Linkedin Ads – A B2B ROI Winner?

This is a guest post from Gareth Rees, a SEO Specialist from Clear SEO.

Choosing the right platform to advertise online can be one of the most important decisions you make. Not so long ago, the only viable option seemed to be Adwords, but over the last 12 months, 2 other options have certainly started to make an impact. While Facebook seems to be gathering momentum as a B2C option, Linkedin is gaining traction for B2B. We’re going to run through the ad options on Linkedin, and take a look at how viable it might be for B2B advertisers.

Although Linkedin Ads have been around since 2007, the platform itself feels very much like it’s in its infancy. Steve Patrizi, LinkedIn’s vice president of marketing says it was developed with “something for everyone” in mind. As such it works, but also frustrates at the same time.

The first thing to recognise is that you target by demographic rather than keyword. How you choose the demographic is up to you, but although there are 7 options to choose from, disappointingly, you can only use 4 at any one time.

These options include, gender, age, country, company size (1-10, 11-50, 51-200 and so on) and seniority of person within a business (individual contributor, through to CEO and Director.) The remaining 2 options offer you to target by job function and by industry. (There are 18 industry sections all with sub categories.) Overall the options are pretty good, although I can’t help wanting to be able to dig a little deeper, but the restrictions stop me from doing so. On the plus side, the idea of being able to target the decision makers is an attractive proposition.

You can choose between CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and place a bid accordingly. Linkedin ads only run in US Dollars at the moment, and the minimum bid is $2.00. Some might suggest this is a pretty steep starting bid price.

You can choose multiple ads to run. Each offers (and I’m strongly recommend) using an image (50X50pxs). You have 25 characters for the headline, 75 for the body content and 500 for the destination URL. So once you’ve got your campaign set up, what’s the best strategies to help it perform?

I ran a test campaign based on 2 services that I offer, SEO PR, and SEO training and ran the ads for 2 weeks.

My CTR was lower than I expected (0.045%) but the conversions I did receive were of a higher quality than I’d usually get from a Google Adwords campaign. Out of 38 clicks, 7 prospective clients contacted me. The CTR resembled something I’d expect to see from a campaign on Google’s content network, but I was impressed by the quality of the leads as most were very focused on exactly they were looking for.

When considering ways to improve my campaign, I recognised a couple of hurdles that Linkedin ads face. Similarly to the content network, you’re advertising to an audience who isn’t actively looking to buy. While people expect ads on websites, Linkedin has been somewhat of a hallowed ground, so getting those users to participate with the ads maybe even more difficult to achieve.

Therefore, the quality of your ad text is vital to your campaign success. For the most part, the audience is savvy, intelligent and certainly not interested in the hard sell or gimmicks. As such, your content needs to really stand out from the pack and catch the eye. Just as with the content network, I noticed strategies such as offering a time relevant or free offer seemed to work better than not, although this needs to be presented creatively.

There are 2 aspects to Linkedin’s ad platform that could be improved. Firstly, be careful to run your campaign from a company account, not your personal account. Linkedin don’t mention this to you, but they display a caption beneath the ad saying who is running the ad. I would suggest that having your ads run from a company account increases trust and authority. Give your company profile a spring clean as it may well play an important part in your conversion rate. Secondly, the analytics are very basic. You’ll get stats on your clicks, impressions, CTR and average CPC but not too much else, so create specific URLs for each landing page so you can track things more effectively in Google Analytics. I also noticed that the insights are a little clunky. I paused a campaign for 1 day yet it still showed me having 2000 impressions. It seemed to right itself the following day, but I’d certainly recommend keeping a close eye on your campaign.

So the final verdict? For B2B marketers, you can’t knock the opportunity to be able to potentially reach decision makers directly, but I wonder if Linkedin is a natural place for those decision makers to start actively looking. At the very least, it’s offering advertisers the potential to reach those they need most, but it’s up to the advertiser to be creative enough to catch their eye.