LinkedIn Audience Network - is it worth it?

Last month I posted about LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN) and about some of the big problems with using this option when running LinkedIn Ads.

In this article, I intend to go deeper than I could in a single post, explain in more detail what the problem is with this option, the methodology used to determine the extent of the problem, and what I action I suggest should be taken by both LinkedIn Ads advertisers, and LinkedIn Ads themselves.

What is LinkedIn Audience Network?

All the major ad networks also run display networks.

Google has GDN, Meta Ads has MAN - so of course, LinkedIn has LAN.

The way it works is that the ad platforms monetize the power of their targeting across the web - buying traffic from publishers, like the New York Times, Yahoo, BBC, CNN - you get the idea. But also from publishers you've never heard of. This is usually done not through relationships directly with the publishers themselves

Most of the time, when you're getting those retargeting ads on websites - it's through one of the display networks.*

*(I'm purposefully leaving out the issue of programmatic, which is relevant but not so much for this article).

Google's Audience Network has recently been making headlines: "Google accused of mis-selling ads on third-party websites for years".

So when you're running ads using LinkedIn Audience Network - you're essentially using LinkedIn's targeting to run your ads on 3rd party publisher websites.

Simple, right? Not so much.

My own experience.

I've been testing LinkedIn Audience on and off since it was released - but time after time I could tell that something here was not right. Whenever I would audit a LinkedIn Ads account with LAN turned on - I'd immediately see that this was problematic.

Eventually I decided to investigate, and with the help of my former colleague and current friend Elad Levy of the marketing analytics consulting firm Creative Geek , we set out to dig deep into the issues facing LAN.

The four problems with LAN.

1. The audience you're targeting, is not the audience you intended to target.
2. Much, likely most, of the traffic seems to be fake or fraudulent bot traffic.
3. Most advertisers do not realize they are opting-in to LAN.
4. This skews the numbers, giving inexperienced advertisers false positive signals, leading to making big mistakes.

Problem 1: The audience you're targeting, is not the audience you intended to target.

LinkedIn Audience Network uses something called Group Identity when running ads outside of LinkedIn.

What does that mean? Well, it means that the audience you believe you are targeting - you are not in fact targeting.

What LinkedIn does is takes the general characteristics of your audience based on things like job titles, company and industry, and finds other people to target that are similar to that audience. Much like their lookalike audiences.

There are several problems with this.

In B2B marketing, targeting is crucial for reaching the right ICP. If we can only our software to compliance managers at banks, it doesn't help me if I reach marketers at banks, or compliance managers at supermarkets.

This is even more troubling when considering ABM campaigns, and retargeting campaigns - you are not reaching who you believed you were reaching - and this has serious implications for how these campaigns were measured and reported upon.

This has been confirmed directly by LinkedIn themselves, and it is written in LinkedIn Ads help center:

Group Identity for LinkedIn Ads

With Group Identity, we apply privacy-enhancing methods to our first-party data to group member accounts. Groups are based on shared professional traits, such as a member’s job title, company, industry, and more. Groups leverage our first-party targeting attributes to ensure that members of the group are similar.

Group Identity then determines how an ad can be served while minimizing personal information shared about a user across contexts.

Read the whole thing here.

So there you have it.

Even this were all there was to it - I would recommend to stay away from LAN.

But it's not... not by a long shot.

Problem 2: Most of the traffic is from bots.

A few weeks ago - I asked Elad if there was a way we could see how much of the traffic was from bots.

Not only did he say he knows how to do it - he wrote a blog post about how to do this over a year ago - and within minutes he had a dashboard set up tracking the bot traffic to a web page we were sending the traffic to. (TL;DR: you can do this too using reCaptcha, Google Tag Manager, and adding a PHP file to your web source code)

Once the dashboard was set up, I set up three test campaigns.

1. One campaign targeting a relevant audience with a relevant blog post about Hubspot tracking - with LAN turned on.
2. One campaign targeting an irrelevant audience with the same blog post - with LAN turned on.
3. One campaign targeting a relevant audience with the same blog post - with LAN turned off.

(Important Note: LAN now allows whitelists of trusted websites. This prompted me to create a list of ONLY the top tier news and tech websites like nytimes.com, bbc.co.uk, techcruch.com and wsj.com.)

You can see the set up here:

I spent about $200 - and these were the results.

You can see that in the campaigns where I used LAN - over 99.9% of the impressions served were from LAN - the CPC was much lower, and the CTR (it's not visible in the screenshot) was over 1%.

In fact - in the campaign targeting totally irrelevant people - heads of HR, Operations and Finance - in Germany - I got a CTR of 2%.

In comparison - the campaign with LAN turned off had a CTR of just 0.22% - even with a more relevant audience of marketing people. Not too surprising considering the niche topic of the blog post.

So according to LinkedIn - we generated - and paid for - 130 clicks to the blog post.

Here's the breakdown of bots according to our research:

Of the 105 visitors we tracked, 81 were certainly bots. That's 77% - over 3/4s!

The remaining 23%? We'll never know for sure.

From Elad Levy :

In our recent research on bot traffic within LinkedIn Ads' Audience network, we conducted a comprehensive investigation using Google's invisible reCAPTCHA.

With this invisible reCAPTCHA test, each visitor to our site was automatically assessed for bot-like behavior, and a unique "reCAPTCHA score" on a scale from 0 to 1 was assigned.

This score indicated the likelihood that the user was either a bot or a human, with values of 0.1 and 0.3 suggesting bot presence, while scores of 0.7 and 0.9 signified probable human users.

Leveraging this solution allowed us to analyze incoming traffic and discern patterns indicative of potential bot activity, thus providing valuable insights into the extent of bot traffic in LinkedIn Ads' Audience network.

Problem 3: Most advertisers do not realize they are opting-in to LAN.

By default, whenever you set up a campaign that can run on LAN, you are opted-in to this option, and need to opt-out.

You can see how this is done below:

Further adding to the confusion, once this has been saved - and your audience launched, this checkbox is hidden - like so:

It's easy to overlook or ignore this bit of text, and so many many advertisers do not even realize that LAN is turned on for their campaigns.

This leads us to our final problem.

Problem 4: The numers are skewed.

When LAN is turned on, we almost always see higher than usual CTRs and lower than usual CPCs - too such an extent that it can really hamper an advertiser's analytics and create very misleading benchmarks.

I can imagine many an awkward conversation when it becomes clear that the numbers being reported upon are not accurate - or once LAN has been turned off - the numbers drop to benchmark levels.

If you are seeing numbers that are too good to be true - chances are, the numbers are too good to be true.

What should you do about this?

First of all - make sure you're not running any campaigns on LAN.

If you are running LinkedIn Ads - either in-house, with a freelancer or through an agency - go check right now.

Just go into the account, and under the Breakdown menu choose "On/Off Network". This will tell you how much of your traffic and spend, per Campaign Group, if any, is going to LAN.

It's a simple check can do it in 2 minutes - and it might end up saving your company thousands of dollars or more.

If you are running campaigns with LAN - stop right now. There's zero value in this - as I've demonstrated above. It's an absolute waste of budget.

What LinkedIn should do about this?

I'm not sure - but if I were someone important at LinkedIn, I would be very upset that this is happening on my product. At the very least I would make it more clear that the audience here is not your targeted audience - and regarding the bot traffic - I believe it's just a matter of trying to mitigate the problem as forcefully as possible.

Ultimately, for whatever LinkedIn is earning here in revenue - it's losing in disappointed advertisers - many of whom may not even realize why their campaigns were not effective at all.

Who am I?

Hi, I'm Gabriel. I've been running LinkedIn Ads campaigns over 8 years, and since 2016 I've been the founder of Remotion: LinkedIn Ads Agency .

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Want help with your LinkedIn Ads campaigns? Get in touch with me, or request a proposal through our website at: www.remotion.io.

We work with B2B tech companies with budgets starting at $20,000/month and up.