Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess

In a LinkedIn group discussion, KimKochaver, Director, Advertising Trade Marketing at LinkedIn, posed the following questions:

“What do you, the marketers, want to see on LinkedIn from an advertising perspective? What questions do you have for us about our members or about how they’re using LinkedIn”

She is mainly talking about brand marketers. That’s their big push recently. I’m rarely in that category, but I am part of an extremely lucrative marketing of advertisers. We are the advertisers that is purely ROI-driven. We’re driven by data, not brand. I’ve managed significant expenditures on Google and other search engines, and I’m always looking for more positive-ROI ad impressions.

So…What do I want to see?

From my perspective, I’m open to trying any new advertising platform, so long as it provides two main things:

• 1. ease of use, so any investment of time learning a new system is minimal, and
• 2. presence of the tools and data that accelerate the Creatalytical cycle of creative development, testing, analyzing, iterating to optimize the mix for ROI.

Notice I didn’t saying anything about demographics, the targeting capabilities, cost, etc. All those things can be tested, so long as you are enabled to be effectively and expeditiously creatalytical. Reid Hoffman is giving interviews about how LinkedIn is essential for brand advertisers. He talks about how the demographic on LI compares to the Wall Street Journal, and how this is valuable to brands. And he’s completely right.

But what I’m interested in is a platform for advertising that is not about brand building: it’s (primarily) about selling. I don’t know that first thing about average salary or household income of a Google user, and that hasn’t stopped me from generating billions of impressions, hundreds of millions of clicks, and tens of millions of dollars of net revenue in my career.

What do I have with Google? Lots of data and tools that allow the campaigns and sites to evolve quickly.

So for me, what I want to see on LinkedIn is that which is squarely in my comfort zone: pay per click text advertising, with lots of available data for analytics. I’ve not started with DirectAds, but I assume this is the PPC engine they are using.

The way I see it, there will be two big challenges for LI.

First, inventory for ads. There’s a lot happening on the average LinkedIn page, and the LI team will have to make some interface choices to free up some space, and that could be quite a hearty debate, both internally and with users.

Suggestion to LI: find space for text ads, and then commit to that real estate. As Google has shown, a fixed position for texted ads will increase user experience while delivering ROI to advertisers.

Second, will a homegrown PPC text ad system (DirectAds?) make more sense than simply syndicating Google, whether it’s AdSense or likely something more “partner-ish,” giving the close relationship of the companies? As an advertiser, I’ve spent years becoming an expert at Google AdWords. The tools, the interfaces, the tricks, the algorithms, the policies, the competitive position dynamics, etc. I’m still a ways from my Gladwellian 10,000 hours, but certainly far enough along that it’s increasingly hard to justify spending time learning new systems.

And also, along the lines of this second issue, there is the issue of relevancy of ads. And the question is: can LI build something at least as good as Google on this? LinkedIn users are serious people, usually on a serious mission while on the site, and if they’re going to sacrifice some screen real estate for ads, they’re going to want to make darnn sure that the relevancy and targeting algorithms are spot on. Not only for ROI (for advertisers and for LinkedIn) but also to keep customer satisfaction up.

It’s quite a balancing act, I’m sure.

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Data Driven Marketing by Matthew Burgess