Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review After extensive research of DSP and DMP platforms in the market, our agency made the wise decision to license TTD's platform and develop a long-term partnership. TTD continues to innovate and offer cutting-edge media buying solutions, access to more audience data segments, and access to new and emerging media channels like CTV/OTT and digital-out-of-home. We couldn't be happier with TTD's technology and is one of the most advanced agency users of TTD is a key differentiator for our agency.
Read full review Pros Targeting - they have done a great job of allowing you speak to ideal audiences Support - dedicated customer service and account advising is always accessible and very responsive Curation of professional audiences - one of the biggest advantages to the platform is that its users are for the most part are professional Read full review User engagement - Cookie matching provides better engagement and effectiveness Reporting of campaigns - Great reporting on display advertising & platforms Dashboard reporting - Scalable to global deployment & campaigns Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Reporting platform leaves a lot to be desired. Requires a lot of trial/error to pull exactly what you need to drive optimizations/learnings. The "stop"/"continue bidding" feature for sitelists, devices, player sizes, etc is awful. When you set something up specifically, you should not have the AUTOMATIC option to serve beyond those parameters. Trafficking video (VAST/VPAID) tags requires a manual insertion of a click URL. Completely redundant ask and is not provided by advertisers as that URL lives within the ad tag. Should not require multiple actions traffic a video tag. Creative approval process (manual) doesn't seem necessary and is not a part of peers' platforms. There is no "pause/deactivate" feature for creative, you remove them or adjust the end date. Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review It's very intuitive. We had some training materials, but found that users were able to navigate through the software without needing many resources. Our only suggestion would be to add hover-over capability in the browser, so users can see a pop-up message further explaining what each button does.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review We noted no issues with our limited interaction with support. The software operated just as expected and we found that we were able to navigate needs on our own. We understand that The Trade Desk offers excellent support, so we believe it will be a good resource to us in the future.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review The Trade Desk is a much better product than
AppNexus . Even though both products showed promise awhile back,
AppNexus stopped innovating and The Trade Desk became specialists on data, cross site tracking and CTV inventory thus having a better and more unique product that actually adds value to your advertising efforts.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The good thing about having an agency account is The Trade Desk lets you add your markups to the client billing. We had a very positive response from clients regarding their perceived ROI on their ad spend through The Trade Desk. We did not have many national clients, mostly local dealerships, so it was difficult for them to allocate a lot of funds to display advertising, even though the ROI yield was acceptable. Read full review ScreenShots