My initial user experience with LinkedIn Ads was quite negative and I voiced my displeasure on social media. Andrew reached out to me with news that LinkedIn was to soon upgrade their ad platform and that he would graciously allow me to be one of the first to use it. I did and it is a considerable improvement over the old model. Andrew graciously agreed to answer a few question for our blog.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m the marketing lead for LinkedIn Ads (formerly LinkedIn DirectAds). I’ve worked at LinkedIn for about one year. Before LinkedIn, I was a marketing manager at Google on products such as Google AdWords and Google Docs. So I have a search marketing background but have transitioned to social media advertising. My LinkedIn profile is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjchang1
2) You did a major upgrade of the former LinkedIn Ads platform. How has it improved and what were you trying to accomplish?
Our self-service PPC offering, LinkedIn Ads, came out of beta with a new set of targeting options that will increase the return on investment of ad campaigns by providing our advertisers access to an even higher quality source of leads than before. In addition to the previously available options of geography, job function, industry, company size, seniority, age and gender, we now allow targeting by job title, company name, and members of LinkedIn Groups that you choose. Customers who have launched campaigns with these new targeting options report click-through rates 3x to 4x higher than other campaigns.
3) Clearly, Facebook Ads has become very popular for even business advertising. How would you try to convince a business advertising in Facebook to try you out (assuming topical relevance)?
Businesses that have been having success with our service tell us that the main they advertise are: 1) the LinkedIn audience is in a “work” state of mind and are receptive to business products and services offerings and 2) the targeting that we allow makes it easy to reach an exact professional audience.
4) Your minimum CPC’s are quite high and (I admit) gave me a bit of a pause. How do you justify them for folks not used to paying at that level?
In our best practices (https://partner.linkedin.com/ads/bestpractices/track.html), we advise people to go into a campaign with a goal in mind, measure the results, and only continue if you’ve reached your goals. At the end of the day, it’s about ROI. Successful advertisers using our service find that the CPCs justify the costs.
5) How has the public responded to the new platform and do you plan any future upgrades to it?
Customers that we’ve invited to test the new targeting features are excited about the opportunities to reach an even more relevant audience.
6) You and I connected after I made the following Tweet about your old ad platform https://twitoaster.com/country-us/toddmintz/used-linkedin-ads-to-advertise-the-next-sempdx-eventfail/ . How have the folks working with LinkedIn ads used social media to connect / respond to customers?
One relatively new way to accomplish this on LinkedIn is to create Products & Services on your Company Page on LinkedIn. For example, here’s the page for LinkedIn Ads ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/linkedin/product?prdId=1361) and you can see that 22 professionals have recommended our offering. We believe that recommendations by people you know are the best way to generate new business, and that you should be make recommendations work for you on LinkedIn by using your Company Page.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
LinkedIn continues to grow as a social media marketing platform. It’s great to see that they are working to improve their ads to take advantage of this growth. I agree with the theory that the LinkedIn audience is in a “work” state of mind, which might work well for some advertisers.