Though the quality is slightly better than Facebook for B2B.
Looks like the min CPC and CPM bids are determined dynamically by account and even down to the ad level, so the $4 min CPC mentioned previously isn’t accurate.
$10 min daily budget, which is not an issue for the enterprise.
Notice that you can bid by CPM, too.
If you are confident in your content, then choose this option. Facebook will charge you about $12 for a thousand impressions in the newsfeed in the US. So you’re paying only double on LinkedIn while getting a higher CTR, apples-to-apples.
Facebook has more traffic, is cheaper, is more “top-of-funnel”, and provides advanced lead-gen/conversion features. Read our side-by-side comparison here.
In B2B, few would dispute that LinkedIn has the highest quality traffic. Expensive, yes, but we can target by workplace, seniority, skill, interest, industry, geography, and so forth.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Keep your audiences really small— only a few thousand– since the cost is higher.
- We still recommend you create multiple ads to separate out the performance by the target.
- Unlike Facebook, you don’t have to post daily, since you can select multiple updates to sponsor in a particular campaign.
- Test to see what works— but start with Facebook. In search, you start with Google and then move to Yahoo! and Bing. In social, you start with Facebook and move into LinkedIn and YouTube.
Here’s another one, this time from our company’s own page.
We got a respectable 2.5% click-through rate.
It cost us $80 for 16 clicks, which is a $5 CPC:
As we said before, the minimum CPC bid is $4, but we’ve been able to get $3 clicks by bidding CPM and having a killer CTR.
But here is what is surprising:
Notice that while the paid ads got 16 clicks, we got 45 clicks organically, nearly 3 times as many.
So if these paid clicks cost us $80, then it would have cost us nearly $240 to buy that same level of organic engagement.
If you believe that, then the moral of the story is that it’s much more effective to produce amazing content than it is to buy your way into the LinkedIn newsfeed.
Do you find it funny that we’re spending money on LinkedIn ads to discuss how LinkedIn ads are performing?
Or that we’re primarily using Facebook to market the research that we’re doing on LinkedIn?
Some counts and analysis, if you’re interested.
But here’s what happens when you sponsor a post indiscriminately.
Look at the comments below:
When you match the right audience against the right content, you get recommendations that people appreciate- They don’t see it as advertising.
But when your targeting is off, especially in the sacred newsfeed of friends and companies that users want to follow, you’re branded as a spammer.
Isn’t it interesting to see that spam is not about Viagra or weight loss supplements, but is often the unintentional by-product of great brands who indiscriminately target?
It’s up to all of us to help companies of all sizes be more effective marketers.
Let us know how your LinkedIn campaigns fare on your business page!
