Three ways LinkedIn can win over advertisers
Unless the platform can provide marketers with a functionality to generate positive ROI on ad spend, advertisers will continue to stay away from LinkedIn, says Alex Cleanthous.
LinkedIn just announced it is now allowing advertisers to track conversions on their advertising spend. That’s good news but it doesn’t solve the real issue that LinkedIn has – that its ad platform doesn’t provide the level of sophistication that a marketer needs to generate a positive ROI from their ad spend.
We test a lot of different ad platforms at Web Profits, looking constantly for new channels to help our clients grow, and we’ve tried time and time again to make LinkedIn a profitable source of new business for our clients, without much luck.
Sure, we get the occasional success from a LinkedIn campaign but we don’t get the consistent flow of new business that we do from Google or Facebook’s ad platforms. That’s where LinkedIn fails.
> LinkedIn has one of the most under-utilised ad platforms on the web today.
So, once it has a good platform it will be spammed to death like Facebook?
Having worked with LinkedIn for years, the unique nature of the targeting and the reason the audience visits the platform drives high quality leads, above and beyond quantity and the cheapest CPC. When conversions and the value of those conversions are measured, LinkedIn often comes out on top.
Facebook – circa 15million Aus users
LinkedIn – circa 3million
15 million users does not equal that you will want to target those people.
How many people on Facebook are really able to be targeted? Facebook is not an effective mean to target younger audiences (say, less then 16 years old) – which is a large chunk of Facebook users. It also is not an effective mean to target older audiences (say, over 60).
LinkedIn provides a group of qualified users to advertise to. Users that usually will have a disposable income. It’s much easier to find people that may suite your particular vertical on LinkedIn vs. Facebook (“I want to advertise this product to managers of companies”, “Advertise to people who make > 200,000”, “Advertise to managers that did not go to university”).
It’s like what KG said earlier, a smaller group of users to advertise to does not particularly mean that the quality is better.
Never seen it work to a CPA.
Should work – doesn’t.