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Why LinkedIn Ads Are Pretty Worthless



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Why LinkedIn Ads Are Pretty Worthless

We all know what LinkedIn is, but why are their ads worthless? We all want to make more money online and most of the time it will boil down to running a PPC campaign. LinkedIn being one of the biggest social networks in the world would be one of the best bets to target clients, right? Well I'm going to go over what I've learned about their system and why it needs a huge improvement in order to be competitive with Adwords, Bing Ads, and Facebook.


Let's start with some numbers first...

Linkedin makes around $450 million per quarter when it comes to advertisers paying them for clicks. That sounds like a great deal of money when it comes to PPC but not when you compare it to facebooks $6 billion and Googles even more staggering $48.1 billion each quarter. If you think about it, Linkedin is making around 3% to 4% of what facebook is making each quarter and a measly 0.08% of what Google is making from their platform.

Now we know that LinkedIn isn't as large as both facebook and Google, but with their almost 100,000,000 active users each month and their 400,000,000 user base, they should be making a lot more, right?


So why isn't LinkedIn making more?
It's because their ads suck and so does their PPC dashboard! If you've ever logged into the dashboard to run a PPC campaign on LinkedIn you would instantly know that it's extremely basic and bare bones. You can do some basic text ads... and that's all lol.

Cost Per Click
The CPC setup on Linkedin is basic, and I mean very basic. It doesn't matter what you're targeting, your cost per click is pretty much the same and it's going to be around $4. It doesn't matter how well your ad is set up and how you target, you're going to pay a premium when it comes to advertising on Linkedin.

Why LinkedIn Ads Are Pretty Worthless

Let's say you get 1 sale in ever 100 clicks, which is normal, you better be selling something that targets any type of business owner and also profit over $400 per sale. This is the only way you'll profit when it comes to LinkedIn ads, unless you're doing something like an email list building method, but there are much cheaper ways to do this effectively.


Why does LinkedIn not care?
I honestly don't think that LinkedIn cares about updating their advertising platform because they make a ridiculous amount of money from all of their premium members. A premium member is paying between $49.95 to $149.95

Let's say that just 1% of the active people are paying an average of $99.95 a month that would mean that LinkedIn is making around $99,950,000 a month just from it's premium accounts. That's $1179,400,000 a year but it's likely to be pretty low if you know how many people are upgrading to premium accounts. I would think that a more accurate number for how many people have premium accounts would be 5% to 7%. This would mean that LinkedIn would be making around $10.5 billion a year just from premium accounts.

For the simple variable of premium accounts, I think this is why LinkedIn doesn't care much about it's advertisers. It's extremely unfortunate for LinkedIn because they could easily compete with Bing Ads since a lot of users would come in specifically for advertising spots.




In Conclusion:
I've never been a huge fan of advertising on LinkedIn because it's a high risk with minimal reward. It's smarter to advertise through Adwords or Bing Ads since the conversions are much better and you can have a much better ROI. Until LinkedIn revamps it's advertising dashboard, they won't be making as much money as they could through their PPC campaigns. However they don't seem to mind much since they have loads of people paying monthly for premium accounts.



Remember to follow me Why LinkedIn Ads Are Pretty Worthless
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Thanks!

Razzy

Comments

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Tronia
I completely agree with you Razzy. LinkedIn ads are completely worthless when compared to other companies. They still don't have video ads or remarketing. It is ridiculous that they aren't upgrading or investing in this way.
Like you said, they don't care about us because they make enough money elsewhere. It is the harsh truth.



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ksundisk9
That's for the information about Linkedin, I don't know much about that site, and it seems less popular that the bigger platforms, I advertise music so I'm not sure if Linkedin is even the right site for me in the first place, but I do want to expand beyond Youtube Facebook, and Sound-cloud, it's oversaturated with content on these sites, which makes business harder in some ways.



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DeeFree
You ought to try Instagram. I'm not sure what the maximum length on video/audio posts is but it's a great way to get something out quickly and to a lot of people. However, you should look into how LinkIn targets its ads because there are definitely music professionals on the site.



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overcast
People don't come to LinkedIn for buying stuff. They come to linked in for job opportunities and the recommendation. So this needs to be properly considered. Not many users are going to be even seeing the ads due to adblocker. So in turn all of these issues makes you think how badly this option can be for you if you choose to view LinkedIn ads. I don't think those ads are any worth it.



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arachnophobik
Yep, LinkedIn isn't a good place for your ads simply because they don't have as much traffic. I think they even have less than reddit, where social medias, in general, should have more traffic. I personally don't know anyone that uses LinkedIn, everyone here is either using Facebook or Twitter. Despite the fact that I see it in Google search a lot, it doesn't make me want to register because why would I waste my time "connecting with people" if nobody I'm connected to is using it.



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Pixie06
I have an account on LinkedIn but can't even remember the last time I went on there. I believe that LinkedIn is not for everyone. I joined this platform at a time when I was unemployed but it did not help me that much. Moreover there are less people using this site compared to the other social media sites. Furthermore those adds are for sure worthless and we must abstain from advertising on LinkedIn since it is not profitable.



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Corzhens
If you say that the advertising of LinkedIn is not good then maybe we can just settle for Facebook Ads which have been praised by some users. I have come across several discussions here about the cheap cost of Facebook Ads that starts from $10 per day and the PPC is not only cost effective but also effective in converting hits from the readers. I remember getting many invitations from users of LinkedIn but I did not entertain them.



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