Linkedin Direct Ads

mberman84

mberman84

New member
Jan 17, 2007
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Los Angeles
I received an email from linkedin this morning promoting their new ads system. They gave me $250 in free advertising if I sign up (which costs $5 initial setup).

The linkedin audience is very particular, business professionals mostly. I checked out the CPC's and CPMs are they are crazy high. The suggested CPC's for me were around $5...crazy! CPM's weren't any better hovering around $3.50.

At these prices, I doubt most affiliate offers will work. I also doubt this audience will be interested in the affiliate bullshit offers. Is there actually going to be a use for linkedin direct ads?

I setup some ads on CPM basis and got zero clicks.

Anyone else get this email? Anyone else try linkedin ads yet?
 


Tried it a while back to help out a non-profit providing free business resources - CPM got next to no clicks no matter how we targeted or what ad copy we used, and CPCs were a minimum of $2 or $3 to get any real exposure.

If you have high margin business services to offer, or a high paying B2B affiliate offer (of course extremely rare), it might be a good mix. Then again, if you have either of those, there are tons more targeted ways to get the leads/sales you're after.
 
johu said:
Tried it a while back to help out a non-profit providing free business resources - CPM got next to no clicks no matter how we targeted or what ad copy we used, and CPCs were a minimum of $2 or $3 to get any real exposure.

If you have high margin business services to offer, or a high paying B2B affiliate offer (of course extremely rare), it might be a good mix. Then again, if you have either of those, there are tons more targeted ways to get the leads/sales you're after.
Click to expand...

yea....i immediately knew I lost the initial $5 deposit to get that $250 free...lol

i figure ill probably do something funny with the rest of the money in my account...ill think of something stupid to advertise...like maybe i should make a linkedin profile for my dog..and promote that...
 
There are offers that make way more than $1,000 per sale.

You just have to think about what people buy for themselves, or their business that cost a lot of money... then you have to go to those services and see what kind of way you can work with them.

Hint, a lot of those types of companies have "partner programs" that people actually join and turn into full fledged business where all they do is create business for those companies as independent reps.
 
mberman84 said:
yea....i immediately knew I lost the initial $5 deposit to get that $250 free...lol

i figure ill probably do something funny with the rest of the money in my account...ill think of something stupid to advertise...like maybe i should make a linkedin profile for my dog..and promote that...
Click to expand...
clickbank + resume products
 
the rates really aren't that bad, especially when you consider that headhunters might get paid $10,000-$50,000 per lead. the typical crap offers you find on affiliate networks these days most likely won't fly.
 
How good is the targeting? I would join and find out if I had a $250 voucher to check it out myself :P
 
I've been doing some local lead gen stuff lately, and I recently brought on a marketing company as a client. I was looking into using linked in to help them generate clients by just sending them to a form page on their site to help funnel in some leads. Anyone know if you can geotarget on linkedin?
 
The rates aren't bad for B2B, especially considering a lot of the high level guys you can target rarely use other sites besides LinkedIn and NYTimes/Fox News/other shit like that.
 
OK. So I started up a LinkedIn campaign yesterday. Granted, my product is VERY niche. However, I was able to target that very niche audience pretty well on LinkedIn.

Some things to note about LinkedIn ads:

1) Can only target 10 DMAs at the most, (you could target all of the US, which would technically count as 1), but they need to expand their geotargeting. I noticed a lot of cities/metro areas aren't even listed in their system (for example, I live in Baltimore, and everyone in Bmore is signed up on LinkedIn as "Washington DC Metro Area"), but there were still entire states missing from their targeting options.

This could get dicey especially when you are trying to generate leads in a very specific area. Surely LinkedIn has the volume to expand their locations, so why not?

2) You CAN target based on seniority (Chief X Officer), Age, Gender, Industry, and Job type. This is good, but you can only select 3 of these categories to target.

3) The image that goes along with the ad is only 50x50, which is basically fucking useless. I can fit maybe part of my logo in the image ad. There is also a very limited number of characters it seems.

After 1 day, my stats looked like this:

3 clicks out of 5747 impressions (0.05% ctr)
$4 avg cpc
$12 total spend
1 conversion

Again, my product/offering is very niche, so it will be interesting to see how it performs in the future. However, the one lead I did receive was VERY qualified, and should result in a nice sized sale/profit.

If anything, I could see advertising my SEO/link building services thru LinkedIn.
 
I have messed with it for a couple of days and really couldn't see it working for affiliate marketing. Which was stated above. The only thing I could see it working for is local marketing.

Or consulting. But then again that includes talking to clients and having to deal with their shite.

Good for reputation build up if you are trying to make a name locally as an expert in SEO or PPC. But shitty for doing anything related to affiliate marketing. Just my 2 cents. Please let me know if I am way off. I would like to see what others say.
 
Not local directories. But doing local seo for clients.
Or another excellent use may be if you are in the market for a job.
Not a pretty word in this forum. But if you were trying to get in with a particular company it would be a unique way to reach the hiring person.
 
Voip, receivables factoring, inventor help leads, startup funding leads, collections leads I bet could all work with some finessing.
 
As others have said pretty high CPCs, but the traffic converts VERY well. At least for me, it out-converted my best keywords on adwords. But this was for a B2B offer I setup myself, not CPA or anything.
 
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