Everything You Need To Know About LinkedIn Ads

"No matter what size your budget or business, LinkedIn ads can help you achieve your marketing goals." This is what LinkedIn has said, but how do we know that it is correct? After running LinkedIn Ads for clients for a while now, I can definitely confirm that your budget and type of business do matter. LinkedIn is what we would consider a premium CPC platform - perfect for businesses with larger budgets but potentially not beneficial for smaller companies.

When I say premium CPC, what I mean is that LinkedIn is notoriously more expensive than it's counterparts such as Facebook or Google Ads. According to the Q1 2019 Benchmark Report from AdStage, Facebook's median CPC was £0.50 vs LinkedIn, which reported an average CPC of £3.18. Note, these averages will vary from industry to industry, and these figures are a blanket average.

Who should be using LinkedIn ads

Typically there are 3 core groups of people that should be using LinkedIn ads. 

1. Business to business products or services, typically of higher lifetime value. A larger lifetime value usually allows for a larger monthly budget. 

2. Companies that are looking to recruit. LinkedIn members tend to always be thinking of their next career move.

3. Companies that provide training or higher education. Again LinkedIn users typically have a keen interest in bettering themselves or becoming a better fit for their job role. 

Who shouldn't take advantage of LinkedIn Ads?

There are also three main groups of users that I believe wouldn't benefit from using LinkedIn ads.

1. Business to consumer companies with low price point products. This is because of the higher cost per click on LinkedIn would make it hard to see positive returns. 

2. Businesses with lower monthly ad spend budgets. Realistically, you need £30 a day minimum to see even some return from LinkedIn ads. Businesses looking at spending less should opt for Facebook or Google Ads (industry dependant).

3. Those with broader target audiences. With the CPC being lower on other channels, it makes sense to target your ads here instead.

The advantages of advertising on LinkedIn

There are several benefits to advertising on LinkedIn, but it does have some disadvantages as well. These should all be taken into account when deciding if LinkedIn is the right choice for you. 

One of the major stand-out benefits of LinkedIn is the ability to very specifically target your audience. It allows you not just to target a company, you can target different people within the company. For example, if you only wanted to target the managers or higher-ups of a business, that's definitely something you could do with LinkedIn. 

There are also many other factors you could include when selecting your targeting on LinkedIn. For example, by size and industry as well as targeting an individual by seniority or job title, the particular skills that they have or the LinkedIn groups that they participate in. 

Some of the best attributes of LinkedIn ads are in the variety of the available ad types. These are some of the leading ad types that we use on LinkedIn.

Image from: https://www.minttwist.com/blog/linkedin-advertising-unravelled/

The disadvantages of advertising with LinkedIn

Although LinkedIn can be an excellent platform to advertise on, it, unfortunately, isn't flawless. I have explained a few of the more notable problems below: 

1. LinkedIn lacks the ability to tailor bids for device type. In other words, you don't have a choice as to whether you would prefer to show your ads on mobile or desktop versions. 

2.  There is no option to control the time of day that your ads are shown, nor the ability to even choose which day your ads are displayed ie no ad schedule.

3.  You're not given a relevance score for your ads. Other platforms do a brilliant job of showing you how well your ads are being received by your audience, whereas LinkedIn does not provide this sort of data to advertisers. The only way to determine a poor quality ad is when it simply just doesn't show to news feeds any more. 

LinkedIn can definitely be a worthwhile investment, but finding success with LinkedIn can be a challenge. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will not work and will cost you a fortune. If you take the time to research your options and your target audience correctly, allow yourself to have some budget for testing, you may find it can be a very valuable tool. 

If you find that your business could be the right fit and have some spare budget to commit to some testing, I would recommend jumping in. Just be sure to keep an eye on your key performance indicators and find out what LinkedIn can do for you.