A Thorn In Our Side
LinkedIn Is a Thorn in Our Side
Anyone who has run media for B2B companies knows how hard it is. B2B-focused companies have all the needs of a B2C brand with 1/3rd (probably less) of the options in where to spend their money on paid advertising. At DNW we have a few B2B brands we workingare working with and often use LinkedIn because it’s the most seamless option to reach a targeted audience. If you are a leader of a marketing team and you need leads or want to run ABM campaigns, LinkedIn is your first choice because of everything that it has to offer.
With that said, here is where the “thorn in my side” part comes in. LinkedIn might be the shadiest of all the social platforms on top of being 5-10x more expensive than other options in the market. This isn’t to say there aren’t workarounds and experiences that you can bring to the table to get past these roadblocks, but without paying close attention, LinkedIn can serve your campaigns in ways you didn’t intend or have much higher costs than expected.
Let's break it down.
Cost
LinkedIn is a premium platform so it makes sense that the CPMs would be quite expensive. To reach a C-Suite audience or Directors, you don’t expect to pay $5-10 CPMs. Higher costs are expected, but often the platform is getting away with charging $150+ CPMs for non-conversion campaigns. If you try to run more targeted audiences that aren’t intended for millions of users, they are going to charge you a premium with CPMs in the $200-300 range.
In media, itsit's often a numbers game, and when it can cost $200+ for the CPM, no matter how well the campaign does, the results are difficult to back out, especially with brands with smaller budgets. If you have $10,000 a month to spend at a $200 CPM, that is just 50,000 impressions.
Audience Network
When you buy ads on LinkedIn, TikTok or MetaFacebook/Instagram, you think you are getting ads that serve on the platforms you spend money with. But if you don’t pay attention (image below) the LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN) is automatically selected when you set up a campaign.
It might not sound like much, but if you don’t uncheck that button, 95-100% of your campaign will end up running off LinkedIn. This means that you are trusting LinkedIn to serve ads on partner apps and websites using their targeting while manipulating the ad you create and not serving it in the feed of the LinkedIn Platform.
For me, no one wants a majority of the spend going to an Audience Network for a cheaper CPM or Clicks. We will fully admit, we haven’t turned it off and then came back excited to see some cheap media but when you look deeper it turns out none of it ran on LinkedIn itself and most of the clicks were low quality.
In our optinionopinion, it’s a must to turn off that placement and absorb the higher costs of running only in feed. The fact that LinkedIn auto-selects that on and then can serve extremely high percentages of the media off the platform is quite shady and not within the normal boundaries of any other social platform. Meta or other platforms do have audience networks too, but none run such a high percentage off of the platform you are buying ads from.
Audience Expansion
Scale is every platform's best friend. Without it, the algorithms struggle and so will your campaign. The purpose of Audience expansion is to find a way to reach other users that are similar to the audience you develop. The problem we have is while in theory this works, it just ends up being delivered to more junior-level employees and those not in the industries you select.
Every time we have turned on Audience Expansion, we are left mostly disappointed with who it serves. Go check out the “Demographics” section after testing having it on and you will quickly see the ad served to a lot of people you don’t want. This again leads to cheaper media, but is there quality in there? Meta has been powered by LAL targeting and audience expansion for years, often leading to better quality campaigns, but LinkedIn hasn’t been able to match that, and we notice the quality goes down after testing it out.
Click Performance
Often when people ask, what is a good CTR in Meta or TikTok, I can say confidently that 1% or greater (sometimes more) is a nice round number to work with. But after years of working in LinkedIn and looking at their benchmarks, often 0.3% - 0.6% is a good CTR. This is where the numbers game starts to sting. If a CTR is 50% as less than other platforms, and the CPM is 10x greater, how much is a post-click event going to cost? Yes, that click could lead to a multi-million-dollar sale but rarely is that the case and even the reality of what a client wants.
Conclusion
It may sound as if LinkedIn is the worst platform to ever advertise with and we aren’t recommending it for clients. As difficult as the platform is and the potential landmines it creates for a brand, we still often recommend it, but ensure clients are fully aware of all the challenges ahead. LinkedIn sounds great at face value with strong targeting in a social media-rich environment, but when you layer on the issues stated, it takes patience and diligence to extract the full value out of your campaigns. Proceed with caution and be prepared for some thorns on your side along the way.