LinkedIn Ads Budgeting and Prediction - Tools Spotlight - Ep 55 - a podcast by AJ Wilcox

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Email the guest: jon@shape.io

Coupon Code on Shape.io: B2

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

AJ Wilcox
Managing budgets on LinkedIn Ads is so hard. Help! Well, not when you're using one specific tool. Stay tuned to hear all about it on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So the LinkedIn Ads partner ecosystem is still pretty thin, especially when we compare it with those super robust partner ecosystems across all the other ad platforms. So we want to start shining a spotlight on some of the most valuable and useful tools that us advertisers can get used to and get to use for better performance. Today's episode is covering a LinkedIn Ads tool that you may not have heard of, Shape.io. It's a tool for budget reporting, budget prediction, and even budget management. It's a very niche offering, but the things that it does, it does very, very well and it's priced very reasonably. Most advertisers I've talked to haven't heard of the tool, so I wanted to introduce it a little bit to you. Now this episode is not meant to be an ad for Shape.io. I'm a longtime user, for sure, and I do gush a bit in the episode about just how useful we found the app. The recommendations that I make here, though, are my own and shape didn't compensate us to be featured here. Alright, with that out of the way. Let's jump into the interview with Jon.

AJ Wilcox
All right, Jon Davis. Jon is a co-founder of Shape. He spent seven years as a PPC consultant, an agency analyst, and a department manager before leaving to build useful apps for other PPC analysts. The origins of shape come from problems Jon saw firsthand in our industry, he focuses on product direction, customer service, and sales for the company. Jon, anything I missed here in the intro?

Jon Davis
Yeah, well, AJ, first off, thanks a lot for having me, I'd say a little, maybe just a little bit more about where our company is Bend, Oregon. Really cool town, if you're into mountain biking, or skiing, snowboarding. Or if you'd like to play golf, like I do golf more my favorite hobbies. I've got two little boys that are four and six years old, that take up a lot of my time and not too much else really, truly interesting about me to be honest. My wife is pretty interesting. She is a former professional cyclist for about 10 years. Raced for team USA, has climbed every mountain in Europe on her bike, and has a lot of really cool stories. She ran track at University of Oregon, which is a really big deal for us out here that live in Oregon. So that's a little bit about the personal life and if you want to hear anything really interesting, get my wife on maybe if she ever gets into digital marketing.

AJ Wilcox
Love it! Well, I can't say any way that I would have like come across your wife because I have not climbed every mountain in Europe. I was just skiing this last weekend. So that is super cool. I will have to make my way up there to Bend.

Jon Davis
Yeah, we're about let's see from our office here about 25 minutes from the bottom of the lift at Mount Bachelor, which is our local mountain here that has a lot of great terrain and a little bit of a bummer this year, low on the snow here in Oregon this year. But Bend is a great town to come in the summertime. Really great weather, no humidity. And I could go on and on and sound like a tourist worker for the City of Bend, but if you like high elevation mountain towns, you should come check out Bend for sure.

AJ Wilcox
I do. I like how high elevation and I especially love the no humidity thing. I'm on my way now.

Jon Davis
Yeah, I lived in Georgia for about 10 years so I'm ready to never go back to humidity ever again.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, I get that. Cool. Well, obviously, I want to have you on here as a tool spotlight because Shape is I think the only tool I know of for LinkedIn ads that does what it does. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what the challenges are that advertisers face and how shapes solves them?

Jon Davis
Sure. First off, I'd be really curious. How would you describe what Shape does? As a customer? Are we allowed to say that?

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, we totally get you. Okay, so I probably will have said this in the intro. But I've been a longtime user of Shape, right, as soon as you guys got access to LinkedIn's API. I think I was one of the first if not the first user and I'm a big fan. So that being said, yeah. What Shape does it from my experience here is its budget tracking and its budget prediction. You know, for all of our clients, let's say we have 50 clients all advertising right now, at any given time, we can be getting alerts of like, hey, we've spent 48% of our month's budget on like, halfway through the month, and I'll know I'm on track, or we can have it automatically pause campaigns, if it's three days till the end of the month, and we've already spent all of the budget. So it's pretty much an insurance policy against like, spending a client's budget incorrectly. What would you add to that?

Jon Davis
Yeah, good job. Are you interested in SDR role or anything here at Shape? That's really our focus is budgeting and helping PPC analysts budget at scale. My background, like you said is in PPC, working as an outside consultant to agency analysts to managing a department of eight analysts at an agency and my background was working specifically in industries like self storage, multifamily housing, senior living communities. Our clients had lots of different budgets in lots of different places, all with managers at that apartment community that had a vested interest in how their budget was being spent. They had a lot of stakeholders. One thing I always say is, nobody has overspent more PPC budgets than me and my career back when I was an analyst. I got promoted to a manager role, but was still trying to manage budgets, and was over my head and things were slipping through the cracks. For me, it always felt like man, this shouldn't be this hard. And that is, you know, really where Shape tries to step in and help. The first version of shape was really focused on, like you were saying, just a pure alerting out to you, hey, you're about to run out of your budget, here's an email alert. Phase two of shape was allowing you to from the interface, when you got that alert went in, saw, oh, man, I need to pause these campaigns, or I need to raise the budget, whatever it is to do that right from Shape and be able to push those edits. So to move out from just being that reporting and alerting tool and then the phase that we're still living in today with Shape is to do a lot of that through automations and layering different automations on there, if you choose. So let's say you've got a PPC client with a $500 a month budget, you've got 10 campaigns across Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, all these places, feeding off that $500 budget, link those campaigns into that budget and when our system detects, you've hit that $500, like you see, will shut those campaigns down, pause them for the rest of the month, wait either to the beginning of the next month, or for more budget to be added and turn those campaigns back on. So really automating a lot of that manual work. I've seen every budgeting spreadsheet template you could imagine working in this space over the years and there's just no substitute for software coming in checking it every hour, every half hour for spend providing predictions, like you say, to help you kind of predict where you're going as well. We really primarily sell to agencies because they're facing that scale problem more than an in house team. We have a few in house customers, which we say are like in house teams with agency dynamics. So maybe they have a lot of franchises they're managing or something like that. But for us, really, we found that PPC agencies are where we have the most product market fit and where people find the most value. Our original name was Steady Budget, before we change to Shape and rebranded. So we've really been focused on budgeting since we released this product.

AJ Wilcox
Alright, so this might be leading the witness a little bit, but I'm curious to hear from you. Why is this an important problem to solve? What's the downsides or risks to overspending a budget?

Jon Davis
Sure. Yeah, I speak from my experience as an analyst. I knew the client would like kind of care maybe about what the cost per click was, I knew they at least have some interest in click through rate to see like how well their ads were responding. But I knew for sure, they cared about how much they spent at the end of that month, or the end of that cycle. And so for me, budgeting has always been one of those core things that really, clients are really focused on. I've really view a lot of PPC really kind of circles around three main pillars. There's the client, there's the analyst that they've hired, and there's the budget that they both agreed to. And that budget, client, customer, analyst relationship is one that kind of rotates around almost every PPC campaign, I think out there and by kind of like keeping that at the core and organizing all your data in Shape around those budgets, I think it works really well for agencies that that's really the first goal, okay, let's make sure we spend the budget accurately. You've got that confidence with your client and customer that hey, they said they're gonna spend $600 bucks they spend $600 bucks, we can trust them to do that. Now let's focus on more deeper agency client relationship things through communication and writing new ad copy and getting new test set up.

AJ Wilcox
I love it. I just want to add on to that. When I very first started B2Linked as an ad agency, I went out and I had to get business insurance and looked at all kinds of different insurances. I realized the most important thing, the worst thing that I could end up doing to a client is overspending their budget. This is spending money that they did not give us permission to spend. So I talked to several insurance agents at the time, not a single one of the policies I was looking at would cover overspending. So I realized I am on my own, it only took one overspending a client's budget before I went, Ah, I get this. This leaves me legally liable here. I think I need Shape.

Jon Davis
Yeah, we've been there too. We've researched the same thing from our end, like, hey, let's say servers went out, stuff that goes crazy early on, and there's a hiccup can we get insurance for that? Really it doesn't exist. Early on in Steady Budget Shape history in 2014-2015, I definitely stayed up at night a little worried about that. Now six, seven years in, if we ever get a support ticket, that's like a Shape overspent by budget or there's, you know, some fire like that that comes up, I know for sure that shape did what it was supposed to do, because that's our number one priority as a software. We have to be that insurance policy and every single time somebody or client or customer comes to us, you know, they believe in overspend occurred in Shape, it's every single time user error, or some setting they didn't get changed maybe the way they were supposed to. We really view that as our responsibility to help educate them on that, but from our perspective, I now sleep soundly knowing that we pause the campaigns when we're supposed to pause them, we turn them on when we're just supposed to turn them on. The code is as bulletproof as it could possibly be because we are out there. You know, we're out on the limb saying we're not going to overspend these budgets. Shape processes over a billion dollars a year in ad spend for our customers. And I promise you, we don't have a billion dollars in our bank account right now to potentially cover that overspend. So one thing that we believe 100% is the logic is rock solid because it has to be.

AJ Wilcox
Very cool. One technical question I've got for you. I wonder how much will Shape allow a campaign or an account to overspend? And also having API access to LinkedIn Ads myself, I know that the API is kind of weak, it's limited, at least in the past, LinkedIn has limited us to say, you are not allowed to request the same information more than four times per day or something. So realizing that you can only inquire from LinkedIn's API every so often, how much exposure does that allow you or kind of force Shape to not have noticed and overspend since the last time it requested?

Jon Davis
Sure, yeah, the good thing is working with them like on the tech side as a software provider, that's then going to license your software out to other providers, as you get a little different parameters and a little bit more often than maybe, you know, going as an individual through the API for your own account. So we have the ability, we're pulling in to make sure that no overspends occur. On a platform like LinkedIn where you're seeing pretty high cost per clicks and, you know, if you get a setting wrong, you can get away from you quick, we're able to really check on that spend at least once an hour through the day.

AJ Wilcox
Great. Is there any sort of logic to say, it looks like we're getting close to a budget so we're gonna start checking more often? We're gonna check every 15 minutes rather than every hour?

Jon Davis
Yeah, great question. And we do. So as we like, see that percentage of budget remaining kind of tightening up it, those types of budgets will float a little higher up into the queue priority that we have run it through and our logic that's just constantly churning through all the budgets on our platform. So we're trying to check that a little more often as we can as it gets kind of down closer. The other thing is, we've got a lot of previous data on how rapidly the those campaigns can spend so we can make a judgment around, okay, well, we don't have to start dialing up that check just yet, because we got a really good feel for how much this is going to spend based on historical data and with some of our automations we've got a little built in buffer on the underspend side of a couple percent, to make sure that if we err one way or another, we're going to make sure we under spend that budget by a percent or half percent then over spend it by a percent or half percent.

AJ Wilcox
I love it. That's fantastic. We've mentioned a little bit about this, but tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as the other ad platforms. Who do you support? What's your relationship like all that?

Jon Davis
Well, my personal relationship with LinkedIn is mostly as a user, somebody out there trying to promote my B2B software, putting How To videos up. It's really been, for our company, one of our most powerful channels to getting new product releases out there, getting some engagement on videos. I've run LinkedIn campaigns for myself and others and have some experience in there, but my primary professional background is with Google Search Ads. That's where I spent the majority of my career before leaving to work on software to solve PPC problems. I graduated college in 2006. In about mid 2007 was learning more about, I was in marketing, I was working in sales making 100 outbound calls a day. I thought hmmm, it'd be a lot easier if people called me and started working on our company website to get optimized for some SEO basics, which back then you could send almost anything to page one with a few easy tweaks, it was a magical time to be in digital marketing. From that time of like 2007, when I realized that these are people searching for products. Here's, you know, this search engine serving up ads for people that want to be shown to those people, it really did feel like magic to me, and I've been in PPC for the last 15 years ever since. So my relationship kind of goes back through the agency world every way you kind of touched the various platforms and Shape in particular, we sync with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, along with the Facebook, you get instagram along with Google, there's YouTube. So for those real main platforms, we go really deep with our integrations, there may be other PPC platforms out there or reporting platforms that have 500 data connections with every possible place, you can imagine pulling in a piece of data, we've really honed in on the top five, eight places that be placing ads for your clients and focused on really deep integrations with those where instead of just reporting on that data, we're pushing back out a lot of automations to all these platforms that we can. And so I think I've tended to live a lot in the search world, so one of the big reason Shape exists is combining search and social kind of into one budget. You know, a lot of these ad platforms don't have too much incentive to really integrate with other data. I don't think it's going to be too soon to where Google is going to be pulling in LinkedIn data. And LinkedIn is going to be allowing them to make like two way changes on a lot of campaigns through their tool. Through the years, there's maybe like backdoor ways in platforms have done it, and you're seeing Microsoft maybe take some steps. But none of the products are really enterprise or agency scale level, they're really meant to kind of help the individual advertiser manage, you know, a few campaigns, not the agency manage 1,000s of campaigns. So that's where one of the big things that Shape allows you to do is pull in all those campaigns from different places, put it under one client, micro group those in the budgets, and feel really good. You're spending your budget allocation where you want to be spending it.

Jon Davis
Love it. Any future plans for other platforms, like are you thinking Snap, or TikTok or any of those that you might want to support in the future?

Jon Davis
Yeah, so we're always getting requests, for sure. Really, that those are, you named a lot of the next big ones that we're looking at. Snap, Pinterest, TikTok are on our list, and really focused on bringing in new types of Google campaigns that they're finally allowing through the API. So really, where we run into more friction with our customers isn't necessarily bring on a new outside, like TikTok type, but not being able to pull in Google campaigns that they don't allow through the API. So up until like six days ago, you couldn't get any local service ads from Google out of their API and now it's just in beta and we're able to run testing. We're also exploring, there's some kind of data aggregation tools out there like Airbyte, and some other places where you can normalize a bunch of data and we could offer a lot more integrations. We're quickly kind of using that as a middleman, but right now Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, definitely the ones that we're targeting the most right now in terms of moving into those platforms and really as somebody that thinks a lot about our product direction, that's the one thing I really feel good about is a lot of our feature requests aren't necessarily like, hey, we need shape to do this new thing around budget management, it's more, hey, can you bring in these other campaigns and have them do for us what shape does for these other platforms?

AJ Wilcox
How mean is that of Google to be like, hey, we'll pass through the API, any information about your spend, except this one ad format, or this one objective? And all of a sudden, you're like, hey, of course, we want to be able to support all this, but the platform itself doesn't let us like, oh, you know, gets my goat. Sorry about that.

Jon Davis
Yeah, that's right. And that's one thing that we kind of, look at it. And in terms of we like to kind of look at ourselves as sort of a speedometer that can like accept any spend from any platform and give you, you know, the analyst a really good idea of what speed everything's spending at and moving at, and being able to pull in more channels there is key. Without that data feed and without Google allowing everything to be pulled in, you know, it's a struggle for us to add value. But the new Google Ads API know we're focused on LinkedIn, but the new Google Ads API that just has finally come out of beta and has been released has been a real huge thing for third party software's like us. It's been a lot of work to change every single call over to the new ads API, but Google, I think, can be slow to react in this case, they're finally give it understanding that, hey, if these third party software's like ours are supporting these clients, we need to give them the ability to pull all their spend in these tools because they're building workflows and systems around them.

AJ Wilcox
Totally. Alright, what strategies have you seen advertisers use and see great results because of using Shape?

Jon Davis
Yeah, I think really, the best way that we help analysts deliver better results is saving them a lot of time budgeting. Time that can be better spent, you know, thinking about how to improve those results, not just how do I spend $22 a day on this campaign or $38 a day? How do I get back on pace? Freeing up that time that you're not exporting a download into Google Sheets, reformatting, emailing, putting a CSV together and emailing out to the customer. Those are really places where we've seen the big savings. Within the app, we've got tools like Budget Pacer, that help people to see maybe opportunities to put more spend into a certain campaign with a lower CPA or a higher return on investment, whatever data you're pulling into Shape. With Budget Pacer, your there's a lot of different tools and dials you can turn to give you sort of like, hey, I want to prioritize CPA or I want to prioritize just raw conversions and get different predictions on what daily budget you should be saying at the campaign level based on those parameters. We see a lot of customers getting great results with Budget Pacer, We will see changes come through that are, you know, so and so changed daily budget to $38.12. And I'm like, Well, I know that was a Budget Pacer change, because I don't think they calculate, you know, $38.12. So we really see good results there from helping people one save a lot of time that they were previously doing manual work out of spreadsheets and workflows that were brutal. You know, as an analyst, I knew like the beginning of the month was always rough for us, because it was like, Okay, this is reporting time, I'm going to go, I'm going to be downloading a bunch of stuff, I'm entering in all these spreadsheets, and, you know, to kind of have a tool that would break that I kind of always wanted when I was in that scenario sort of break out of that kind of cycle and focus on more of the creative side. That's where we've seen the most positive results. And, you know, I think our core feature of pausing campaigns before they overspend is one that kind of eventually gets people don't even think about it anymore. They're they're not even worried about overspending a campaign ever again, where before they came to us a lot of customers that was like you were saying one of their chief concerns that the company was not overspending these budgets they've been trusted with?

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I see what you mean by time savings, can't tell you the number of times that past companies, the CMO would come to me and say, Hey, are we on budget? Like, what number are we going to hit by the end of the month? And if I would have had Shape back then, I could have just looked at the graph and said, but instead I had to export everything by day. And, you know, plot spend by day and figure out how many days left in the month and do a trend line to show it. I'm decent at Excel, but I'm not a wizard. So that kind of report might take me 20, 30 minutes to put together whereas Shape tells you exactly what you're shooting towards. So I love that.

AJ Wilcox
All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right back into Shape.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked as the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners. And you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, now, let's jump back into it.

AJ Wilcox
What are some of the results that your advertisers have seen in doing business with you? Have you had any like case studies or anecdotal evidence where they come to you and say, Thanks, you saved my bacon? Or this helped us so much? Or what are some of those?

Jon Davis
Yeah, well, I think, you know, most people out there thinking about LinkedIn are focused on LinkedIn. We've got a case study on our site. I don't know if it's company you've heard of, it's called B2Linked? Haha! When we talked to your team about what was life like before Shape or after Shape? What we really found was like just what we were saying your team estimated about 70% of their time that they previously spent on budgeting, which is hours and hours and hours a week. Now, it's just gone. And what we see really across the board with people that are trying to manage a lot of budgets is once everything's on boarded, set up, immediately, all that time that was spent budgeting is now freed up for other things. It's not uncommon for me to hear from an analyst like, Oh, I've got 10 hours in my week back, 15 hours in a week back. Working with larger agencies, we interact with a lot of accounting teams too that are responsible for reconciling ad platform spend at the end of the month. Just last week, an accountant sent me a thing, it's like we've just on boarded shape and now I need to pick up a new hobby because I don't have to spend as much time in the evenings manually entering ad spend that's getting reported on from PPC. Those are really fun for me to hear, because I was that analyst spending hours a day in Excel. To know that now they're able to think about the landing page they're sending the ads to, think about testing this new Google campaign type, and just pulling it into shape and not worrying that it's going to go crazy spend. Those are the things that I think are really fun about PPC and will keep better and smarter people in the industry for longer.

AJ Wilcox
Totally. That definitely resounds with me. If we as creative professionals and technical marketers are spending all of our time doing mind numbing, like crap work, busy work, rather than doing what we should be doing, which is developing good offers and good creative and managing the platform. I think it's a great thing. I'm curious. I know Google was famous early on for allowing you to spend more than your daily budget. And now LinkedIn has followed suit, depending on the objective you choose. They can overspend your daily budget by 20 to 100%. Have you found a situation where Shape has caught an overspend and been able to pause it before even the platform itself could do it?

Jon Davis
Yes. So one of our core features is really based around protecting against just that from the ad platforms. We have a feature called autopilot and there's two different settings on that. The first setting is let's give a budget a $1,000, here's the 10 campaigns. Let's turn on autopilot and let's say it's a monthly budget, we hit the $1,000 this month, turn it off, wait for the first day ofthe next month, turn it back on. Another version of that autopilot is daily autopilot. What that does is it takes the amount of budget you've got left divided by the number of days and sets a daily budget for those campaigns and when we see that daily budget reached, we take action to pause those campaigns within that day, wait for the midnight start of the next day, and then turn it back on. So let's say you've got your daily budget set at $50. Okay, Google and LinkedIn, they were rubbing their hands are like, alright, 50 bucks, that means 100, I'm ready to go. At about, 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, you spent your 50 bucks, Shape comes through does the data update says well, you've hit your daily 50 bucks your campaigns off. Now Google and LinkedIn, they can't spend on a paused campaign for the rest of that day and that's been a really powerful thing for us to offer our customers you know, that gives you the ability to go into LinkedIn and even set just like a lifetime budget. And then make sure you've got daily autopilot involved and you're gonna pace on that daily budget for the life of that budget without needing to change those micro parameters from within LinkedIn along the way. So you can change any type of budget into a daily budget if you want to using those systems And that's again, where we view ourselves as that like speedometer, you're saying, hey, Google, hey, LinkedIn, I only want you to take this car 50 miles per hour, I'm not approving you to go 100 miles per hour, like you say, in your conditions, I want you to go 50 miles an hour, we make sure your cruise controlled to hang right there.

Jon Davis
That always makes me laugh when platforms act like they can't pause a campaign when it's overspending. Like, oh, we need allowance to spend 20% or 50% or 100% over because, you know, we're gonna throw a whole bunch of ads out there. And we have no idea how many of those are going to get clicked on? Yeah, maybe if you're spending millions of dollars per month, I get it. Like you're gonna have a lot out there. But especially for LinkedIn, where the majority of advertisers I'm guessing, are paying on CPM. It's like, the second your campaign is shown that 1,000th time and you know, it's spent that amount, the platform should be able to stop on a dime. It seems ridiculous, but I'm so glad that there's a tool like Shape that will allow us to override that.

Jon Davis
Yeah, I can see where the product design is there. And I can see how and why they can genuinely believe that, hey, giving us that freedom will get you better results at the end of this 30 or 60 day period because we've identified something in this moment, that means we should be spending more, but ut I think that doesn't always make it really easy on the analyst communicate that back through to their clients. And I think as clients sometimes are willing to sacrifice maybe that last morsel of performance to have some predictability around what is this gonna spend on a daily basis, when you know, about the same amount is going to be spent at the beginning of the month, that's going to be spent at the end of the month. And I think in a lot of cases, there's still value to that kind of predictability and to be able to set a setting on budget and have the platform stick to that budget should be an option.

AJ Wilcox
I totally agree. And with Google, I totally expect the platform to be able to say, hey, if we overspend right now we'll get you better performance. And I'm okay with that. I don't even think that LinkedIn does claim that if they overspend your budgets, because it's going to perform well. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just, we don't have faith in our platform being able to shut it off on time. That's what it seems like to me anyway. Tell me about some of the nuances with budgeting, either with Shape or without on LinkedIn Ads specifically. Like any nuances with the platform that we should know about as advertisers, what can you teach us?

Jon Davis
Yeah, I mean, I think, from my perspective, I probably have no grand insights there. But I think the one unique thing about LinkedIn versus some of the other platforms is just the sheer cost per click in some scenarios and that can be really challenging when it comes to budget management. If four or five clicks are costing you $10 to $20 a click, especially if you're working with a smaller business, that's a big chunk of change really fast. And, you know, I don't think that's a surprise, obviously, to anybody out there that's been running LinkedIn campaigns, and I think is one of the bigger barriers like to entry for people, you know, making the leap and getting into LinkedIn campaigns. But I think really, what I see in terms of like the nuances around on LinkedIn is just paying a lot of attention to how that bid is affecting your positioning. The magic part for me around LinkedIn is really being able to focus on that bid, get the amount of impressions, make sure you're not like two impressions a day, or 2 million a day, finding that sort of sweet spot in your bids so that you don't necessarily have to always CPA or CPM bid, you can bid more for performance and kind of enter that auction where I think you've got, you know, Google Ads guy in my background, I'm kind of an auction believer, in some cases there. I think if you're able to bid, obviously CPM, you're still involved in that auction somewhere, but you've got a little bit more of a finger on the dial there. So I think being able to kind of set up to make sure you're not overspending and then really kind of hone in where that bid needs to be, is where we see kind of the nuance and LinkedIn over maybe some of the other platforms.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, very well said. I love that explanation. So what's your favorite aspect of shape? Just some area of the product that you are really excited about or you think makes the biggest difference?

Jon Davis
For me, I still get really excited about the core thing we set out to solve in 2014, 2015 when we were launching the product, and that is, I've got a budget for this month and within shape, you can set a budget for any duration, it doesn't have to be monthly, it can be a one time, it can be a 17 day recurring budget for whatever crazy reason you might need it, but for me, I still get really excited about the fact that, let's say I set up campaigns, and I set a $500 a month budget, I set those campaigns that could run for the rest of time. and I know it's going to spend $500 a month as long as the volume in those campaigns will get the clicks and Google keeps showing the ads, you know, the quality scores don't go down too low or LinkedIn keeps showing those ads, I know in some ways Shape would just manage that likeRobots should. On, off when it should, pace the budget when it should. That kind of core features still leads every one of our sales calls, it still is the core of a lot of our marketing material that we talk about. I think as we've seen a lot of third party software in our space that started around the 2010 to 2015 zone, they were really focused on optimizing your campaigns and how can you spend your $500 a month more effectively, within the search engines are the ad platforms like LinkedIn, where we kind of thought the market was going back in 2014 2015, was that eventually all the ad networks are going to be way better at all that then third party software would ever be. We need to focus on building solutions where the ad networks weren't as excited about solving those problems, like limiting your budget, or bringing in data from multiple channels into one place. So I think, luckily, we haven't had to chase too much on the product and really just continuing to do our core function of pacing and managing PPC budgets, and removing all the manual work and staying kind of laser focused on that. One thing I've admired about B2Linked has been like your focus as a company and being able to really succinctly kind of say, Hey, we're the best and LinkedIn Ads in the world. That's our Jim Collins hedgehog concept. You know, that's our one thing we do great. I feel really lucky to have a company where I can, you know, say we do PPC budgeting, PPC management, budget management X scale better than any other platform out there. That's been a real focus of ours is to stay in that budgeting world and not chase, you know, the next AI algorithm because Google has, you know, I don't even know 5,000 engineers thinking about exactly that one thing and all the data in the world you could imagine and they're just not going to release enough of that data to third parties for us to make better recommendations than they could. So solving those problems and kind of filling in those cracks that the platform's leave open is something that gets me really excited about Shape. New campaign types getting pulled into shape gets me really excited. Being able to now add a lot of these new Google campaigns as LinkedIn keeps testing new types of campaigns and falls a lot of the same way. I get excited when each of those new campaign types get pulled in there. Because it means people now are pulling it in, not worrying about budgeting, focusing on like, okay, is this campaign type the best place or the best channel for me to be putting my clients money?

AJ Wilcox
Love it, if I can share my favorite feature? It's the fact that you can create a specific budget. It's not just like, one of our clients per month, we get to know are they going to spend or understand or whatever their budget, but it's the fact that we can group individual campaigns by name and give them their own budgets. So for instance, if we're running ABM campaigns, we could take their three ABM campaigns, group them into one budget on Shape and say, Hey, tell us how we're pacing here. Are we going to spend our ABM budget versus the overall account level budget? So that's one that I think is really cool. I just don't ever see any of the platforms releasing the ability to do this. I feel like you're on solid ground where the platforms aren't going to compete with you to try to take your business.

Jon Davis
Yeah. And that's been a real conscious decision on our end. And it's another one of the reasons we haven't really chased super in depth like reporting solutions. Instead, we have a one click integration with Data Studio where that's, you know, your reporting place now to go because everybody's working with data studio now. And they've got every little dial you could ever imagine. We'd be coding on just some new reporting dashboard for the next four years to get up to what Data Studio and some of these other tools are doing today. So instead of like fighting the battle on the reporting front, fighting the battle on the optimization front, all areas where big teams, big companies have a lot of incentive playing both those games, we want to be where they don't want to play. And they don't really want to play and project management and building tools to make it easier on a PPC agency to manage a lot of clients, you know, in a lot of the ad platforms mind, you know, the agency is really just a management fee that's taking more ad spend that could be going to the platform. And so a lot of their products aren't designed with the agency in mind. Our third party software, we can design specifically for the agencies and solve problems in that way that we just haven't seen the ad networks really take on that challenge yet. And it makes sense why they wouldn't. Their focus is on building tools so that an individual advertiser feels like you know what, I can run my own LinkedIn Ads campaigns, I don't need to go to be to links and, you know, pay for them. I think it's good enough, I can turn these few dials and LinkedIn will handle it. You know, that's really the problems they're trying to solve and focused on not how do we help B2Linked to manage 10,000 clients at the same time?

AJ Wilcox
Totally, it doesn't seem like it's in the platform's best interest to give their clients tools like that. I would argue that if you're having a good experience with the platform, if the platform feels like it's taking care of your money, they're a steward of it, that you probably want to spend more, you probably want to come back. But hey, you know, Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and they should have enough data to analyze. If they feel like it's still okay, to overspend a budget, then they must get more money out of it, it must be a good business decision. So I like the business you're in, keeping them honest.

Jon Davis
I don't think you can ever go too wrong if you just follow the money in the decisions and the product. They're beholden to stakeholders and it makes sense why they're doing what they do, but I think that leaves a lot of opportunity for third party software and companies like ours to fill in those cracks and add value.

AJ Wilcox
So true. Give us an idea. We've been talking about the product, give us an idea on pricing. What can any of our listeners expect to spend to get access to these features?

Jon Davis
Sure, well, first off, you can get complete feel of Shape, all our automations through a free trial. You can manage up to 20 budget on our free trial for as long as you want to get a feel for it. If you feel like that's limiting you in any way reach out to me personally, I'll help you do a little bigger trial, if you need it. During that time, they let your team get a feel for it. After the free trial, our lowest tier is $299 a month. $299 a month and for that you can manage up to $100,000 of ad spend through your accounts. From there it progresses, you know, every $250,000 in ad spend goes up roughly about $500 a month. It works out to be anywhere from like, .1% to .2% of your ad spend is roughly the Shape fee you could ballpark expect to spend.

AJ Wilcox
It's really reasonable. As longtime clients, I can I can attest to that. Not that this is meant to be an ad or anything, but honestly, I want to share the partner ecosystem and I want to highlight which tools we actually think are worth paying for and which aren't. Shape definitely fits squarely in our bucket of yeah, this is definitely worth paying for. We like it.

Jon Davis
Thanks. That means a lot for me coming from you and to hear that.From our perspective, we work with small, medium, large agencies, all of them are fighting a battle against smaller margins over the last 5, 10 years, you know, management fees are dropping, clients expect more, for less, and that's where we've tried to keep our Shape software fee as a pretty minor percentage of your overall adspend. We did also set up a coupon code for anybody listening. If you go through the free trial and you decide that hey, shape is for me, coupon code just B2. So B2 and get you 50% off your first three months.

AJ Wilcox
Love it. Thanks for creating a custom code for us. That's awesome. I know you'll treat our listeners. Great. So everyone who's considering definitely take Jonn up on that offer.

Jon Davis
Yeah, if you submit a support ticket, it will either be me or Nicole, one of my colleagues here answering it so you can reach me jon@shape.io. Don't hesitate to reach out and answer any questions or I can give a more in depth demo for anybody interested in Shape.

AJ Wilcox
Beautiful. Alright, so away from business here or this could include business, too, but I'm curious, what are you most excited about either professionally or personally coming up? Like what's getting you out of bed in the morning?

Jon Davis
Yeah, I mean, I think professionally for us, it's really now we've made it through a lot of the hard startup years, the beginning years. We're seven years now and we have a really good belief in our product market fit. And for an entrepreneur, there's no better feeling to get you out of bed than feeling like you've got product market fit. And I think that's the one thing that is really nobody can ever predict if you're going to get it. Nobody knows if you have it before you have it. And the only way to get it is to really try and go out there and knowing that we're building a product 1,000s of people use every day, that's an easy reason to get out of bed and make sure that we're helping them with their jobs. You know, when my kids asked, What do you do? It's kind of hard to explain to a four year old what being a co-founder of PPC management software startup is, but I pretty much just say I help make tools that live in the computer that help make people's jobs easier and more fun. And I think that's really the core of what helps me get out of bed professionally. Just hanging out with my kiddos and seeing what they're going to get into next. We've been doing a bunch of skiing this year and hoping maybe this is the summer they pick up golf a little bit more. And let's see my old 1994 Land Cruiser that I just picked up a little while ago helps get me out of bed to figure out what I'm going to fix up on that next or build that up next for the trail.

AJ Wilcox
Sweet. You're speaking my language. I'm just headed out on our side by side the end of this week doing some off roading. I'm not handy enough to fix up my own Land Cruiser, but I'll play in the side by side. That'll be fun.

Jon Davis
We'll have to connect up on that!

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, it'd be fun. Jon, thanks so much for joining us, sharing about your product, giving us some insights, teaching us about budgeting on LinkedIn and the other platform. So sincerely, thanks for coming on. Anything else you want to share with us or anything else or anything else we should know?

Jon Davis
No, I think that'll do it. Thanks so much for having me. I feel like I've gotten to have like a 40 minute plug here so I don't need to plug anything else. Most important thing is if you want to talk to me or reach me about anything PPC related, jon@shape.io and I'll be happy to talk to anybody that has any questions. It's really fun to get to talk to new PPC analysts see how new teams are doing stuff and if Shape can help them.

AJ Wilcox
Perfect. Thanks so much, Jon. Sure appreciate having you on!

Jon Davis
Thanks a bunch, AJ.

AJ Wilcox
All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox
Alright, I've got the episode resources for you here. So first off, Jon was so generous in giving us his email address. So if you want to email him directly to ask any question about anything we've covered here, it's jon@shape.io. You'll also see that down below in the show notes. Next, if you do decide to sign up for Shape, use the coupon code on shape.io of just the letter B and the number 2, that's also going to be in the show notes as well. As a reminder, if you have any colleagues or even you yourself are new to LinkedIn Ads, and you're trying to learn it, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is in the show notes below and it is by far the most comprehensive, as well as one of the cheapest courses you can find out there and LinkedIn stands behind it. On whatever podcast player you're listening to this on, if you like what you've heard, please hit that subscribe button so you can hear all of our future episodes as we come out with them. You may want to go back and binge a few along the way as well. I'm not judging. If you do like what you've heard, please do review the podcast. Most of those reviews happen on Apple podcasts. But I've heard that reviews are starting to happen on Spotify as well. But really anywhere that you listen, anywhere you find reviews, I would absolutely love to see your review and I'll totally shout you out as well. With any suggestions or corrections. You can reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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