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 Do you currently use Google
AdWords to drive new business for your website? Then you need WordStream. The best scenario where it has helped me is time. I used to spend easily 20 hours a week analyzing data, making minor changes, adjusting budgets, trying to just master Google
AdWords ! But now I'm able to spend maybe 2-3 hours a week on Google
AdWords and put the rest of my attention on other responsibilities. WordStream has mastered making my time more efficient.
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 Definitely go with a consultant. It amazed me how quickly our consultant was able to understand our business and what we sell. He was the best resource for our newly-digitized marketing team. The negative keywords section was a hugely helpful tool. It saved us from so much unnecessary spend while making it easy to add negatives. How quickly changes implemented were updated on AdWords was amazing. It's live, so no lag and unnecessary spend. 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 While the basic tools are pretty simple to use, the platform is actually pretty expansive and I don't feel like I've taken advantage of it (yet) as much as I could. It does require some training to get up to speed. Support for Display ad campaigns is limited - this is mainly used as a way to optimize Search campaigns. Reporting. I find the reporting setup to be a bit confusing and still rely on other sources for building out reports on our Adwords performance (Adwords itself and Google Analytics). Read full review Likelihood to Renew Affordable, useful, informative, easy to use, continually updating and staying current
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 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 I have not had any experience with the customer support team for platform issues, but the account representative checks in with us often and is always available to answer questions. We will usually get on quarterly review calls so that she can share any new updates to the platform and answer questions.
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 WordStream is a little different from the competition. There are much more expensive solutions that manage the account for you with more features (Kenshoo, Marin, etc) and there are cheaper solutions out there that offer some of the features that WordStream provides; however, if a marketer wants to personally manage an account with some aided help than WordStream provides a great, cost-effective solution
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 I've already noted the time savings that WordStream has provided - at leats 5 hours a week (and I like to think that my time is pretty expensive/worth it). Wordstream has paid for itself already, simply in removing junk from our AdWords account - junk keywords, junk AdWords groups, junk matching. I think we'll find, over more time, that Wordstream will continue to provide outstanding value in dropping our CPA - once Google register sthe lack of junk, our CPC will continue to go down. Read full review ScreenShots