LinkedIn ads are an effective way to build backlinks, generate leads, create opportunities, and increase traffic to your website. Using a unique Objective-Based advertising system LinkedIn lets advertisers choose between three different pay models: cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM), or cost-per-send (CPS). By taking advantage of these differing pay models, LinkedIn ads could be effective for any sized business. With over 690 million professionals in a wide variety of fields, LinkedIn ads offer many businesses an exceptional and flexible opportunity to advertise to industry peers alongside other businesses for a variety of prices.
The Types of Audiences to Advertise on LinkedIn
LinkedIn ads stand out from other platforms like Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram ads because they focus on B2B (Business to Business) marketing. This means that you can organize your LinkedIn advertising campaign depending on whether you want to target companies, professionals, industries, job titles, seniority, skills, schools, locals, interests, or a combination of these audiences.
How Much do LinkedIn Ads Cost?
The price of LinkedIn ads fluctuates depending on a few key factors. The first key factor is how much you’re willing to pay for a click, or the cost-per-click (CPC). The way LinkedIn’s CPC model works is similar to Google ads: you choose a price to sell your advertisement at and you must beat competitor bids for Google to show your ads. For instance, if you bid $1.00 on an advertisement spot and your competitor bids $0.90 you will receive the advertisement spot and only pay $0.91.
Similarly, LinkedIn uses two alternative payment models. One is CPM or the cost-per-impression. These campaigns hinge on brand awareness rather than click conversion and are priced based on how many people see them. The other payment model is the cost-per-send (CPS) model which only applies to message ads. The cost of these ads is based on how many messages get delivered.
Notably, these costs are influenced by the demand surrounding the target audience you’re marketing to and what bids are currently in place. The minimum amount a LinkedIn ad campaign could cost is a $10 daily budget which is a good starting point. However, scaling up to a $180 daily budget has been proven to influence results.
Types of Advertisements
LinkedIn offers a wide range of ad types including text ads, sponsored content, and message ads.
Text Ads:
Text ads are extremely easy to create and relatively inexpensive. Helpful for small businesses or testing a simple ad campaign, text ads are an inexpensive way to advertise on LinkedIn.
Sponsored Content:
Sponsored content appears directly on LinkedIn feeds, although it is more expensive than text ads per click, sponsored content is much more effective because it blends in with a standard post.
Sponsored content includes image ads and carousel ads.
Message Ads:
Message ads are the most expensive type of ads, however, they also work very well. With message ads, you can reach out directly to your advertising targets’ inboxes.
Using LinkedIn messaging, you can easily blast an advertisement to a handful of potential customers.
Results
The click-through rate (CTR) of LinkedIn ads overall is approximately 0.6%. Even though that rate may seem low, keep in mind that you’re advertising to high-quality businesses or professionals (B2B). Additionally, grouping the types of ads unveils more opportunities present. For instance, sponsored content has a 1% CTR compared to message ads with a 3.6% CTR.
Final Evaluation
At the end of the day you can have a high CTR or low impressions but what really matters is conversions and cost-per-conversion. In the Performance tab, you will be able to calculate these metrics with accuracy. This allows you to do a cost-benefit analysis determined by the amount paid for the ad divided by the business those conversions will yield.
Overall, LinkedIn ads are effective if your goal is to build high-quality leads by advertising to businesses and industry professionals.
