
Most of you probably already know that LinkedIn now offers an advertising platform called Direct Ads similar to Google Ad Words and Facebook Advertising but I just launched a test campaign for Datalicious and was impressed by the targeting options the LinkedIn ads offer for B2B marketing.
LinkedIn not only allows you to target your ads by gender, age and geography but also company size, job function, industry and seniority (see below). From a B2B lead generation perspective these kind of targeting options seem amazing, however I cannot comment on ad effectiveness yet.
From what I can read online so far, people seem to think Linkedin ads are too expensive and not providing enough value for money but I'll give it a try anyway. If you have any comments or experience with LinkedIn ads please let me know, would love to hear your stories.
PointRoll released some interesting data last month on how not only ad re-targeting but also ad sequencing can help to lift interaction and response rates. We've been making some noise about this for a while as part of our targeting matrix development exercise in our analytics courses but it's great to see some independent data on this.
Essentially what we're talking about is the basic fact that advertising needs to be relevant to stimulate engagement and responses. In addition to re-targeting, which is used to display consumers highly targeted ads based on their past content consumption (e.g. recency and frequency of certain product categories viewed), marketers should also consider ad sequencing or in other words story telling (e.g. exchange or evolve the message with time).
To better understand the different messages, segments, channels and data points that would be involved in creating a coordinated targeted end-to-end user experience across your various channels we recommend starting with a simple targeting matrix as shown below.
A targeting matrix helps to determine at a high level what segments we are talking to, how the message should change over time with consumers moving along the purchase cycle and what channels we have available to deliver our messages as well as the different data points we can use to segment users.
Please let us know if the above has triggered some ideas, we would love to work with you and your agencies to develop a customised targeting matrix and enable the underlying technology to help you deliver more targeted advertising.
The debate around whether display influences search behaviour or not has been going on for a while but I don't think anyone really doubts the impact on search anymore, the question is how much. So it's nice to see some research on how this differs by vertical. The below Eyeblaster graph shows the share of search and display conversions by vertical.
Interesting to see would be how the impact of display on search behaviour differs depending on the brand awareness in market for a particular brand. Datalicious client research indicates that the weaker the brand awareness in market for a particular brand, the stronger the impact of display advertising on search behaviour and conversions.