As a LinkedIn certified partner, AdStage is a trusted platform for many B2B marketers who run ads on LinkedIn. Below, we take a look at how B2Linked , an advertising agency that manages some of the world’s largest LinkedIn Ads accounts, uses AdStage’s API to drive the costs down and boost performance.

B2Linked: LinkedIn ads agency focused on lead generation for B2B companies

B2Linked is an advertising agency that helps B2B companies find new customers through the LinkedIn platform. The founder, AJ Wilcox, started with LinkedIn ads back in 2011, when the ad platform was still nascent. AJ’s deep passion for LinkedIn advertising, combined with his experience and strong influence in the PPC community, helped him become one of the best-known LinkedIn experts. AJ and his team at B2Linked manage LinkedIn ads for companies such as Hired, ON24, BambooHR, and many others.

“If you spend more than $10,000 a month on LinkedIn Ads, AdStage is a no-brainer. It’s the only power tool for LinkedIn advertisers. It gives you the functionality and features that you just can’t get from the platform by itself.” -- AJ Wilcox, CEO and founder, B2Linked.

Challenge: Making LinkedIn ads run on your schedule

LinkedIn is a professional social network, so typically, most people would only use it during business hours. Advertisers, especially those with smaller budgets, can quickly run out of ad dollars without much yield if they don’t set up the correct ad schedule. While it makes perfect sense to run LinkedIn ads, say, 9-to-5 in your specific time zone, advertisers can’t set up dayparting -- a common PPC scheduling technique -- in the native LinkedIn interface.

“The day begins for LinkedIn at midnight GMT,” AJ says. “GMT is 7 or 8 hours ahead of me. If you have a client with a campaign that only budgets 20 dollars a day, what happens is that these 20 dollars free up at 8 o’clock p.m. The client will end up bidding during the night time when people are less likely to engage, and by the morning, when clients get into the offices fresh and ready, that 20 dollars have already been spent.”

Without a third-party platform that helps manage multiple campaigns, ad budgets, and scheduling on LinkedIn, optimizing campaigns can be a pain. Advertisers manually toggle on campaigns as they come into the office in the morning, and toggle them off before they leave. “I used to set up alarm for 3 a.m. on a holiday morning to make sure I go in and pause all of my 600 campaigns,” AJ says.

Solution: Use AdStage's automation to automate routine tasks

Managing LinkedIn ad campaigns with AdStage’s automation platform helped AJ save time and optimize ad budgets by bidding at the right time. “For those who have smaller budgets, it’s a 30-40% gain in performance just because they won’t be bidding in the middle of the night when nobody wants to convert,” AJ says. “And they’re not blowing their whole budget by 8 a.m. and wondering why they’re missing out on traffic for the rest of the day.”

Using AdStage’s API that pulls granular LinkedIn campaign data in a snap, B2Linked can quickly access their campaigns’ results and ship the data anywhere they like -- from spreadsheets to internal tools.

AJ manages large accounts -- some carry over 1,200 campaigns in one -- so he found AdStage’s bulk rules functionality especially useful. “When a client comes in and says, ‘can you ramp up our budgets’ or ‘can you go in and increase our bids by 10%,’ or ‘increase our budgets to $500 a day,’ we just hit that rule, and it saves us several hours every time we have to do that,” AJ says.

For AJ, using automated rules is not just efficiency, but also peace of mind. “For many clients, we make this mid-trajectory changes several times a month. It’s a very monotonous task, and prone to human error. If I’m going to do it, I’ll miss two or three [campaigns], and the things aren’t going to be organized,” AJ says.

Results: Improved efficiency and better performance

With AdStage, AJ was able to set up dayparting and edit multiple campaigns in bulk. The ad campaigns now run only during the times that AJ wants them to run, resulting in better performance.

Improved efficiency after switching to AdStage meant that AJ could take on more clients and make more money. “Instead of 7 accounts, we can manage 25 with the same number of people,” AJ says. “It allows us to serve these clients better, too, and get better performance.” With time savings and performance improvement, AJ and his team can be more productive. That is, if they choose to: “AdStage saved me enough time to take a day off,” AJ says.