“We’re always building and testing new features and capabilities that will help marketers reach their customers,” a LinkedIn spokesperson said when asked about the platform’s new features.
New attributes or features have been added to LinkedIn for ads three years after Microsoft bought the company, helping bring more financial resources. In May, LinkedIn bought Drawbridge, a cross-device data company. AJ Wilcox, the founder of B2Linked, a LinkedIn-focused ad agency, said he saw the Drawbridge acquisition not as just as an acqui-hire, but as a sign of LinkedIn bringing more cross-device targeting into the platform. LinkedIn has relied on cookie-based retargeting, which is not effective when browsers are restricting functionality. Wilcox said adding event-based retargeting such as based on percentage viewed of a video is a necessary step.
“Not only are video ad views very expensive ($0.06 per two-second view), you can’t do anything with it like you can on YouTube and on Facebook. LinkedIn understands that their targeting there is weak, and I see them making strides to address this,” Wilcox added.
Stephen Vujevich, Director of Digital Strategy at Gregory, said, “I can only imagine that would be an even pricier offering given that it would be a smaller audience subset, but it’s great to see them giving the ad platform the attention it deserves. Since the Microsoft acquisition, it’s pretty evident that they’ve been systematically focusing on pain points across the platform to slowly evolve it and improve.”
“The ad manager is easier to use and looks nice. They have been upping their pixel and audience data a ton. Last year, launching a LinkedIn profile targeting that you can do with Bing Ads has been great for clients. Sadly, going through Bing Ads does not make it cheaper, but being able to target LinkedIn people while they are on the Bing network is a huge start to the LinkedIn-Microsoft integration,” said Duane Brown, Founder and Head of Strategy at Vancouver-based agency Take Some Risk. “The CPCs can be higher with super focused targeting, but you get what you pay for in the end. This is no different than on any other ad platform. The quality of traffic is great, and the options to get such precise targeting makes it worth the cost of entry. Plus, competition is not as bad.”
Apart from this, the platform also recently released new features for LinkedIn Pages.