Should I Use LinkedIn Ads?

There are 133 million people who use LinkedIn in the United States, 500 million worldwide. ^[1] LinkedIn has also been ramping up its ad platform in recent years. You might think that it is a great opportunity if you need more business and are looking for places to advertise. But is LinkedIn a good place for you? Let’s take a look.

Pros:

The main attraction for LinkedIn comes from it’s targeting options. LinkedIn Ads has excellent targeting options for B2B companies. You can target people by job title, seniority, what company they work for, what school they attended, and what groups they are a part of, and many more options related to their career. If you are looking to target people in these areas, LinkedIn is the best way to reach them. You can very easily target specific job titles differently, or even based on how much experience they have in their current position. People are also often using LinkedIn for looking for new career opportunities, so if you are in career-related services, like higher education or recruiting, it can be the perfect place to advertise.

Cons:

There are some downsides to using LinkedIn Ads. It is a relatively expensive platform, with the average cost-per-click at $6.50. If you don’t have a large margin for your products or services, that can be eaten up very quickly by clicks. LinkedIn does not offer many of the useful options that other platforms like Facebook and Google offer for optimization, like goal-based pay, quality scores, and good conversion tracking. Company page promotion can also be difficult since the follow button is not present on most ad formats.

Who Should Use LinkedIn Ads?

So, who should use LinkedIn Ads? It makes a lot of sense for any B2B company with a large deal size (at least $10k deals), where you can afford to spend a little more to get the right people to see your ads. If you have a very small margin to work with, LinkedIn Ads is not the cheapest way to go and there are better options. It can also work very well for recruiting since people using LinkedIn are often looking for new employment opportunities, so you can take advantage of that to advertise your career openings. It can also work very well for higher education, for very similar reasons. If you are not in these categories, it is possible that LinkedIn Ads could work for you, but it is less likely.

Who Shouldn’t Use LinkedIn Ads?

If you are in these categories, it is unlikely that LinkedIn Ads will work for you because the audience doesn’t match well, they aren’t looking for what you are offering, or because it is too expensive: B2C, E-commerce, ad agencies, and commodity products. If you have a very broad targeting, LinkedIn Ads also might not work very well for you.

LinkedIn Ads can be a great place to spend your ad dollars, but you want to make sure that you are a good fit before you start spending a lot of money on it. It can be the difference between a successful campaign, and one that wastes a lot of money with very little results.