With a little over a year’s experience with LinkedIn Advertising and some insights from a connection at LinkedIn, I’ve put together a list of 6 suggestions to help you increase the ROI and performance of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns.

Tip 1: Bid Popping

Bid popping is the strategy of bidding high at the beginning of the life of your ad to get your ad to the best audience possible and to get the best Click Through Rate (CTR) possible. But if you’re paying per click anyways, why does this matter?

LinkedIn is dedicated to making sure that it’s users have an enjoyable experience and are shown good content. To do this, they built a 0.35% CTR benchmark into their algorithm. If your ad is performing above this benchmark, LinkedIn will help you out by automatically giving you better ad placements. This way, good content that entices people has an advantage over the not so good content that might have a larger budget. Cool, huh? Again, the strategy is that having a higher bid will likely get more people clicking on it, increasing your CTR. After a week or two you can cut back on your budget and will be able to get higher bid positions at lower costs than you would have been able to before, and you can stay competitive with lower budgets. If your ad is going to have a longer life than just a couple of weeks, it is well worth the effort.

P.S.— If you’re familiar with Google AdWords’ Quality Score, this strategy can be used very effectively there as well.

Tip 2: Create Multiple Ad Variations

Multiple ad variations can help you in a few ways. First, running A/B tests is always a good idea. If you’re not testing your content, you are missing out on a learning opportunity. Most importantly, though, is that you get a chance to show your ad more often. LinkedIn only gives your ad one shot at each user per 48 hours but creating variations of your ad will allow each one to be shown in that same 48-hour window. Having 2-3 at a minimum per campaign would be a good idea.

Tip 3: Create LinkedIn Friendly Ads

There are a few things unique about LinkedIn ads that differ from other places. First, use stock imagery. Based on what historical databases at LinkedIn say, you can expect that users will respond very well to clean and simple images. In other words, exactly what you would expect from stock images.

It is also important to keep your character count below 140. Even though this is not  Twitter, it is a really good standard to keep. In today’s world, people’s attention spans are short, and the ability to say the same thing in fewer words is highly desired skill in today’s market. I’m not the only one that says that either. Adam Shiflett, the Marketing Director at DrivingSales, has said that “if your email has more than three paragraphs I won’t read it, just mark a time to come talk with me.” And if that’s not enough to convince you, data shows that ads with more than 140 characters start to see a diminishing CTR.

Tip 4: Optimize Targeting (Don’t Spend More Than You Need To)

When I built my first campaign I was told that we were targeting X job titles in  Y Industry, so when I got into the Campaign Manager to select my audience, I went straight to the ‘Job Title’ and ‘Industry’ fields to target “Job Title X” and “Industry Y.” Now, that’s a good way to do things, but I have learned that each filter you use charges you at different rates and that the “Job Title” just happens to be the most expensive one. Plus, you’re probably not reaching everyone you could be. Instead, I would be filtering by “Seniority.” You can easily include or exclude the different levels that you want (Owner, CXO, Manager, Entry, Etc.) and get those long tail job titles that you wouldn’t have thought to include in your job title search, and spend less money doing it. Win-win, right?

One additional pro-tip is filtering by relevant Member Groups. These people are raising their hands telling you that they are interested in seeing your content, are more likely active LinkedIn users, and are more likely to engage with content. It takes a little more effort to find the perfect groups but is well worth the effort.

Tip 5: Allocation of Budget (Where & How Much)

Now, there are two main types of ads that I use on LinkedIn: Sponsored Content and Text Ads. Best practices say that ¾ of your LinkedIn advertising budget should be spent on Sponsored Updates and the other ¼ on Text Ads.

Text ads don’t perform as well but also aren’t as costly. The purpose of text ads in your campaign is mostly to build brand awareness and get your name out there. I’ve personally seen a lot of these ads, read them, and never clicked. That’s a good thing for these companies. I’m seeing their content and becoming more aware of that brand while not costing them anything. However, if I do click that’s not a bad thing either. You now have a chance to convert them on your landing page at a lower price than Sponsored Content. The main downside is that these ads have very limited text and image space, so landing page conversion rates tend to be lower.

Tip 6: CPM Bidding

In all honesty, this article was written to be only five tips, but I just found out this tip this week and had to add it. If you have posted an ad and have gotten the click through rate over 1% you should think about changing from PPC to CPM. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille which means that it will charge you a fixed rate per 1000 impressions. If your add is picking up momentum and have this high click-through rate, you can save a lot of money by changing payment methods.

There are, of course, a lot of other things that go into a conversion than just these things, but I’m confident that applying these principles will help you increase your ROI from your LinkedIn campaigns. Don’t take my word for it, get out there and test out these theories. The market and tools are constantly changing so always be testing and always be improving. 

Who did your grandfather go to when he needed information? Most likely his father. Where did your father go when he needed information? Again, probably his father. Now, where do you and I go when we need information? Most of us would probably say Google.

In writing this article I wanted to make a point that as we get more digitally connected we stop relying on our family and friends for information. I thought it would be cool to put some data behind that idea and I would have an awesome marketing article, right? The problem is that I was wrong—This article just got a lot more interesting.

In this article, I’ll show you what I found, explain why I was wrong, and tell you what that means for us.

In order to prove my point, I needed to show that search engines were gaining in popularity and that the millennial generation is going less to their family and friends for advice. I started my research by jumping into multiple databases trying to find credible information backed by data. The problem that I ran into with my research is that no matter how long or far I looked, I couldn’t find evidence of this. In fact, I started finding information contrary to the point I wanted to prove.

As it turns out, these college age students have actually started to think of their parents as informal advisors when they need to make important academic and career decisions, according to Javeed (2010). Actually, 45 percent of students will call, text, or email their parents on a daily basis! They like this level of involvement from their parents; they rely on it frequently as it makes them feel safer in these important decisions. Why? Quigley (2016) says that an increased use of technology is thought to be one of the most obvious causes of this social trend. She notes that these students are leaving home but never really need to separate from their parents when they all have cell phones in their pockets and can call at any moment with no additional cost.

We now know that millennials communicate with parents more, not less. So does that mean that Google is just a fad that will die out as people connect more with their families for information? Well, no that’s not true either. Google reported 2012 as a record year for new searches, coming in at 1.2 trillion averaging around 100 billion per month (Google, 2013).

Unfortunately, that was the last report that Google has put out which doesn’t tell us anything about the recent growth pattern I was searching for. Luckily there is a third party, comScore, that has published reports on search engine history. comScore’s report shows that from December 2012 (Lella, 2013) to December 2014 (Lella, 2015) search traffic has increased by 3.4%. So no, it doesn’t appear that Google is just a fad, but what does that mean for us?

This answer puzzled me for days when I finally stumbled upon the article “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” by Sparrow (2011). The team of scientists working on this ran a number of experiments and found out three key things. They found out that as (1) people discover that they need information, they think first of the computer, (2) we remember things best that we don’t think will be available later, and (3) we identify where an item has been stored better than what that item was. With this information, things start to make sense.

Millennials continue going back to their parents because they are a trusted source of information and they slowly learn that their parents know more than they gave them credit for. They will keep going back for both the information they have forgotten and to learn more about important decisions as Javeed taught us earlier. The same goes for Google. If they know that they can do a simple search again and find the same information easily, they are less likely to remember it. That will cause them to continue coming back for that information and Google continues as their number one resource for new information.

In August 2013, all Google servers went down for a total of five minutes, but in just this small amount of time global web traffic went down by 40 percent, as reported by Bell (2013). We have become dependent on the knowledge we get from the Internet the same way we are dependent on the knowledge we get from our family, friends, and parents. The experience of losing an internet connection is quickly becoming more and more like the experience of losing a friend, a family member, or a parent.

As we’ve seen, people are becoming more dependent on the paths they use to get their information. What does that mean for us as marketers? We need to start thinking more about how we can influence that inner circle of family and friends that will eventually influence the audience we are marketing towards. If they are already going to social media for information we need to be on social media and become a reliable source for them. Once you can build that image in their mind they will continue coming back to you for both past and future information. Our goal is to become a member of their inner circle of friends and family, almost like a parent. Your goal is to become their father, their patriarch, their ultimate source.

References

Bell, L. (2016). Google Goes Down for Five Minutes, Web Traffic Plunges 40 Percent. Retrieved from http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2289637/google-goes-down-for-five-minutes-web-traffic-plunges-40-percent

Google. Zeitgeist 2012. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/zeitgeist/2012/#the-world

Javeed, S., Bruschke, K., & Chen, E. (2010). Bringing the Message Home: Teaching Effective Communication to Students and Parents. Retrieved from NACADA Clearinghouse of Academic Advising Resources Web site http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/tabid/3318/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/165/article.aspx

Lella, A. (2013). comScore Releases December 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings. Retrieved from http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2013/1/comScore-Releases-December-2012-US-Search-Engine-Rankings

Lella, A. (2015). comScore Releases December 2014 U.S. Desktop Search Engine Rankings. Retrieved from http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Releases-December-2014-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings

Quigley, M. W. (2016). Keeping the Lines of Communication Open with Millennials. Retrieved from http://www.aarp.org/ home-family/friends-family/blogs/info-2016/millennials-communication-with-parents.html

Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at our Fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776-778. doi:10.1126/science.1207745