LinkedIn Marketing Advice & Insights Wanted

[Semmy]

I have been searching a bit in the forum for LinkedIn marketing advice but did not find a lot of relevant things. Maybe @Vigilante can help a bit to tune into this thread here with my questions and can give some better insights.

Beside me not having used LinkedIn to "actively network" (as its a time consuming task that I need to learn if I can outsource that and add relevant well researched contacts) I am doing a a marketing test with LinkedInAds.

And I am a bit flabbergasted what is going on with what they ask for you in order to get into their "game".

So they give you a free $50 (40 €) balance to get you started.

For all of you who dont know I am a tracking fanatic, so I have destinct tracking links to every different variant of ads and know exactly when someone clicks on my links and where they came from and all that.

So the first thing I had to decide with my "free" money is to go for either:

Getting impressions or getting clicks?

Pay per Click 4.43 - meaning do I want to have 10 people click at my offer or
let my ads be shown with like for around 2.5 for 1000 impressions: so more or less 20.000 impressions.

I figured since I show my URL as branding to people that serving impressions might reach more people.
The only problem is that if people come back to an URL you can't track them in the future and it is just
"typed in traffic" that you can't clearly assign to an advertising source, but what the heck...

I had no prior experience to do LinkedIn ads and already wondered what to put in a 50x50 image pixel.

So here is how my ads looked like:



24 hours later... - Now drum roll please - guess how many clicks I got?

According to Linkedin they served 24,697 impressions and deliverd 1 (!).

Hm, ok.

My tracking software tells me I got 3 clicks - two with the same IP address from Ireland
with a time difference of 10 minutes and another one from the United States.

Damn, I really should have tried to get 10 clicks for sure instead, right?!

Well... since my promotional advertising budget is almost used up I set up a "careful"
minibudget for $20 per day and bid 3 $ (they actually recommend me to bid between 4 and 8 dollars
per click?!) and I decide to write them as I think a conversation rate of a whopping 0.004%
must the the all time low I got with any marketing testing for a very long time.

Oh and in case you wonder what I did target:


I pretty much think that this is "hungry" target market for improving their marketing tracking.

So I decided to write the helpdesk at LinkedIn to ask them if they can explain to me why
i have such a low click through rate and why my own tracking shows me 3 visitors while their
own internal tracking only gives me back 1 click and here is what I get back from them.

Here is their answer. My own thoughts are in BOLD - and no, I did not bother to write them back
as their response lacks total marketing logic for me.

------------------------------------------------------------


Hi Semmy,

Your campaign has been running for one day only and it's quite early to judge about the performance.

I don't think so, I consider 25.000 impressions already a good sample to see first results (I know guys, you just want to have my advertising money!).

However, there are few things I would suggest you to change to make sure your Ad campaign gets better performance.

- Create a new campaign based on the one you currently have to refresh the CTR.

Creating a new campaign will give me a better Click Through Rate? HUH?!

- Have only 3-4 ad variations within the campaign. By default, we'll display all of your Ads and show the highest-performing ones more often. You’ll likely find an Ad variation that outperforms the others. If you will have more than 3-4 Ad variations the less performing ones will bring the CTR of the entire campaign down.

Can't follow that logic. I have 6 ads in rotation to show to the audience, how will reducing them to 4 increase my click through?

- One thing to be aware of it, is that LinkedIn Ads platform uses algorithms to analyze data from user profiles and determine age, gender, job title / function and experience. If the user does not include certain information in the profile, such as date of birth, the algorithms may not be able to categorize it; therefore, they will not be included in the target audience. Therefore, I recommend you to remove the age option. Keep in mind that the ideal target audience size is between 100,000 and 400,000 LinkedIn members.

I don't get that either. I look for buyers with a specific age bracket that I know that spend money, why should I lower the age to guys in their 20s or 30s if the ones that i have targeted in the past perform better? Also: broadening the audience size to 100,000-400,000 makes my advertising even LESS targeted. You really just want to have my advertising money (especially if I pay you per impressions, not per click)?


- Call out your target audience in the headline or text of the ad. By doing so, it will grab their attention and hopefully lead to more clicks. I have only freaking 25 characters guys! I should waste them by writing: "Attention Online Marketers!" ?

- Increase your bid up to 30% higher than the suggested range. Your bid is competing with other advertisers who are targeting a similar audience. By increasing your bid, it will be more competitive in the auction and will likely receive more impressions and clicks. Your bid is currently lower than the suggested range
and cannot compete with other advertisers who target the same audience. Yes I only bid now 3 € instead of your suggested 4-8 € per click. Throwing more money at you will give me a better click-through rate, right?

In regards to clicks, make sure that you added UTM parameters to your destination URL for ads in your campaign. This will allow you to differentiate the clicks coming from the Ad and regular visits to the website. DUH, i am not dumb I am tracking EVERY links down to the exact advertising sources, believe me I know what I am doing.

Semmy, I hope you will find this information clear and helpful. If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.

I think I will just pass - thanks for your valuable insightful answers.

Regards,

xxxxxx
LinkedIn Ads Specialist


I know maybe I am stubborn or don't get it.

I would like to know if anyone is doing successful LinkedIn Advertising and has any
pointers for me. And yes I know that this was a very "lame" low-budget testing with
them and that indeed it might not be enough of a sample data to decide if LinkedIn
Advertising could work for me.

Looking forward for your feedback guys!

P.S.: Even with a quite decent lifetime customer value that I have I am not sure if
I can make LinkedIn advertising work for 4€ - 8€ per click. (4.60 $ - 9.25 $).

 

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[johnp]

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[Semmy]

Vjeplt @kujpq - epz ofie up jux vu uavtuasdi vji moplifop edvowovit zua jewi uavmopif vjisi?

 

[Semmy]

Vji medl op sitqupti jisi tjuxt ni vjev MoplifOp ot puv vji xez vu hu ev vjot voni.