Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
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LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Score 7.8 out of 10
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LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is a recently (2015) expanded marketing platform for reaching audiences through the popular Linkedin work-oriented social network that includes modules like the Lead Accelerator (supporting segmentation features to improve conversion), Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn Onsite Display, LinkedIn Network Display, and Sponsored InMail. While still at its core a social marketing engine, Linkedin Marketing Solutions now presents a more comprehensive B2B advertising platform. The…
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Pricing
Google Ads
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
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Pricing Offerings
Google Ads
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Ads
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Considered Both Products
Google Ads
Verified User
Employee
Chose Google Ads
Google Ads can be more useful than LinkedIn & Facebook Ads because it is reaching a larger pool of users. Both platforms have even better/more targeting options, but they limit the amount of reach you will receive. Google Ads catches users at the top of the sales funnel.
It really depends on the objective of the campaign. Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is great for service businesses and e-commerce stores, whereas Facebook is really great for brand awareness and e-commerce. LinkedIn is best for B2B and finding job seekers. I believe that if used …
I feel Amazon advertising is more for products, and we sold services. Microsoft ads were interesting, but the Bing platform did not have as much traffic as Google. Facebook ads focus more on casual relationships than business ones, so we spent more time and money on LinkedIn. …
Google Ads has significantly higher reach than any competitors. In my experience, Google Ads is more expensive than Facebook and cheaper per click than LinkedIn but the results have always been far superior to both. The ability to organize campaigns and fine-tune your marketing …
It reaches clients in a different way than other marketing channels, so Google Ads fills a nice niche that should be a part of any major overarching advertising strategy.
Google Ads aims to find new business prospects by connecting your relevant business to their search intentions, instead of targeting new prospects by their demographic characteristics, expressed interests or other traits. This allows a business to find new and unexpected …
You should never just one channel of marketing as each channel has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, AdWords does capture 80% of search volume.
I rank Linkedin Marketing Solutions below Facebook for Business, as well as Google AdWords and Analytics. You get a much deeper view of how your ads are performing and your ROI with those platforms as opposed to LinkedIn. I'd probably rank Linkedin right next to Reddit Ads in …
We chose to use LinkedIn Marketing Solutions as an additional channel to Google Ads (formerly AdWords). Comparatively, Google Ads gives you better reporting features and much lower PPC costs. The tradeoff is user segmentation -- Google lets you pick by general demographics, …
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions offers more powerful targeting capabilities than other ad platforms in the space. We are able to target by company, job title, job level, company size etc. which you cannot do accurately on competitor ad platforms like Facebook or Google Ads. Some …
LinkedIn ads CPC is typically higher than Facebook ads and can be higher than Google Ads depending on who you are targeting. I've found IT and CEOs to be the most expensive targets on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn offered a different way to market and that was through direct messaging on the platform. Those direct messages result in a push notification and an email (depending on the user's settings), so we knew that was a more creative and attention-getting spend. It made more …
Audience type (professional) - LinkedIn has worked great for SaaS offerings while other social media advertising platforms seem better suited for product offers.
Lead volume - other platforms tend to produce more form submissions
LinkedIn is definitely more expensive if you are doing video or image ad formats, unless you're in an extremely competitive industry for search ads on Google. However, Google has nowhere near the capabilities for audience targeting if you are selling business-to-business. They …
LinkedIn is phenomenal in comparison in terms of the data and analytics they provide to you. No other platform tells you the names of the companies of users who clicked on your ads or visited your website, or anything like that. Website analytics provided by LinkedIn are …
I think LinkedIn, though a niche product, is not quite as good as Google or Facebook Ad platforms. LinkedIn feels more like Twitter Ads platform circa 2012, with the lower view count. However, LinkedIn Ads has a great amount of targeting options that are useful when attempting …
LinkedIn doesn't come even remotely close to the pure audience size of Google, or even Yahoo for that matter. But it really doesn't need to, it's a specific product for a specific market and it does an exceedingly good job. Facebook will get your content in front of an almost …
LinkedIn Ads are much easier to set up and learn than Google AdWords. The analytics are also much clearer and easier to understand. However, it does cost a lot more per click than AdWords in general we have found. On the other hand, you can target your audience a lot better.
Linkedin Marketing Solutions has many competitors including Facebook, Twitter, Google Adwords and many others. The benefit with LinkedIn is the professional filters and the low cost per click.
LinkedIn marketing solutions is great for its narrow targeting options. Being able to target professionals at scale is ideal for certain clients' business needs. The reach of Facebook and Twitter is not matched by LinkedIn and the Google and Bing scale is also larger than …
I think LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is much easier to use than Google AdWords. That being said Google AdWords has much better targeting and doesn't cost as much if you know how to properly use the tool. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions clicks are generally more expensive, but have …
Clients who are selling products such as dresses, clothes, jewelry, beauty products, etc., generally work well. Also, in some cases, it doesn't fetch a good ROAS for very small business owners. If a client is already doing well in SEO, the probability for it to perform well over Google Ads is always enhanced, and if it doesn't have a good organic reach, Google Ads also suffers.
Although it offered great features, we didn't really see a lot of traffic or results from the ads we placed. Working in hospitality, we had to strategically time and place our ads around holiday seasons and it can be difficult to predict a marketing campaign. Depending on your market, LinkedIn may not be the best avenue to advertise with.
Keyword Research - Google Ads has a handy built in tool that helps determine important keywords to target both for Ads & SEO
Intuitive Analytics Dashboad - Google Ads makes it fairly simple to see and analyze important metrics on how your ads are running week after week
Intuitive Setup - Google Ads makes it easy to figure out how to run ads with little to no training (although training is highly recommended to run effective ads), as their interface is clean and easy to figure out (unlike competing products).
The Campaign Manager is not good. It seems like the Campaign Manager (where you create and manage your self-serve ad campaigns) is buggy and doesn't have a good flow. Contrast with FB Ad Manager of the Google Adwords/Ads interface, which has a much more simple process to create and edits campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, audiences, budgets, etc. LinkedIn Campaign Manager seems to actively work against you trying to make changes to your campaigns.
LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three options: sponsored content, InMail, and text ads. LinkedIn used to offer other ad services that you couldn't access unless you had a "managed ad account" run by LinkedIn Staff with a dedicated monthly ad spend. It seems most of those "hidden" features have disappeared, though you still have to contract with LinkedIn to offer dynamic ads. It would be better if LinkedIn empowered marketers to create the ads they want. (Perhaps with a dedicated acct. manager like how Google Ads works.)
This is silly, but it isn't easy to navigate to Campaign Manager. I have a bookmark for Campaign Manager because if you want to click there through LinkedIn, it takes 2 or 3 different screens to get to Campaign Manager. In my opinion, when you click the "Work" dropdown from the LinkedIn header (by your profile picture) you should have a link to Campaign Manager.
LinkedIn, in recent months, has made substantial changes to the Ads platform and Campaign Manager. Though these changes work to address some of the above issues, LinkedIn still has quite a ways to go before their platform is on par with their competition.
I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.
I suspect that Google Ads is not for the novice user. I told my 'Ad Specialist' that I was not the best on computers and apprehensive about my ability to maneuver the website. He told me on more than one occasion that "I work for you...I'm your sherpa...call me any time or send me an email"! The sales and service representatives for Google Ads are very well trained, though not much integrity. Despite that I told my Google Ad Specialist that my website was incomplete the ad was published live anyway! Beware that the 'talk' is good, but it ain't cheap!
in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.
We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with
So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.
Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.
If you want more precision in B2B targeting, then LinkedIn is without question the better alternative. However, as I established before, I've rarely seen LinkedIn campaigns be successful for anything other than brand awareness/thought leadership. And that's almost 100% what Twitter is for. Twitter campaigns almost always have a cheaper CPC AND CPM than LinkedIn and accomplish the same thing, so I would say go with Twitter. At times LinkedIn campaigns are just so you can tell someone at a higher level that you did precise targeting to the exact audience they wanted and check that box, because it's easier for them to understand how you'd do well on LinkedIn, and more difficult to tell that story on Twitter. But I honestly prefer Twitter and its platform for B2B awareness campaigns. Heretic, I know, but it's how I feel after several years of experience with both. Facebook is bottom of the barrel for B2B in my mind, so I'm not really going to discuss it. I would take LinkedIn over Facebook for many reasons, but Facebook is an option too, but more for SMB and just covering all bases, not as a primary choice for B2B marketing.
Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.
We have seen a marked increase in inbound agent calls since we began LinkedIn marketing.
LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way to put your content in front of people that are actually going to read it, this has led to a major increase in our content being consumed and acted on.