After two years of testing, ’grown-up’ social networking site, LinkedIn, has unveiled their new pay per click (PPC) ad platform.
Called LinkedIn DirectAds, the service allows advertisers to target their extensive professional membership based not only on geography, industry, job function and age but also now on exact job title, company name and LinkedIn group membership.
Describing the offering as: “a self-service advertising solution that allows you to create and place ads on prominent pages on the LinkedIn website.” LinkedIn claim in StrategyEye that “companies who use the service in beta reported click through rates three or four times higher than the site’s average.”
LinkedIn, according to their website, boasts a membership of “90 million professionals,” who use the site to “exchange information, ideas and opportunities.” By using their ad platform, advertisers will have access to almost eight million “business decision makers.”
Then advertising service was originally released on beta in July 2008 and has been praised for the way it allows marketers to zero in on their target audiences but has also been criticised for being expensive. Advertising currently accounts for a third of the company’s revenue but equates to just one percent of the US market in display ads, according to comScore, whereas Facebook reportedly accounted for a quarter.
One of the main issues that LinkedIn needs to address, if DirectAds is to sourced, is finding a way to increase the amount of time members spend on their site; consequently exposing them to more adverts. The average Facebook user stays logged in for five hours; the average LinkedIn users spends just 30 minutes browsing their profile. How that will be tackled remains to be seen.
