Three reasons why marketers often fail with LinkedIn Ads

The purpose and mission behind LinkedIn is to provide an environment which “connects the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful". Where marketers very often fail on LinkedIn Ads is pushing out solutions and products expecting similar clicks and conversions to Google Adwords where users are actively searching for product information with a high intent to purchase.

This is fundamentally because you often are reaching customers at a difference stage in the buying cycle where users are making professional connections, having conversations with their network on groups rather than purchasing services directly. Targeting on LinkedIn is very effective but often the best performing campaigns use several layers and are extensively tested and refined.

2) Managing minimum bids when advertisers test it

When a new advertiser is testing the advertising options, marketers tend to go in with the very minimum bids possible. On the Campaign Manager Ad tool that floor is just above $2. Unfortunately, if you launch an ad, and the bids are lower than other advertisers are bidding, your ad is unlikely to be entered into very many auctions. Thus it won’t be seen by your target audience and you are minimising the chance of it performing.

There is also a time component to your bidding strategy. If you aren’t getting entered into auctions fast enough, the algorithm may sideline your ad because it’s not getting impressions fast enough. This leaves many new marketing managers disappointed with its performance

3) Using the Campaign Manager

The Advertising Tool Campaign Manager has historically been notoriously time consuming and clunky for agencies to use compared to the intuitive design and detailed tracking offered by Google Adwords and Facebook’s Ad platform.

LinkedIn invested heavily in upgrading and relaunching the New Campaign Manager in July. This has resulted huge improvements to the design, ease of use and technical efficiency when managing campaigns. A new account overview page is a particularly useful upgrade making it is now easier to locate and access multiple advertising accounts through a single interface.

This upgrade is vital as testing LinkedIn ads requires multiple testing to get the right performance metrics and will make it far more efficient for marketers in the future.

David Reilly is a digital strategy consultant, writer, digital skills trainer and owner of Lets Learn Digital