The crew at PPC Hero knows the trick to the PPC trade can sometimes lie in the use of 2nd and/or 3rd tier search engines. Why? Generally speaking, they’re already targeted in some way to your core audience (think Shopping.com for Ecommerce sites) and there’s usually less competition (think cheaper clicks). Back in January, Linkedin took their advertising platform out of beta testing and made PPC ads available to the masses. They’ve been making small changes and updates to the functionality since release but now…now, Linkedin is in the lead generation game…and it could get serious…
OK, maybe it isn’t that serious. But here’s what it IS: potentially awesome because Linkedin is like Facebook for professionals. So if you’re in business-to-business sales, this one’s for you! Before we get too far in to the newest addition to the platform with the lead generation options, I want to outline a little of what Linkedin’s PPC advertising is offering up front.
Pricing & Payment
Linkedin has a minimum daily budget for advertising of $10/day for a campaign and they allow up to 20% overspend from your daily budget setting. The platform also offers CPC and CPM bidding options and based on their minimum daily spend, they only recommend this platform for advertisers with at least a $300 budget per month.
Best Practices
The Help section of the Linkedin advertising interface offers up a checklist of best practices for the platform and how you can juice up your advertising efforts. Their list includes:
- Create effective ads (with examples)
- Create multiple ads for each campaign
- Target the right audience
- Set an appropriate daily budget
- Understand how bidding works
- Improve your performance
Targeting
This is where the Linkedin platform starts to strut its stuff for the B2B industry because the interface allows you to target your ads based on user’s profile information, such as:
- Company
- Job Function
- Job Titles
- Industry
- Seniority
- Gender
- Groups
- Age
- Geography
The platform also gives estimates for audience size as you select your targeting options that way you can get a better grasp of the budget needed to reach your goal audience. Ready for the new stuff??
Lead Generation
The newest edition to Linkedin’s advertising arsenal allows advertisers to take their PPC efforts in the platform to a more competitive level by implementing Lead Collection to complement their landing page. Any Linkedin user that clicks on a particular advertiser’s ad will be directed to that advertiser’s landing page and they will be presented with a ‘Request Contact’ button. Should that user choose to click one of these contact buttons, the advertiser will receive an email with that user’s Linkedin profile link (and possibly email address if the user has supplied it) so they can follow up with direct communication later. Another important note is that there is no extra cost applied to receive leads from the lead collection feature outside of the cost for ad click.
What we’re seeing more and more often as PPC continues to mature and grow is social media and social networks becoming larger players in specific audience-targeted advertising. I don’t know how many PPC advertisers would have seen this coming a handful of years ago, but here’s another avenue for the industry to explore in professional social networking! So what do you all think? What kind of world do we live in, where a social networking site, dressed up as a PPC advertising platform, starts getting everyone’s attention??
Have you been using Linkedin advertising this year? Are you seeing positive or negative performance for the money spent? If you haven’t implemented Linkedin’s platform, will you now that they offer lead collection? Share your experiences and ideas in the comments section below!
