Putting yourself out there on LinkedIn and then having no interest after three days can be extremely disheartening. Read on to avoid this in future…
Over the last few months I have been managing a LinkedIn advertising account for a client. The problem they were having was that the LinkedIn adverts would show for the first three days they were live, but there after they would get no clicks and very few impressions, meaning it was not sending any traffic to the site and there was no way it could create leads.
Aim
My aim will be to get the adverts showing on LinkedIn all the time without having to create new adverts frequently.
Background
The account I will be running the test on is a company that offers training courses for businesses. They are currently using adverts to target people on Google. Still, they have also been using LinkedIn to so they can target specific courses to people in set jobs, and LinkedIn is the ideal platform for this type of marketing. The only trouble we have noticed is that the adverts only show for around three days before vanishing.
82% of UK B2B Marketers Advertise on LinkedIn
Plan of Action
I will set up two LinkedIn campaigns – one that is specially targeted, and one that is much broader that targets a lot more people. In each I will have around 4 adverts, so there are a wide variety of adverts showing at any one time.
Campaign A will be focused, and campaign B will be generic.
What happened?
The first three days started really well and we had plenty of clicks in both campaigns. The only difference was that B had more clicks and impressions than A which was expected, as it is targeting a wider audience.
Four days into the test and as usual, the clicks started to fade on both campaigns. Campaign A went from X clicks down to X, and campaign B dropped even lower, falling to 0 clicks. This was not only for one day however; campaign B continued to get no clicks and campaign A had only one advert continuing to achieve a small number of clicks.
After a week of this I decided to add a new advert to each campaign. The clicks jumped up for the first three days as before, and then started to reduce again. I then added a new advert to both campaigns and again the clicks increased for three days then started to fall. The only difference was that one of the new adverts continued showing and getting a small number of clicks in campaigns A, so I now had two adverts out of five getting clicks constantly.
The only similarity I could see between the two that remained showing was that they both had a CTR of over 0.025%, which is higher than the rest of the adverts which were averaging around 0.015% or lower.
The next step I took was to duplicate the old adverts that had stopped running and getting clicks. For the first three days, they all got many clicks and then started to die off again. What I noticed again was that adverts with a CTR of over 0.024% would keep running with a high number of impressions and clicks.
I noticed from doing this that campaign A had more adverts that would continue running and getting clicks. I also noted that after when the adverts’ CTR started to drop, LinkedIn stopped showing the advert.
Findings
From monitoring the LinkedIn adverts I have come to realise that it is all about the CTR; the higher your CTR is, the more LinkedIn will show your adverts and the longer they will show for.
What I have started doing is uploading 4 adverts to my campaigns and any that don’t have a CTR of 0.026% or more, I will pause the advert and duplicate it or make a small change. When doing this, I don’t hit the edit button because LinkedIn keep the historical data for the advert and just doesn’t show it, even if you make a change. If you click duplicate, then make your changes, it starts a new advert with no historical data, and LinkedIn will spam your advert over the course of the three days, and if it has a high CTR, it will keep showing.