The professional social network has partnered with AppNexus to deliver ads based on LinkedIn data not only on LinkedIn’s site and apps, but a network of 2,500 of other business-focused websites. It follows LinkedIn’s $175 million acquisition of b2b marketing platform Bizo in August last year. LinkedIn has since integrated Bizo’s team and technology, and it is now unveiling its first line of marketing and advertising products following the acquisition. It’s essentially the relaunch of Bizo, under the LinkedIn banner.
LinkedIn’s 347 million registered user base is an extremely valuable one to advertisers. By definition its members are tech-savvy professionals, many of them affluent and many of them involved in their business’ purchasing decisions. And, just like the incredibly powerful Facebook Atlas network, LinkedIn users are logged-in, which means the company holds rich data on them such as their age, job position, connections, and browsing behaviour.
Chief among LinkedIn’s new b2b advertising products is “LinkedIn Lead Accelerator,” which allows brands to place a pixel on their websites, which uses cookies to identify LinkedIn users so advertisers can get a better understanding as to the types of people visiting. LinkedIn says that currently, most website owners only actually know about 5% of their visitors, and that LinkedIn Lead Accelerator fills in that gap.
Advertisers can then retarget those visitors with ads (with different messaging, depending on the different parts of the website they visited) on other websites and outside of LinkedIn across the new LinkedIn Network Display, which is powered by AppNexus. The data is all anonymized: Advertisers won’t know you visited their website, but they will know that 30% of their visitors are finance directors from London, for example. Users can opt out of this form of targeting via their LinkedIn settings.
Advertisers are required to sign up to use the new advertising products on a quarterly, or annual subscription basis. LinkedIn requires that advertisers must have a minimum of 20,000 visitors (or “leads”) to their website in order to sign up, but there is no minimum ad spend. LinkedIn would not confirm the cost of a subscription. Brands including Lenovo, Samsung, and Groupon are already signed up.
The suite of tools are not all self-service. It begins with an office visit, with LinkedIn’s team identifying the best course of action and advising on content. Marketers do, however, get access to an analytics interface so they can see how their campaigns are performing and the types of professionals that are visiting the website, and the cost per acquisition of a customer. But LinkedIn’s own team optimizes and buys the campaign in the background — the advertiser can’t do this from their desk at this stage.
LinkedIn is also launching a widget brands can add to their website that allows visitors to autocomplete forms with their LinkedIn log-in information, and LinkedIn Onsite Display, which will allow advertisers to buy ads on LinkedIn’s mobile and desktop platforms.
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