The Ultimate LinkedIn Ads Playbook from $200M in Spend | AJ Wilcox
The Ultimate LinkedIn Ads Playbook from $200M in Spend | AJ Wilcox
The Ultimate LinkedIn Ads Playbook from $200M in Spend | AJ Wilcox
Eleven years. One ad channel. Over $200 million in managed spend.
When AJ Wilcox started B2Linked in 2014, locking an entire agency into a single ad platform looked like commercial suicide. LinkedIn ads were expensive, niche, and largely ignored by mainstream B2B marketers. He bet his career on it anyway, and built what's now arguably the world's most concentrated authority on a single ad channel.
In the latest episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, AJ joined host Surender (Co-Founder, Hawky.ai) to unpack what $200M in LinkedIn ad spend has actually taught him. The headline takeaway? A lot of B2B advertisers are paying twice what they need to before their ads ever reach a real human, and it has almost nothing to do with creative.
About AJ Wilcox: The Specialist Who Bet on One Channel
AJ founded B2Linked.com after stumbling into LinkedIn ads in a previous in-house role, where he scaled the channel into LinkedIn's largest spending account worldwide. Today, B2Linked is the only ad agency that's a certified LinkedIn partner, has managed over $200M in LinkedIn ad spend, and counts five of LinkedIn's top 10 spending accounts as clients.
He's also the host of The LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, the author of LinkedIn Ads Demystified, and a fixture on stages from Social Media Marketing World to Inbound and HeroConf. His thesis from day one, "be the best in the world at one thing", is the throughline of everything he shared.
The Three Default Settings Quietly Draining B2B Budgets
Ask AJ where most LinkedIn budgets actually go to die, and he doesn't talk about creative fatigue or ICP misalignment. He points at three boxes LinkedIn ticks for you the moment you build a campaign.
Audience Expansion. "If you leave it on, you're going to wonder why you're getting leads that are not high quality, they're not from your targeting set." Uncheck it.
LinkedIn Audience Network. It looks great on top-of-funnel metrics, low CPCs, high CTRs, but a lot of that traffic is fraud. AJ shared one stat from a partner test: 67% of an entire month's audience network budget on a client account went to a single Android Sudoku app. "That tells me the developer was committing fraud."
Maximum Delivery Bidding. LinkedIn's default and most expensive option. AJ's fix is a hidden setting called manual cost-per-click, bid significantly under LinkedIn's recommendation and watch costs drop.
His verdict is sharp: "Just by doing these three things, you'll get your costs way lower, probably half of what your competitors are paying."
Engagement Retargeting: LinkedIn's Most Underrated Weapon
If defaults are where money leaks, engagement retargeting is where it compounds. Standard website retargeting on LinkedIn is, in AJ's words, "like trying to carry water in a leaky bucket", more than 50% of users now run cookie-stripping browsers, so the audience evaporates.
Engagement retargeting bypasses cookies entirely. LinkedIn knows who watched 25% of your video, engaged with your document, or visited your company page, because they were logged in when they did it. That signal is the foundation of B2Linked's three-stage funnel:
Stage 1 (Cold): Thought leader video ads from internal executives.
Stage 2: Brand-led video plus static creative, retargeted from Stage 1 engagers.
Stage 3: Single-image ads and message ads driving demos and lead gen, retargeted from Stage 2.
The discipline that holds this together: as soon as someone engages with Stage 1, they're excluded from it. Same for Stage 2. Without those exclusions, ad sets cannibalize each other and bottom-of-funnel starves.
The 36% Open-Rate Glitch, and Why Message Ads Are Back
For two years, conversation ads were the default play in LinkedIn's inbox. Then about six months ago, B2Linked noticed something: conversation ads couldn't get open rates above 35%, while older message ads were clearing 55%.
"There is no reason why they should have a difference in their open rate. It looks like a glitch to me." LinkedIn maintains nothing has changed. AJ has moved his clients back to message ads regardless.
The math is brutal: a 36% lift in opens means 36% more clicks, which means 36% more conversions for the same spend. Until LinkedIn reconciles the two formats, his playbook is to capture that margin manually.
The Creative Truth Most B2B Brands Refuse to Hear
Ask AJ which lever moves the needle most after targeting and bidding, and he points to creative, but not the kind most B2B brands are comfortable shipping.
"B2B advertisers have been very, very boring. As soon as we come to LinkedIn, the tie is on, the shirt's all buttoned up." His most consistent finding across hundreds of accounts: witty, human-feeling videos outperform brand-compliant ones, sometimes dramatically. One partnership with a B2B video studio produced the highest-performing video content B2Linked had ever measured across five client accounts in a row.
A smaller example with outsized impact: bright-colored captions on video ads. Step away from your brand palette and "you can get twice as many people to view to the end", which translates directly into half the cost per click and half the cost per conversion.
His creative stack-rank by funnel stage:
Top of funnel: Video, ideally thought leader video from your founder or executive team.
Mid-funnel: Brand video plus static.
Bottom of funnel: Single-image ads and message ads outperform everything else for demo asks.
And a warning on rotation: don't load seven creatives into one ad set. "You're going to have one that takes 70% of impressions, one that takes 25%, and the other five share the last 5% and never run." Two creatives per ad set is the sweet spot.
Key Takeaways from the Episode
Audit the defaults first. Audience expansion, the audience network, and maximum delivery bidding are the three biggest leaks in most LinkedIn accounts.
Use engagement retargeting, not website retargeting. It's cookie-free and one of LinkedIn's most underused signals.
Run a strict three-stage funnel with audience exclusions. Without them, ad sets cannibalize each other and BOFU starves.
Move back to message ads, for now. They're delivering 36% more opens than conversation ads in B2Linked's parallel tests.
Drop the brand-guideline armor on creative. Witty, founder-led video and bright caption colors consistently win, and never put more than two creatives in a single ad set.
Eleven years. One ad channel. Over $200 million in managed spend.
When AJ Wilcox started B2Linked in 2014, locking an entire agency into a single ad platform looked like commercial suicide. LinkedIn ads were expensive, niche, and largely ignored by mainstream B2B marketers. He bet his career on it anyway, and built what's now arguably the world's most concentrated authority on a single ad channel.
In the latest episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, AJ joined host Surender (Co-Founder, Hawky.ai) to unpack what $200M in LinkedIn ad spend has actually taught him. The headline takeaway? A lot of B2B advertisers are paying twice what they need to before their ads ever reach a real human, and it has almost nothing to do with creative.
About AJ Wilcox: The Specialist Who Bet on One Channel
AJ founded B2Linked.com after stumbling into LinkedIn ads in a previous in-house role, where he scaled the channel into LinkedIn's largest spending account worldwide. Today, B2Linked is the only ad agency that's a certified LinkedIn partner, has managed over $200M in LinkedIn ad spend, and counts five of LinkedIn's top 10 spending accounts as clients.
He's also the host of The LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, the author of LinkedIn Ads Demystified, and a fixture on stages from Social Media Marketing World to Inbound and HeroConf. His thesis from day one, "be the best in the world at one thing", is the throughline of everything he shared.
The Three Default Settings Quietly Draining B2B Budgets
Ask AJ where most LinkedIn budgets actually go to die, and he doesn't talk about creative fatigue or ICP misalignment. He points at three boxes LinkedIn ticks for you the moment you build a campaign.
Audience Expansion. "If you leave it on, you're going to wonder why you're getting leads that are not high quality, they're not from your targeting set." Uncheck it.
LinkedIn Audience Network. It looks great on top-of-funnel metrics, low CPCs, high CTRs, but a lot of that traffic is fraud. AJ shared one stat from a partner test: 67% of an entire month's audience network budget on a client account went to a single Android Sudoku app. "That tells me the developer was committing fraud."
Maximum Delivery Bidding. LinkedIn's default and most expensive option. AJ's fix is a hidden setting called manual cost-per-click, bid significantly under LinkedIn's recommendation and watch costs drop.
His verdict is sharp: "Just by doing these three things, you'll get your costs way lower, probably half of what your competitors are paying."
Engagement Retargeting: LinkedIn's Most Underrated Weapon
If defaults are where money leaks, engagement retargeting is where it compounds. Standard website retargeting on LinkedIn is, in AJ's words, "like trying to carry water in a leaky bucket", more than 50% of users now run cookie-stripping browsers, so the audience evaporates.
Engagement retargeting bypasses cookies entirely. LinkedIn knows who watched 25% of your video, engaged with your document, or visited your company page, because they were logged in when they did it. That signal is the foundation of B2Linked's three-stage funnel:
Stage 1 (Cold): Thought leader video ads from internal executives.
Stage 2: Brand-led video plus static creative, retargeted from Stage 1 engagers.
Stage 3: Single-image ads and message ads driving demos and lead gen, retargeted from Stage 2.
The discipline that holds this together: as soon as someone engages with Stage 1, they're excluded from it. Same for Stage 2. Without those exclusions, ad sets cannibalize each other and bottom-of-funnel starves.
The 36% Open-Rate Glitch, and Why Message Ads Are Back
For two years, conversation ads were the default play in LinkedIn's inbox. Then about six months ago, B2Linked noticed something: conversation ads couldn't get open rates above 35%, while older message ads were clearing 55%.
"There is no reason why they should have a difference in their open rate. It looks like a glitch to me." LinkedIn maintains nothing has changed. AJ has moved his clients back to message ads regardless.
The math is brutal: a 36% lift in opens means 36% more clicks, which means 36% more conversions for the same spend. Until LinkedIn reconciles the two formats, his playbook is to capture that margin manually.
The Creative Truth Most B2B Brands Refuse to Hear
Ask AJ which lever moves the needle most after targeting and bidding, and he points to creative, but not the kind most B2B brands are comfortable shipping.
"B2B advertisers have been very, very boring. As soon as we come to LinkedIn, the tie is on, the shirt's all buttoned up." His most consistent finding across hundreds of accounts: witty, human-feeling videos outperform brand-compliant ones, sometimes dramatically. One partnership with a B2B video studio produced the highest-performing video content B2Linked had ever measured across five client accounts in a row.
A smaller example with outsized impact: bright-colored captions on video ads. Step away from your brand palette and "you can get twice as many people to view to the end", which translates directly into half the cost per click and half the cost per conversion.
His creative stack-rank by funnel stage:
Top of funnel: Video, ideally thought leader video from your founder or executive team.
Mid-funnel: Brand video plus static.
Bottom of funnel: Single-image ads and message ads outperform everything else for demo asks.
And a warning on rotation: don't load seven creatives into one ad set. "You're going to have one that takes 70% of impressions, one that takes 25%, and the other five share the last 5% and never run." Two creatives per ad set is the sweet spot.
Key Takeaways from the Episode
Audit the defaults first. Audience expansion, the audience network, and maximum delivery bidding are the three biggest leaks in most LinkedIn accounts.
Use engagement retargeting, not website retargeting. It's cookie-free and one of LinkedIn's most underused signals.
Run a strict three-stage funnel with audience exclusions. Without them, ad sets cannibalize each other and BOFU starves.
Move back to message ads, for now. They're delivering 36% more opens than conversation ads in B2Linked's parallel tests.
Drop the brand-guideline armor on creative. Witty, founder-led video and bright caption colors consistently win, and never put more than two creatives in a single ad set.
Eleven years. One ad channel. Over $200 million in managed spend.
When AJ Wilcox started B2Linked in 2014, locking an entire agency into a single ad platform looked like commercial suicide. LinkedIn ads were expensive, niche, and largely ignored by mainstream B2B marketers. He bet his career on it anyway, and built what's now arguably the world's most concentrated authority on a single ad channel.
In the latest episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, AJ joined host Surender (Co-Founder, Hawky.ai) to unpack what $200M in LinkedIn ad spend has actually taught him. The headline takeaway? A lot of B2B advertisers are paying twice what they need to before their ads ever reach a real human, and it has almost nothing to do with creative.
About AJ Wilcox: The Specialist Who Bet on One Channel
AJ founded B2Linked.com after stumbling into LinkedIn ads in a previous in-house role, where he scaled the channel into LinkedIn's largest spending account worldwide. Today, B2Linked is the only ad agency that's a certified LinkedIn partner, has managed over $200M in LinkedIn ad spend, and counts five of LinkedIn's top 10 spending accounts as clients.
He's also the host of The LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, the author of LinkedIn Ads Demystified, and a fixture on stages from Social Media Marketing World to Inbound and HeroConf. His thesis from day one, "be the best in the world at one thing", is the throughline of everything he shared.
The Three Default Settings Quietly Draining B2B Budgets
Ask AJ where most LinkedIn budgets actually go to die, and he doesn't talk about creative fatigue or ICP misalignment. He points at three boxes LinkedIn ticks for you the moment you build a campaign.
Audience Expansion. "If you leave it on, you're going to wonder why you're getting leads that are not high quality, they're not from your targeting set." Uncheck it.
LinkedIn Audience Network. It looks great on top-of-funnel metrics, low CPCs, high CTRs, but a lot of that traffic is fraud. AJ shared one stat from a partner test: 67% of an entire month's audience network budget on a client account went to a single Android Sudoku app. "That tells me the developer was committing fraud."
Maximum Delivery Bidding. LinkedIn's default and most expensive option. AJ's fix is a hidden setting called manual cost-per-click, bid significantly under LinkedIn's recommendation and watch costs drop.
His verdict is sharp: "Just by doing these three things, you'll get your costs way lower, probably half of what your competitors are paying."
Engagement Retargeting: LinkedIn's Most Underrated Weapon
If defaults are where money leaks, engagement retargeting is where it compounds. Standard website retargeting on LinkedIn is, in AJ's words, "like trying to carry water in a leaky bucket", more than 50% of users now run cookie-stripping browsers, so the audience evaporates.
Engagement retargeting bypasses cookies entirely. LinkedIn knows who watched 25% of your video, engaged with your document, or visited your company page, because they were logged in when they did it. That signal is the foundation of B2Linked's three-stage funnel:
Stage 1 (Cold): Thought leader video ads from internal executives.
Stage 2: Brand-led video plus static creative, retargeted from Stage 1 engagers.
Stage 3: Single-image ads and message ads driving demos and lead gen, retargeted from Stage 2.
The discipline that holds this together: as soon as someone engages with Stage 1, they're excluded from it. Same for Stage 2. Without those exclusions, ad sets cannibalize each other and bottom-of-funnel starves.
The 36% Open-Rate Glitch, and Why Message Ads Are Back
For two years, conversation ads were the default play in LinkedIn's inbox. Then about six months ago, B2Linked noticed something: conversation ads couldn't get open rates above 35%, while older message ads were clearing 55%.
"There is no reason why they should have a difference in their open rate. It looks like a glitch to me." LinkedIn maintains nothing has changed. AJ has moved his clients back to message ads regardless.
The math is brutal: a 36% lift in opens means 36% more clicks, which means 36% more conversions for the same spend. Until LinkedIn reconciles the two formats, his playbook is to capture that margin manually.
The Creative Truth Most B2B Brands Refuse to Hear
Ask AJ which lever moves the needle most after targeting and bidding, and he points to creative, but not the kind most B2B brands are comfortable shipping.
"B2B advertisers have been very, very boring. As soon as we come to LinkedIn, the tie is on, the shirt's all buttoned up." His most consistent finding across hundreds of accounts: witty, human-feeling videos outperform brand-compliant ones, sometimes dramatically. One partnership with a B2B video studio produced the highest-performing video content B2Linked had ever measured across five client accounts in a row.
A smaller example with outsized impact: bright-colored captions on video ads. Step away from your brand palette and "you can get twice as many people to view to the end", which translates directly into half the cost per click and half the cost per conversion.
His creative stack-rank by funnel stage:
Top of funnel: Video, ideally thought leader video from your founder or executive team.
Mid-funnel: Brand video plus static.
Bottom of funnel: Single-image ads and message ads outperform everything else for demo asks.
And a warning on rotation: don't load seven creatives into one ad set. "You're going to have one that takes 70% of impressions, one that takes 25%, and the other five share the last 5% and never run." Two creatives per ad set is the sweet spot.
Key Takeaways from the Episode
Audit the defaults first. Audience expansion, the audience network, and maximum delivery bidding are the three biggest leaks in most LinkedIn accounts.
Use engagement retargeting, not website retargeting. It's cookie-free and one of LinkedIn's most underused signals.
Run a strict three-stage funnel with audience exclusions. Without them, ad sets cannibalize each other and BOFU starves.
Move back to message ads, for now. They're delivering 36% more opens than conversation ads in B2Linked's parallel tests.
Drop the brand-guideline armor on creative. Witty, founder-led video and bright caption colors consistently win, and never put more than two creatives in a single ad set.
Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Winning with Creative Intelligence?
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Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Winning with Creative Intelligence?
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Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Winning with Creative Intelligence?
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