Edit: Well that’s a screw up! This was launched in July! Slow news Summer for Mulley.net!
Chris alerted us all on Twitter than the new LinkedIn DirectAds have launched.
Some thoughts and figures from playing around with LinkedIn DirectAds:
You can go er direct to the Directads creation page to run your own ads. It runs a bit like the Facebook SocialAds idea. Target ads to people. You can target them based on: Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority, Gender, Age, Geography
Targeting
There are 12,449,658 members in the United States who you can now target a LinkedIn DirectAd to. United States only right now, hopefully the rest of the world to follow. Also LinkedIn charge per impression, not click. The basic charge is $10.00 per 1,000 impressions. As you make your ad more targeted, they charge more. For example to target women or men only it’s $13.00 per 1,000 impressions. To target women aged 25-34 it’s $16.00 per 1,000 impressions.
I actually like that idea of charging more for targeting. Facebook doesn’t mind how targeted you get but there is more value in targeted ads really.Trouble is that LinkedIn will only allow you target based on two or less of the seven target types. This is odd.
Some additional figures :
Company profiles:
211,137 are self employed
513,697 in a company with 1-10 employees
640,016 in a company with 11 to 50 employees
802,168 in a company with 51-200 employees
562,431 in a company with201-500
479,299 in a company with501-1000
1,129,009 in a company with1001-5000
560,801 in a company with 5001-10,000
2,404,600 in a company with 10000+
Added up you get 7,303,158 who have filled this in.
Oddly, when you check the Seniority box you are told 1,296,023 are the owners of their business, yet 211,137 are self employed. Hmmmz.
Age Profiles
18,841 are aged 18-24
623,310 are aged 25-34
1,428,227 are aged 35-54
102,392 are aged 55+
When you tick all the boxes you get 2,172,770
So that means you are missing 10 Million people if you send an ad based on age
Misc:
On gender there are 4,752,304 women from the U.S. on LinkedIn and 5,625,916 men. Which gives 10,378,220 that have filled in their gender. So 2 Million in the U.S. have not.
There are 1,423,490 people on LinkedIn who say they’re from New York
Thoughts
All in all, this is good. I’m sure mySpace and maybe even Bebo will come along now too and offer something like this. I hear it’ll be 2009 before mySpace can offer these type of targeted ads.
Right, I’ll be trying that at the earliest possible convenience.
My facebook clickthroughs are dropping off as more people are using the new layout. I think the reason is the new ad position- off to the Google-blinded right.
What started out as a very successful advertising campaign for me is rapidly losing value for money, and if it gets worse I’ll just stop.
Beware! Don’t get caught out by the LinkedIn Ads promotions. – I recommend avoiding LinkedIn DirectAds.
Just before Christmas 2010 I got a $100 promotional coupon emailed to me by LinkedIn to try DirectAds. I had to register my credit card with them for a $5 initial charge to open the account. A few weeks later I checked to see how the ad trial was going and found that over $250 had been taken from my credit card account (in four separate transactions) as the $100 coupon amount had been used in just a few days! I had received no notification from LinkedIn of any of these charges to my credit card.
I have disputed this with LinkedIn and they say that the user agreement says they can charge the registered credit card for any amount at any time !
LinkedIn refuse to accept that the promotion was unclear about charging and they point blank refuse to refund any of the charges. In fact they took a final $48 more after I asked for my credit card to be removed from their system. I never had any trouble like this with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.
Don’t fall for the marketing hype – save your money and avoid LinkedIn Ads.