5 Surprising Insights We Discovered after Spending $15,651.95 On LinkedIn Ads + Claim $100 FREE Credit

1 – LinkedIn Ads Are Incredibly Expensive:

If the average value of one sale is less than $2,500 then we don’t advise you to buy LinkedIn ads. While each industry is different, most people will want to target decision makers like VPs, Senior Managers and Owners. The average cost of these audiences will cost between $77 and $100 to get 1,000 impressions. See screenshot below for what LinkedIn suggest we should bid to reach our audience:

2 – Avoid Sponsored InMail, Text Ads & Display Ads:

While these may seem like a great idea, there are 2 main reasons why they are not a good option.

i) Sponsored InMail ads do not allow your recipients to reply to the automated message you send to them. The only option your recipient/s is to opt-in to your offer. Since people are on LinkedIn to build relationships (& look for a new job) they are less likely to opt-into an offer from someone they don’t know. 

ii) Texts ads are basically banners ads. Question: when was the last time you intentionally clicked on a banner ad? My point is that click through rates on banner ads are incredibly low and you won’t get many conversions. Google ads provides a better platform for running banner ads. 

3 – Avoid Promoting White Papers & Free PDF downloads:

Before we started promoting valuable content (like this article) we were basically replicating what everyone else was doing which is attempting to drive cold traffic to sign up pages. This strategy proved to be very costly. We set out to study what the top 100 LinkedIn advertisers were doing and noticed that most were taking the same approach with only a few being innovative. While our counterparts have deep pockets, we had to work with a tight budget. This meant we had to think outside the box and promote content that delivers value to my audience. 

4 – Videos Convert Better Than Images:

We initially started using images for all our campaigns however, LinkedIn recently rolled out an option for sharing video; see "LinkedIn opens video uploads to all as part of a bigger video push" Article below

After some testing we discovered that video was getting nearly double the engagement rates over images. 

5 – Webinars Convert Between 15 & 20%:

While it's tempting to just copy what your competitors are doing and drive traffic to pdf download pages this does not build enough trust. Granted some advertisers are finding success with this strategy it is not only the expensive path to success, but you also lose that lead qualifying element that your sales team desperately needs. We have found that webinars do an excellent job at qualifying leads.

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