Bing LinkedIn Targeting 3 Month Update
Back in April, we blogged about our admission into one of Microsoft Bing’s newest pilot programs that lets you target LinkedIn profiles. After testing this feature for 3 months, we’ve gathered our findings and the results thus are far from spectacular.
Our Test:
Our client that we first added into this pilot is a B2C digital services company. Our strategy for testing was to hyper focus on relevant audiences with the Industry and Job function targeting options. We started by taking our best performing services from existing campaigns which have ad copy and assets that are tailored to their respective service. Then we created new ad groups and applied several job function and industry targets that best aligned with that specific ad group audience.
Initial Results:
After a few weeks we saw that impression volume was very low so we increased the bids to roughly 200% our account average bids to try and gain some traction and let them continue running.
After the second month of activity we reviewed performance only to find only 1 conversion after $1.5K in spend – a far cry from our target cost per conversion of less than $45.
We collaborated with our Microsoft representative and they confirmed that most of their other clients were seeing similar, disappointing results. They suspect the blame is attributed to the low volume of Microsoft ads being served on LinkedIn overall and shared some tips based on what their few, successful clients were seeing.
What worked:
According to our rep, clients who saw positive results did so by casting a very wide net. The exact opposite of what we did. They targeted all job functions and industries, inspected performance until volume was significant, and then focused their efforts only on those audience targets that performed well. This indicates that the targeting we marketers might assume will perform best might not actually do well at all in Microsoft’s LinkedIn placements for those audiences.
What didn’t work:
For us, hyper targeting – thinking we were putting our best foot-forward – did not work at all as intended. Volume was very low, even after pushing bids 200% above our account average.
We’ve moved to using this wider audience targeting setup and will keep a close eye on this wide targeting tactic to prevent any excessive wasteful spending. We’ll be sure to keep you updated with any findings. Stay tuned for more updates!
In the meantime, we’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts surrounding this new feature.
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