LinkedIn Marketing Solutions vs. Yahoo Ads

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.

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Good for instances where search campaigns are driving poor overall traffic. Campaigns for awareness work well, and you have pretty good control of how your ads look without having to do too much work. We've used this successfully for law, financial services, and political campaigns effectively. With Twitter banning political ads, and Facebook becoming increasingly strict on their approval guidelines, this may turn into the best alternative. Would not necessarily recommend for ecommerce campaigns, or lead based campaign where keeping cost per conversion down is a primary objective.

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• 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

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• Offers extensive solutions to reach a high volume of users and create new reach outside of major networks like Google and Bing.
• Provides unique ways to differentiate advertisers in top positions on search results pages.
• Creates unique tactics to utilize on display networks (carousel and video takeovers).

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• 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.

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• No traffic -- despite a high ROI, the lack of overall spend led to us eventually remove support for the channel from our services.
• Nothing to differentiate it from other paid platforms -- Gemini didn't particularly offer anything new or novel that made it worth using over Bing and Google.

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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.

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One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.

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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.

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They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.

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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.

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Yahoo Gemini! does stack up well against its competitors in the smaller spending realms. We've never been able to justify the ROI when we try to scale it up to even 10% - 15% of our spend. No, we've found that it's much better as a tangential win than a mainstream channel.

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• 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.

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• It has created a more comprehensive understanding of the audience to whom a client is marketing.
• It allows clients to target and reach audience members on all major search platforms.
• It provides data and reporting to understand and analyze campaign success and optimize campaigns towards client goals.

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