s what LinkedIn Retargeting does for you. You collect the high-intent audience from Google and position your offering to them on LinkedIn. Sounds complicated? Well, it’s really not and we can help you decode this strategy.

In this article, we’ll not only cover why you should use LinkedIn Retargeting Ads to increase your Google Ads spend ROI but also reveal how you can go about doing it.

How To Retarget Google Ads Traffic On LinkedIn?

Let’s first get the technicalities covered. A lot of people steer clear of retargeting because it’s not easy to set up, too complicated to transfer the data, and whatnot. Well, these are the ones who haven’t tried it ever.

As a matter of fact, if setting up a Linkedin Retargeting Ad from Google Ads Traffic is your worry, then you can stop fretting. It’s merely a three-step process, provided you already have a successful Google Ads campaign (because that’s a different tale altogether!).

Here’s what you have to do:

• Install the Linkedin Insights Tracking pixel on your website. (It’s just a small snippet of code that you need to add to all pages of your website to track your visitors)
• Create a custom audience group on LinkedIn to specifically target your Google Ads traffic. (All google ads traffic will have sourc=adwords in the UTM which allows you to track by setting up a “contains this in the URL” rule. )
• Tell LinkedIn, “If anyone comes through Google Ads, they should be added to this bucket and targeted with this set of LinkedIn Ads.”

LinkedIn has all the functionality in place to fire this up in no time. Easy, right? Now that we’ve cleared that the technical part is simple – let’s cover the business side of things.

Why Should You Use LinkedIn Paid Ads To Increase Your Google Ads ROI?

We know there would be some skeptics out there wondering if this really such a great strategy then why aren’t people using it. As far as we know, a lot of LinkedIn Marketing experts (like us – yes, Impactable!) are already leveraging Linkedin Retargeting for B2B clients. However, unlike many – we’re also revealing this secret sauce to you, and here’s why we swear by this strategy.

1) LinkedIn Is The Ultimate B2B Destination

Let’s discuss the elephant in the room first. Why LinkedIn? We are not asking you to retarget your Google Ads traffic on Facebook or Instagram but LinkedIn, and for a good reason.

According to eMarketer, LinkedIn had the largest share of U.S. B2B display ad spending in 2021. After all, with over 750 million members and 55 million companies from more than 200 countries on their platform, they have got to be the go-to B2B digital advertising platform.

So, you have to be where your audience is. The next question is why should you “retarget” your Google Ads traffic instead of running a separate campaign there. Let’s address that now.

2) You Get High-Quality and High-Intent Audience

Let’s weigh the two options here. When you start on LinkedIn, you can either start afresh with a new audience or you can retarget to an existing one. The former will be a new set of eyes, a completely cold audience that may or may not know about you. Evidently, you would have a lesser chance of catching the eyeballs there. After all, you are literally starting from scratch there.

On the other hand, when you retarget your Google Ads traffic – you will get an audience that has already searched about you or a relevant keyword on Google, taken the effort to click on your search or display ad, and has visited your website at least once.

Which one do you think will convert faster? We’ll let you do that math and leave you with the ultimate business principle by Jeff Eisenberg, “It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” (Pretty much what we’ve been talking about since the beginning of this article!)

Given enough budget, we’d say do both! However, if you have to choose one or the other, retargeting a warm audience that has already shown intent just makes perfect sense.

3) You Save Money – A Lot Of It

We have a lot of clients who want to get into LinkedIn and carve a presence out for them there but find it expensive. Yes, advertising on LinkedIn is expensive and if you were to use it as your sole channel to earn your bread and butter, you’d be burning a hole in your pockets real soon. The cost per click (CPC) and the cost per lead (CPL) on LinkedIn are relatively much higher than most other platforms. While we’d argue the quality is worth that extra price tag but we can get into that later. Bottom line is that it can be an expensive channel to carve out.

That’s why – we always suggest retargeting. If you’re already spending on several other channels, you might as well spend a little on LinkedIn to enhance your conversion rates from those channels. In the simplest sense, those “less expensive channels” become your top-of-the-funnel mediums to add in relevant leads to your LinkedIn campaigns which can be your mid-funnel gambit.

Just take a look through your Google Ads campaigns at what you are paying for some of the highest intent clicks. When the prospect is searching Google for exactly what you do, those clicks can cost anywhere from $40-$90 due to it being such high intent/quality.

It then only makes sense if you are willing to pay that much for such high-intent traffic, that you’d do everything in your power to get the most out of it which can be done through proper retargeting over the next 90-180 days via Linkedin retargeting ads.

This way you reach a much smaller but refined audience and convert more! #EfficientSpending

4) You Can Personalize And Customize Your Funnels

Remember that account we talked about? The one where we doubled the conversion rate? Well, there was another secret there. While working on their account we realized that 80% of their traffic comes from a single campaign. Then, all we had to do was customize an ad on LinkedIn to focus on that campaign and taddaaa – conversions X 2!

Retargeting lets you personalize your funnel for each campaign and build a messaging that speaks to the audience of that campaign. For instance, if you have a Search Ad campaign targeting all your competitors’ branded keywords and that’s getting a lot of traction, then your LinkedIn messaging campaign could be a comparison sharing how you stack up against them, what you have that they don’t. You basically get a sneak-peek into what’s making people click and then all you have to do with LinkedIn ads is strengthen your messaging to push them towards your offering.

On the technical side, all you have to do is find the UTM that’s specific to that campaign and create a custom audience for it, given that you have enough traffic coming from the campaign. (Retargeting needs a minimum audience of 300)

Any Google Ads expert can tell you that not every campaign is created equally. Some are focused on the most high-intent search phrases that are almost guaranteed to produce a high converting campaign. Other campaigns are often doing some form of research where they are less focused and searching for new search phrases to add. There can be a large quality difference in the traffic these two types of campaigns produce which is why singling out the ultra high-intent campaign for retargeting can have such a huge impact.

5) You Can Get To The Hottest Leads Effectively

Just because you’re retargeting doesn’t mean you throw caution out the window. (LinkedIn’s still expensive, remember?) So, while you’re customizing your messaging on LinkedIn, you can also go ahead and customize your audience further.

On top of the retargeting, you can add filters and further demarcate your most crucial audience segments. Out of all the traffic that comes your way, you can further filter out the ones from your target geographies, job titles, functions, industries, and more. The bigger your audience gets, the more specific you can get with your filters to always reach the most relevant folks.

6) You Convert More By Staying On Their Mind

Have you heard of the Marketing Rule of 7? For the unacquainted, it says that “a prospect needs to “hear” the advertiser’s message at least 7 times before they’ll take action to buy that product or service.”

You have to understand that the customer’s journey is not a straight path – click, view, buy. We all wish it was simple. In reality, your customer might find you first on a Facebook Ad, then Google about you, then check your website, then wander away, then find you again on LinkedIn, then again check your website and then probably reach out or buy.

So, a lot of the traffic that comes to your website just needs some pushing to get to the buying stage and that’s what retargeting does for you. For B2B, your go-to choice to remind your prospect about you becomes LinkedIn because you’ve got to “do business where business gets done”.

7) You Build Your Reputation And Credibility

You may call us a little biased as marketers but we do judge people on their marketing budget and we’re sure there are plenty of professionals out there who do the same. Let’s face it, digital advertising is not a secret. So, if a business professional is finding you on Google search and display ads, seeing you creep into their inbox, watching you while scrolling their Instagram feed, and discovering you on their LinkedIn too, they’d know you have a decent marketing budget are probably a more established business.

After that, it would not take them more than 5 seconds to build your brand credibility and image. They’d know you are either funded and/or making a profit, so your product or service is worth trying out because clearly others seem to be paying for it. It’s all psychological really!

We’re sure all of these reasons are enough to convince you to try LinkedIn retargeting – so should we skip the good part?

What Kind Of LinkedIn Retargeting Ads Should You Use For Your Google Ads Traffic?

We’ll keep this quick. What do you know about the audience that you’re retargeting? That they’ve already checked out your website and know what you’re offering – so your ads don’t have to tell them what you offer. Rather, you have to tell them why they should go for you.

Here’s a quick list of the kind of ads you can try out:

• Press releases
• Client testimonials
• Success stories
• Case studies
• Relevant blog articles
• Campaign relevant messaging (like those comparative ads we talked about)

To Sum Up – Every Recipe Needs A Chef

In conclusion, for the millionth time, LinkedIn Retargeting can revolutionize your paid advertising strategy and ROI. There’s no denying that. Having said that, we do want to end with a few words of caution. First of all, all of this works only if your Google Ads are giving you quality traffic – don’t expect to start your Google Ad campaign today and have a LinkedIn retargeting campaign tomorrow. Remember, the magic number is 300. Secondly, all said and done, we are not completely dismissing other campaign strategies – they all come with their pros and cons and we can address each separately. This is just one of many which give a good ROI and increase your conversions from other campaigns.

Lastly, while we’ve revealed the secret sauce, the recipe does require a bit of expertise – knowing the best target filters, analyzing campaigns, A/B testing strategies. There’s a lot that goes behind the scenes to make a retargeting campaign a success. While you’re busy growing, you may not want to get your hands dirty in the nitty-gritty. In that case, you can always rely on us, Impactable, to do the leg work for you and assist you in hitting those conversion goals quickly. Schedule a call to explore how Impactable can help you with your business objectives!