Relevancy Is Key to Reaching Professionals With LinkedIn PPC Ads
Reach your audience on LinkedIn with these tips on targeting, ads, and bids and budget.
Reach your audience on LinkedIn with these tips on targeting, ads, and bids and budget.
LinkedIn’s PPC placements can help advertisers reach professional and B2B market segments. LinkedIn.com boasts over 120 million members and is the top website for professional social networking.
To best reach your audience and get great results, I’ve compiled a few best practices and tips.
Targeting
LinkedIn provides traditional targeting like geography, gender, age, and then specific professional targeting focusing on company, job title, or groups users have joined. Break out specific audiences by campaign, and start with only one or two professional targeting filters at a time.
How to use the professional targeting filters: for example, you can target IT managers by using “job function” (IT) and “seniority targeting” (manager) in one campaign. Use “title targeting” related to “IT managers” in another campaign and compare results.
Ads
Keep ads as relevant to the target audience as possible. Here’s how:
It’s common for the CTR of your ad to decline if you continue to display the same ad week after week. A best practice is to refresh your ads at least once per month with new ad text or images.
Bids and Budget
LinkedIn uses a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand (CPM) ad bidding system. Minimum CPC is $2 and the minimum daily budget is $10. At a high level, LinkedIn only wants to show ads considered relevant to the targeted audience based on audience engagement with an ad. If the audience shows a high level of interest and clicks on the ad, the system will continue showing the ad. If the ads are not clicked, the system will begin to show them less over time.
The ad auction determines the winning advertiser and charges one penny over the second highest bid, based on their quality score and the ad’s max CPC. This also determines if an impression is shown and the ad’s position. A few tips to help get you the best performance out of your campaigns:
Utilizing best practices for targeting, ads, and bids can help to make the most out of your LinkedIn ads. Since keywords are not used, it’s important to use these tips to ensure your campaigns and ads are relevant to the target audience.