There is always a bit of scepticism when you mention LinkedIn Ads on the sidelines of a project. “LinkedIn Advertising is expensive.” It can be: at the basic metrics level of an advertising campaign, the numbers speak for themselves.
The average cost of clicks on Linkedin is much more than Google and Facebook Ads, the same for a conversion. And, in general, the initial starting budget is significantly higher, which takes a lot of marketers away from advertising on LinkedIn.
“Maybe next time we’ll do a test…”.
LinkedIn certainly also suffers from the halo of mystery and poorer communication skills compared to Facebook, and trivially also the fact of not being as mainstream as Facebook which counts on billions (really, not figuratively) of users.
Furthermore… with LinkedIn Ad campaigns you can get amazing results, for some marketing strategies with particular objectives and targets, for example in B2B sectors or when you want to reach specific professionals, in well-defined production sectors, or specific company roles (buyers, CEOs, HR managers, etc.).
Results that perhaps do not stand out for quantity, but are qualitatively excellent. And attention: often with costs quite in line with competitors.
Today we want to give you some tips on LinkedIn Ads: how it works, types of ads, tricks and some good practices to make your marketing campaigns run with LinkedIn Ads! 🎯
What Options Are Available?
There are 3 types of campaigns available through the Campaign Administrator (and therefore available in self-service for all):
- Text ads;
- Sponsored content;
- Sponsored InMail messages.
#1. Text Ads
Let’s open and close on the text ads; we can pretend they don’t exist for various reasons:
- They are not shown on the app and mobile version (about 60% of traffic);
- They are usually not very effective in terms of CTR (number of clicks compared to impressions);
- Despite this they are quite expensive (minimum 1.5/2€ per click).
This doesn’t take away the fact that someone can have a case of success with this format…but just look at which advertisers are usually in these positions to understand that the professional and the SME won’t benefit much from this format.
On the other hand, text ads are a format that reflects an old concept of online advertising.
#2. Sponsored Content
Facebook has taught us and accustomed us to the concept of sponsored content, which for the less experienced means to make it appear in the newsfeed (homepage) of the target audience even if they are not followers.
On LinkedIn this is only possible using a company page, you can sponsor content already published on the page or even write ad hoc content only for sponsorship (direct sponsored content) that will not appear to all followers.
Native videos can also be sponsored, i.e. uploaded directly to LinkedIn, which will be shown in this with a highlighted call-to-action.
In any case, those who see the sponsorship in their newsfeed, desktop or mobile, will see the update with the words “Promoted”.
The sponsorship of content, although much more expensive than Facebook (always a minimum of 1.5/2€ per click), is a useful tool and accessible to SMEs.
A powerful implementation of sponsored content is the lead module for contact generation, which allows you to collect the contacts of people interested in your product or service directly through LinkedIn without having a landing page or website, through a module linked to a sponsored update.
The costs remain those of sponsorship, and the tool allows a quick and effective conversion.
The lead module in fact eliminates all the problems of optimization and trust to build that arise with external landing pages.
#3. Insight Tag
By installing an HTML code (called Insight tag) on all pages of the website, today LinkedIn can collect (via cookies) a lot of information about the visitors of a page of its website, with 3 different purposes:
- Professional demographic statistics of your website traffic (very useful free service)!;
- Creation of personalized audiences (for retargeting);
- Monitoring the conversions of a campaign.
In particular, when a campaign is carried out with the objective of making the user perform a specific action, visiting a page, filling in a form or making a purchase, the conversion monitoring tool is extremely effective in verifying the number, origin and cost of conversions.
#4. Sponsored InMail Messages
The last advertising tool made available by LinkedIn is the sponsored InMails, i.e. private messages in a richer format than LinkedIn’s free messaging that can be sent to a target group identified according to professional characteristics.
The sender is, in this case, the person.
This tool, which usually costs around €0.5 per sending, is very effective to date because, perhaps due to its low usage, it has very high opening and click rates.
Also to the sponsored InMail messages, it is possible to connect an integrated lead generation module, thus achieving very interesting conversion performance with an advantageous cost/contact.
5 Tips For Creating An Efficient Advertising Campaign On LinkedIn
Here are some of our tips to run and fly your advertising campaign on LinkedIn; if you have any questions or want to tell us some more tips, contact us or comment on this article!
#1. Refresh The Advertisements
“Breathless content”: change the content of your ads on LinkedIn Ads every 4/6 weeks.
The advertising campaign “loses effectiveness” over time.
Facebook Ads also needs to freshen up: users tend to see the same ads several times (with the same creativity) and, over time, more and more users may decide to hide repetitive ads.
These actions are interpreted by the Facebook Ads algorithm, resulting in a deterioration in the quality score of the ads.
Moral: you pay more and more clicks and conversions, the ads lose effectiveness. The value to keep an eye on when it’s time to change ads is the CTR (Click Through Rate – users’ click rate on ads).
When it drops a lot, it’s time to change.
#2. Retargeting With LinkedIn Ads
Retargeting with LinkedIn? Yes, with LinkedIn Insight Tag. In web marketing, you need a bit of imagination, a bit of experimentation.
The remarketing with Facebook Ads works very well, but each platform has its own characteristics that – with the same type of advertising – leads to different results.
Retargeting with LinkedIn Ads allows you to intercept professionals with a LinkedIn account who have visited certain pages of your website.
The retargeting, although expensive, in this case, becomes very precise and segmentable along with specific job categories or roles (e.g. Managing Directors, Sales Directors, Art Directors, Production Managers, etc.).
#3. Automatic Offer VS Manual Offer
The automatic offer on LinkedIn Ads: some empirical evidence and suggestions coming directly from LinkedIn Ads go a bit against the trend on Facebook Ads or Google Ads, where the automatic offer usually manages to perfectly optimize the budget with respect to the objectives set with the campaign.
On LinkedIn Ads the matter is usually reversed: at the beginning of the campaign, it is better to use the manual offer, raising it by 1 euro compared to the best-recommended offer, until you reach the involvement rate you want to have on the ads.
When to use the automatic offer in LinkedIn Ads?
- When the campaign evenly distributes the budget over the various days (for at least 7 consecutive days);
- When the size of the audience intercepted by the campaigns tends to exceed 100,000;
- When the daily expenditure is kept within 70% of the planned daily budget;
- Better starting from the tenth/ fifteenth day of the campaign (in the first 10/15 days, as said, it may make sense to proceed with manual offers).
#4. Experiment
Often LinkedIn Ads is seen as another channel to “do a little test”.
Okay, that’s fine… but this form of thinking often leads to forgetting good practices that are respected on Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
For example, a constant variation of ad types, communication content and also products/services advertised, is always important in general during a Pay per Click campaign: this also applies to each Ad on LinkedIn.
In general, it is also good to experiment with “multi” strategies on LinkedIn Ads:
- Multi-type of ads;
- Multi-type of messages/creativity;
- Multi-type of product.
So observe CTR% and conversion rates and costs, often different from case to case.
#5. Conversion Rates And Copywriting
The conversion rate of Lead Generation Forms on LinkedIn, as for the other indicators, is very variable.
If you want to give a reference here too, you can take into account 10% of completed forms.
A form completion rate below 10% may reveal that the target audience is too wide, inaccurate, but any consideration should be reported to your industry, ads, advertising message.
Shooting figures is always risky!
Consideration of creativity to use in LinkedIn ads -> The images and videos of an advertising campaign can be innovative and ingenious, triggering more interest and, therefore, the number of clicks (CTR high).
This aspect is central to all communication platforms.
But – and this is true for any advertising platform – remember that a well-reasoned copy (a text caption; the text of the ad) can make any visual fly or, on the contrary, crash any visual.
Budget and LinkedIn Ads Cost?
Still on the subject of budgets and offers on LinkedIn Ads, how much should I spend? Preamble: well, there is no specific answer to this question.
There is no suitable and certain minimum for any condition.
The variables at stake are too many (sector, type of product/service, type of conversion, type of target, country, etc.).
But some valid range can be provided in many cases:
- LinkedIn Ads costs: From 20/30 to 100 euros per day (and more), depending on your goals;
- Pay attention to the cost per lead, which on average is higher in LinkedIn than other platforms. The smaller the audience you hit with ads, the more the CPL will rise on average (but the quality of contacts will be high). Some references here too: > 10,000 users -> small audience; up to 100,000 users -> medium/large audience. You have to find the right compromise for your campaigns;
- Targets are narrower and more precise; campaigns last on average less than other platforms, with a more massive daily outlay;
- If you are constantly running out of your daily budget, then you are probably not reaching your full potential audience.
Advertising on LinkedIn is more expensive compared to other platforms. However, if well set, your campaign can generate a high ROAS.
Conclusion
Given the plethora of social networks available, finding the ideal advertising platform to create and orchestrate your advertising initiatives can be heavy.
LinkedIn Advertising may not be the perfect advertising platform for all companies.
In fact, no advertising platform really is. As we have already pointed out above the higher ROAS is achieved by integrating different advertising platforms and strategies, as well as adopting always-on advertising strategies.
On the other hand, it may be more convenient to appeal to neuromarketing strategies that use more rational promotion techniques, compared to campaigns that you could do based on emotions (like on Facebook Ads).
Continuous testing strategies serve to determine, as always, what works and how to make campaigns more effective.
What do you think? Have you ever used the LinkedIn advertising system? What results have you achieved?
Let us know in the comments! … And stay tuned for future articles! 🎯
