Over the past year, LinkedIn has made several updates to their advertising options to make the platform more useful for companies that want to engage with a target audience. Last week, they announced several more changes that advertisers can use to make their campaigns more effective. LinkedIn introduced three new marketing objectives that can be used with a more powerful Campaign Manager.
A critical part of successful online advertising is choosing the right objective. When ad systems are geared to deliver a specific result, businesses get a better value for the advertising budget. LinkedIn has new campaign objectives that can help companies to get the results they want.
In a post announcing the new updates, Amita Paul wrote, “Today, we’re excited to announce three new objectives — brand awareness, website conversions, and job applicants — which are the latest additions to our redesigned Campaign Manager, which we first introduced in October as a public beta. These new offerings are designed to continue to make it easier to improve key results and better align with your campaign objectives. Early results show it’s working, we’ve seen a 67% lift in customer satisfaction compared to our legacy Campaign Manager experience.”
For the brand awareness objective, advertisers can now increase share-of-voice for the company’s product or services by using top of funnel campaigns that charge by impressions (e.g., cost per thousand or CPM). The website conversions objective is self-explanatory. LinkedIn has upgraded its conversion tracking tool so marketers can create campaigns that are optimized for specific actions on the company website. You can target for activities such as purchases, downloads, or event registrations. And for companies that are trying to recruit, LinkedIn Talent Solutions customers who are trying to drive applications on LinkedIn or their own site can now create ads using Campaign Manager with the job applicant objective.
In their announcement, LinkedIn included some testimonials from people involved in the Beta test for the new ad options. While these examples are cherry-picked to show the best possible result, they still show that the new ad formats will be useful in the right circumstances.
AJ Wilcox of B2Linked wrote, “Objective-based Buying generated 300% more sign-ups than standard bidding over an equivalent amount of time. Objective-based Buying generated more conversions than any other similar time period I compared it to, all the way back to 2015.”
Besides the new ad formats, LinkedIn also updated its click pricing options in Campaign Manager. LinkedIn has optimized click pricing to align with the advertiser’s objective. For example, if an advertiser selects “website visits” as the objective, they would only be charged for clicks that reach the landing page. Similarly, campaigns with social engagement goals, click pricing will be optimized to include all social actions such as likes, comments, shares, etc.
Companies that consider other businesses and professionals to be their target audience should consider taking advantage of these new tools from LinkedIn. LinkedIn has always been the best place for B2B marketing, but their ad options were lacking. The recent spate of advances to LinkedIn ads has made it easier to engage with a target audience on the platform.
For more recent news about changes to LinkedIn, read this article on the new custom call-to-action options and community hashtags on the platform.