July 27th, 2010
DirectAds Finally Works!…Sort of.
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
After 9 days of running ads on LinkedIn’s DirectAds, we’d seen a total of one click. This despite the fact that more than 16,000 impressions had been run, the fact that we took our top-performing ad from Google’s AdWords and put it into rotation on DirectAds, and the fact that we wrote the most pragmatic ad that we could think of.
Here we had free money, and we couldn’t spend any of it.
So we did what we do here at Fight. We looked to see what we could do differently.
After a brief brainstorm, we decided to open up the audience target. We had been targeting people in Marketing job functions at medium-to-large companies and were likely to have control of a budget. Since we had to spend the money or lose it, we decided to go wider; much wider.
We blew away all of the audience targeting options; anyone at on on LinkedIn could see our ads, moving us from about 500,000 potential audience members, to over 70,000,000. Our justification for this (aside from having to spend money by July 31st) was that it’s possible that marketing professionals just don’t use LinkedIn that much (seems unlikely, but our low number of overall impressions is suggestive), and that if we reach beyond the primary network of the people that we’re directly targeting, into the secondary network of people in a company who might refer us along, and the tertiary network of influencers outside of a company, then DirectAds could still be a benefit to the Naked Campaign.
Here’s what happened:
There was an immediate uptick in both impressions and clicks. The click through rate is modest, and the bounce rate for people arriving at the Naked landing page from DirectAds is about 67%, which means that there are likely SOME visitors who have a legitimate interest in what Fight does.
And what ads are getting all of these new clicks?
Maybe it’s no surprise to you, but it’s the top performing ad from the AdWords campaign and the pragmatic ad written specifically for the LinkedIn audience.