LinkedIn allows you to advertise to these professionals, and it can work very well for some businesses and not at all for others. In this article you’ll learn whether LinkedIn advertising is right for your business or not, and how to make it profitable if it is.

Who should advertise on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn advertising is ideal for companies that operate in the B2B space, such as accountants, consultants and lawyers. LinkedIn advertising is also ideal for institutions that want to attract the attention of highly qualified business professionals, such as universities advertising MBA programs.

If your product or service is mostly sold to end consumers, LinkedIn is probably not the right platform for you.

DIY or Agency?

So you figured out that your target audience is on LinkedIn… the next question is, do you outsource the management of your advertising campaign or do it yourself?

Depending on the size of your target audience, your advertising campaign might only cost a few hundred dollars per month. In that case the management fee of a professional online marketing agency will be the same or higher than your ad budget. This might not be worthwhile for you.

If you have a larger audience and you are spending $500, $1000 or more every month on LinkedIn, you will benefit from an expert who manages and optimises your campaigns because they have the expertise required to get the maximum return from your advertising spend.

What else do you need to make LinkedIn campaigns profitable?

If you don’t have a high-converting web design and a strong offer, you shouldn’t be advertising on LinkedIn. Think about it… LinkedIn members aren’t actively searching for anything on LinkedIn, which means that your ad really needs to capture their attention and compel them to act… and the better your offer is, the better your results will be.

What kind of offer? In most cases, you won’t be able to go for the sale straight away. You’ll need to have a strong free offer that really talks to the main benefit your prospects are after, for example: a free report, analysis or consultation. Make sure that whatever you offer really delivers value to your prospects.

How do you evaluate the success of your campaign?

LinkedIn currently does not offer its own tracking solution. That means in order to evaluate the performance of your LinkedIn advertising campaign you need to setup tracking yourself.

You can use a free Google Analytics account to track your campaigns. Make sure that you setup dedicated tracking links using the Google URL builder. That way, you can monitor how many leads or sales your campaigns generate.

If you don’t have a ‘thank you’ page that people get redirected to after requesting your free offer, you won’t be able to track your campaign performance, so make sure to set one up.

The recipe for success in a nutshell…

Your target audience is on LinkedIn, your business sells B2B products or services, you have great free offer, you have a high-converting website, and your campaigns are being tracked using Google Analytics.

With all of those factors in place, LinkedIn advertising can be very profitable for your business.

1. Faster Results

Concerned about speed? SEO can take 6 months or more to generate results. PPC can get you more business within 24 hours.

2. Keyword Discovery

Using PPC you can find the most profitable keywords for your business. Once you know conversion rates and the profitability of each keyword, you can use this to improve the targeting of your SEO campaign.

3. Close The Gap

PPC can close the gap on SEO rankings. There are always long-tail keywords with low search volumes that are relevant to your business. However, their search volumes often don’t warrant any effort from an SEO perspective. With PPC, it’s easy to add hundreds of long-tail keywords to your campaigns and benefit from their combined search volumes.

4. Promotions

Want to push a specific product or let people know about a promotion or discount? You can always run specific PPC campaigns to announce your latest marketing initiatives.

5. Meta Tag Split-Testing

In order to get the most out of your SEO ranking, you will want to optimise the text that appears in the search engine (ie your meta tags). How do you find out which meta tags get the most clicks? Just test them in the ad text of a PPC campaign. The one with the highest click through rate is your winner.

6. Exposure

PPC can get you traffic where SEO cannot: from the display network. Using the display network you can run your ads on hundreds or thousands of websites that are relevant to your business.

7. Seasonality

Is it that slow period of the year again? Use PPC to drive additional traffic to your website to generate sales.

8. Market Share

Do you want to maximise your market share? Then you need to run both SEO and PPC campaigns. Running both at the same time will guarantee that you get the maximum traffic share possible.

9. Testing

Do you have a new product idea or want to enter new markets? PPC is a great way of testing the potential of your ideas. Just create a landing page around your idea and send PPC traffic to it. You will quickly know whether your idea works or not.

1. Get Your Demographics Right

The most common mistake advertisers make is to target an audience that is too broad. You need to know your demographics, it’s most likely that it’s not men and women aged 18 to 50 across the whole of Australia. Don’t set your demographics as broad as that. There will be certain age ranges that respond better to your products or services. Equally, your product might be purchased mainly by one gender. If you don’t know your demographics, keep testing until you find the most responsive demographic.

2. Use Google Analytics To Track Your Facebook Traffic

You should be tracking your traffic using the Google URL builder. Every ad can be assigned a specific ‘campaign name’. That way you can evaluate in Google Analytics which ad converts the best. In order for this to work, you also need to have goal-tracking setup in Google Analytics.

3. Split-Test Images And Headlines

A higher click through rate on your ads means you will be paying less per click on Facebook. The image usually has the greatest impact on your click through rate, followed by your headline and ad copy. Therefore it’s important to split test images and ad copy in order to get to the best performing ad possible.

4. Use A Strong Offer

It’s most likely that people are not actively searching for your offer on Facebook. Their main purpose of being on Facebook is not to purchase your offer. That’s why it’s essential to come up with a compelling offer. If you cannot go for the straight sale, you can test offering a free report in order to build a database. Offer value to the database, build a relationship and then sell them your product.

5. Interests, Hobbies, Likes And Workplace

Facebook is unique in the way you can target people. Make use of the targeting options as they can provide great ROI when used in the right way. What are your customers’ interests and hobbies? Where do they work? What high school or college do/did they go to? What Facebook groups are they part of? For example, as a recruiter you might be targeting people who work for certain companies.

6. Likes On Your Facebook Page

Another angle to build a following is to advertise your own Facebook page. When you send traffic to your Facebook page, the goal is to get people to like your page. That way, whenever you post an update on your Facebook page, people will see this update in your newsfeed. This is where your Social Media Strategy becomes important.

7. Test, Test, Test…

So what’s going to work for you? Sometimes it’s not the obvious. You need to test every possible angle and not give up too early. Is it best to build your following through a Facebook page or by offering a free report on a landing page? Or should you be going for the sale straight away? The only way you can find the best angle is by testing every idea you come up with.

1. Launching A New Product or Service?

Pay per click advertising can drive qualified prospects to your website immediately. It is one of the fastest ways to generate targeted visitors to your new offering. With PPC you’re able to start selling your product as soon as it’s available. PPC advertising is fast and can be adjusted and optimised immediately.

2. About To Invest In SEO?

If you haven’t started SEO (search engine optimization) yet, PPC is a great way to determine which keywords generate the most sales for you and is the fastest way to find out which keywords convert best for you. This information can then be used in your SEO campaign to focus on establishing rankings for the most profitable keywords specific to your business.

3. Already Investing in SEO?

If you’re already investing in an SEO campaign, pay per click advertising can be a profitable add-on. PPC can drive qualified prospects to your website from keywords that you haven’t achieved top rankings for yet. PPC can also increase the share of traffic you are receiving from keywords you have a top ranking for – a top SEO ranking for a specific keyword might send 30% of the total available search volume to your website; pay per click advertising can increase your overall share of that targeted traffic even further.

4. Just Launched A New Website?

Have you just launched a new website but haven’t received any visitors yet? Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest and most flexible ways to generate targeted traffic to your new website. PPC will also help determine your new website’s effectiveness (ie conversion rate).

5. Need To Improve Your Online Performance?

Pay per click advertising is one of the best methods of testing every part of your online marketing strategy. Using PPC you can test design elements on your website, your pricing strategy and your marketing message. PPC will generate the necessary traffic and provide you with statistically significant data to be able to make informed decisions.

6. Do You Have A Product People Are NOT Searching For?

If you’re launching a new product that people don’t know about yet, it’s unlikely that there will be any search volume on search engines for this product. Using PPC you can run advertising campaigns on the Google display network by running banners and text ads on websites your prospects visit. With PPC you can promote your new product to your target market as fast as possible even if no one is actively searching for it yet.

7. Are You Considering Expanding To New Countries?

If so, pay per click advertising is a great way to test the waters. It offers the opportunity to drive qualified prospects from other countries to your website. With PPC you’ll be able to test the demand and profitability of your new market with limited risk and expenses.

8. Are You Creating A New Product?

Do you have a product idea or want to find out the demand for a product? Pay per click advertising allows you to do this, quickly. You can send qualified prospects from PPC to surveys to find out more about your potential customers and assess the demand for your product idea. And you can also send qualified prospects to a mini-site where they can pre-register for a product you’re thinking about launching soon.

9. Can’t Decide On A Product Name?

Just run a PPC campaign and test the different product names in the headline of the ads. The one which gets the highest click through rate is your winner. You can also test your product name with a website split test. Two pages with the same product but different product names would be split tested against each other; the one that produces the most sales is the winner.

10. Does Seasonality Affect Sales?

Most businesses face times during the year when demand slows down and sales decrease. Pay per click advertising is a great way to counteract these seasonality effects throughout the year. PPC is flexible and can be applied as needed.

If you aren’t yet running a pay per click advertising campaign then seriously consider it. It can be one of the most profitable advertising channels available.

1. Use Conversion Tracking

When setting up your PPC campaign, make sure you install conversion tracking. If you are running a campaign already and haven’t used conversion tracking yet, you should set it up as soon as possible. Conversion tracking allows you to monitor and evaluate where your conversions are coming from. It is the basis for optimising your PPC campaign. It will allow you to see exactly which search queries are most profitable for you and which ones do not work at all. Based on this conversion data, you can optimise your campaign. Hence, without conversion tracking you cannot optimise your PPC campaign. It’s a bit like investing in something without knowing your return.

2. Avoid Low Google Adwords Quality Scores

Google assigns every keyword in your campaigns a quality score. The higher your quality score, the less you have to pay per click for the respective keyword. Contrarily, low quality scores will results in inflated cost per clicks. We have seen cost per clicks as high as $98 (yes, $98 for one click) as a result of an inadequate account structure. You don’t want your account to establish a low quality score because it becomes very difficult to reverse a low quality score history in Google Adwords.

The quality score formula is based on various components. One of the main factors is the click through rate on the respective keyword and also the historical click through rate of all other keywords in your Google Adwords account. In order to make sure you are getting good click through rates and high quality scores, keep these tips in mind:

• Create ad groups around specific keyword themes
• Try to use no more than 10 – 15 keywords per ad group
• Write targeted ads for the various ad groups
• Link your ads to a relevant landing page

3. The Importance Of Website Design For Pay-per-click

Website design is one of the most important factors for your Pay-per-click campaign. A good website design conveys trust to your visitors and lets them easily find what they are searching for. It only takes one click for your visitor to leave your website and visit another one. That is why your visitors should be able to easily contact you through a contact us form and telephone number.

We have seen improvements in conversion rates of 400% as a result of improved web design (that’s equivalent to cutting your cost per conversion by 80%). If you are in doubt whether your website design will convert well, we are happy to do a free website analysis for you.

4. Even Good Web Design Can Always Be Improved

Even if your website is converting well already, there is no limit to increasing conversion rates on your website. The best way to improve your website is by using A/B split tests or multi-variate tests. A simple split test would show 50% of your visitors your current website version and the other 50% of your visitors a new version with a varied element, for example a new headline. The test then determines which website version yields a better conversion rate. A different headline can easily improve your conversion rate by 30% and more. There is no limit to which elements on your website you can split test. Split testing these elements will get good results: headlines, buttons, forms, images, sales copy. Start split testing your website with the free Google Website Optimizer, a split test solution that offers everything you need to improve your conversion rates.

5. Separate Search Network And Display Network

The standard setting for every campaign in Google Adwords is to show your ads both on the search network as well as the display network. For optimisation purposes this is not ideal. To improve performance, set up separate campaigns for search and display network. That way, it will be easier to optimise and monitor the two different networks.

Generally your cost per click on the display network will be lower than on the search network, but your conversion rates will usually also be lower. Once you have gained some experience with the display network you should create banners for your campaigns. Banners are a great way to improve your performance on the display network. Good banner design will get you more clicks from the display network and therefore also more conversions.

6. Split Test Your Text Ads and Banners

Just like split testing your website, you should also split test your text ads and banners. For every ad group, rotate at least two different ad versions. Once you have determined a winner between the two variations, pause the losing ad and write a new one that is designed to beat your existing winner. The same strategy applies for banner variations. Try different headlines, colours and styles in your banners. Google’s standard setting is to show ads with a better click through rate more often. In order to properly split test ads, you need to change your “Ad rotation” setting in the campaign settings to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”.

Combine these 6 strategies to multiply your conversion rates and drastically cut your costs. By means of continuously improving your conversion rates, you are guaranteed to stay ahead of the competition.

1. Make use of all match types

Google provides three different keyword match types: broad match, phrase match, exact match. You should make use of all of them in order to maximise the potential of your campaigns. One of the biggest and most common pay-per-click mistakes is to only use broad match keywords in your entire campaign. Broad match is a great way of covering a large amount of keywords. However, it can also easily waste your money by spending your budget on irrelevant keywords. Add phrase match and exact match keywords in order to make your campaign more targeted.

2. Split test ad copy

Google likes high click-through-rates. The higher the click-through-rates on their ads, the more money they make. If your click-through-rate is not high enough compared to other advertisers, Google will punish you with a lower Google Quality Score and a higher cost-per-click. However, as an advertiser your click-through-rate should not be your only concern. The other major criterion is the conversion rate on a particular ad. Ideally, an ad gets both a high click-through-rate and a high conversion rate. This can only be achieved by constantly split testing at least two different ads for every ad group. Once one ad can be found to outperform the other, a new ad needs to be tested against the best performing ad.

3. Create narrowly focused ad groups

Ad groups within a campaign should always be closely focused around a specific keyword topic. The narrower you can build your ad groups, the more tailored your ad text can be to the keywords in the ad group. A smaller number of similar keywords make it easier to get a good click-through-rate and conversion rate.

4. Use negative keywords

Every campaign should contain negative keywords. Negative keywords are keywords for which you do not want your ads to be shown. Since broad match keywords often trigger impressions for irrelevant keywords you need to monitor your campaign and avoid getting irrelevant clicks. How do you find out if you are getting irrelevant clicks? Generate a search query report from the report section in Google Adwords. Then evaluate whether your ads are shown for unrelated keyword phrases. If so, add these keywords as negative keywords to your campaign.

5. Monitor the content network performance

The standard setting in a Google Adwords campaign is to opt-in for the content network. For some markets this works well, for others it’s simply a waste of money. If the content network is activated for your PPC campaign, be sure to monitor its performance. If it does not perform well, pause it within your search campaign and try creating a separate campaign which only targets the content network. That way, you can use a different wording for your ads on the content network. Generally speaking, the content network often needs a stronger call-to-action in the ads in order to get visitors to click through to your website.

6. Monitor your keyword conversion rates

The performance of a campaign largely depends on the keywords that were chosen. Conversion rates vary across keywords and across match types. It is therefore critical to monitor conversion rates and cost-per-conversion across all keywords. Bids on keywords that do not perform well can be lowered or the keywords can be abandoned altogether. Bids on well-converting keywords can be increased in order to improve exposure.

7. Mind the Google Quality Score

Google assigns each keyword in your Google Adwords campaign a quality score between 1 and 10. 7 or higher is good, 10 is great. The higher your quality score, the lower your minimum bid on a keyword. The quality score depends on a number of factors such as the click-through-rate on your keywords, the relevance between keyword, ad and landing page, and your website loading time. While all factors play a role the click-through-rate is one of the strongest determinants for the Google Quality Score. Optimise your campaign so that all of your keywords at least get a quality score of 7 or higher.

You just learned about 7 ways that have the potential to drastically improve the performance of your PPC campaigns. Make sure you apply all of these strategies in order to gain the best possible return from your PPC campaigns. Overall, you should constantly be monitoring your campaign and working on making it more targeted to your market. The key to success is in testing, evaluating and adapting your campaign. So, go the extra mile and your campaign will stay ahead of your competitors!

“I’ve already tried pay-per-click advertising and it doesn’t work”

Immediately this sounds warning bells, as PPC advertising is one of the most profitable methods of advertising available (in fact, we’ve been able to generate more than 1,000 sales per day for some companies using PPC advertising).

After further questioning we find out that they have setup a Google Adwords campaign themselves (because Google makes it so easy) and have invested $500 or $1,000 in advertising, only to find that they could not achieve any results… and based on this they say PPC advertising doesn’t work!

Maybe it is because of the common misconception that ‘it is easy to make money online’. We’ve been hearing this for years now, and I admit that was one of the reasons I started in the online game… but I was wrong, even in the very beginning. Now, after many years in the online game I understand why it is difficult to make money online, and why it will become harder in years to come.

When you market on search engines, like Google, you have to be on the first page to be noticed, and that’s where the challenge lies. There are a maximum of 10 paid positions available to the entire country. That means that from all the advertisers in the country, only 10 can hold a first page position. That means that only those advertisers which know what they are doing can afford to compete in a market where the top positions are dominated by clicks of that cost between $2 and $7 per click.

That’s why you need to work with a professional if you’re serious about succeeding in the online game, because a professional knows how to work with your current advertising budget to get the most out of your advertising spend.

And nine times out of ten, when we do take over a PPC campaign that was setup by a beginner, we find the following mistakes nearly every time:

1. Not enough keywords being used – identifying the most profitable keyword phrases first requires that you build a keyword library of all of the possible keyword phrases that somebody who is interested in your service would type into Google. Most beginners use only 20 or 30 keywords in total, where the minimum for most small campaigns should be 1,000 to 2,000 keyword phrases.

2. Incorrect use of targeting – using exact match, phrase match and broad match correctly will increase your positioning and decrease your average cost-per-click (CPC).

3. Poorly constructed text ads – writing effective text ads, utilising proven marketing principles, will increase your click-through-rate (CTR), improve your quality score and, in turn, decrease your average CPC.

4. Not split-testing text ads – the only way to tell if one text ad is better than another is to split test those ads, track the results and identify which combination of words produced the best results.

5. Not geo-targeting campaigns – geo-targeting, especially for a service company is critical in getting maximum ROI from advertising spend. The last thing you want is to pay for website visitors which are in locations that you cannot service.

6. No continual optimisation – the hardest month for PPC advertising, and the lowest ROI, is in the first month, because it is during this month that you are experimenting to identify the keywords which produce the most profits for your business. Done incorrectly, the first month can cost thousands of dollars with no results at all. But once the ‘money words’ have been identified, continual bid management and optimisation is required to increase ROI from the monthly advertising spend.

7. Conversions are not being tracked – tracking conversions is the most important factor in PPC advertising, because this is how you measure the success of all of the previous 6 points in the campaign. Most importantly, when you track conversions at the keyword level you can increase spend on the keywords which are producing results and decrease spend on the keywords which a not producing results, increasing your ROI.

Without implementing ALL of the above points efficiently and with expertise it is virtually impossible for a small business to compete in an increasingly competitive online market place.

In the last 12 months we have seen the cost of PPC advertising increasing steadily, with the competition in some markets so fierce that the average cost-per-click (CPC) more than doubling in the last 12 months.

Pay-per-click advertising is rapidly becoming a marketing channel dominated by online marketing experts. When a beginner tries to run a PPC campaign on their own, competing against seasoned professionals, their budget is quickly burnt with no results to show for it. And now that the cost of a first page PPC listing costs a minimum of $2 to $7 per click how can a beginner afford NOT to use the services of a professional to manage their PPC campaign and minimise their risk?

This relatively new tool allows you to try out specific keywords and phrases to see what the likely results would be if you actually tried them for real. You can find out:

• How popular a keyword or phrase is likely to be
• How many times that keyword is typically clicked on per day
• What the average cost per click would be to you
• How many clicks you could expect to get per day, depending on the budget you set

The Google traffic estimator is a useful tool for all website owners, but it is likely to save many novice owners from making expensive mistakes with their advertising budget. A key point to remember is to put a price on what you are prepared to pay per click. You can then find out where that puts you in the grand scheme of things – Google might estimate that there are ten other people who are prepared to pay more than you, and so they will tell you roughly how many times your keywords will be clicked on each day.

Obviously the more popular the keyword or phrase is, the more you can expect to pay for each click. A neat trick for competing with high demand keywords – such as ‘credit card’, for example – is to narrow your focus; try something like ‘credit card rewards’ instead. Getting traffic to your website is one thing, but getting highly targeted traffic is far better as these people will be far more likely to buy from you.

Experiment with using the Google traffic estimator to find more carefully targeted phrases to use in your ads and on your website. You can test any number of targeted phrases (within quote marks) without it costing you a thing. This will help ensure your website is optimised to rank as highly as possible in the search engines. In this sense, the Google traffic estimator can benefit you in two ways:

• You will discover how to use your advertising budget for AdWords more wisely
• You will also know which words and phrases are searched for most often, and will be able to optimise your website more accurately in the future

You don’t need to have an AdWords account to use the Google traffic estimator. This is a real advantage if you have little or no advertising budget at present, but you want to understand more about search engine optimisation and how far any size of budget could stretch for the keywords you have in mind.

For the quarter ended June 30, 2006, Google reported recorded revenues of $2.46 billion, an increase of 77% compared to the same time just one year ago!

In 2003 Google’s arch nemesis, Yahoo!, bought Overture, the pay-per-click service, in an attempt to capture a share of the huge advertising dollar spent on pay-per-click advertising every year.

Since its purchase, the Overture system remained unchanged for more than 3 years, until now…

The massive profits earned by Google has obviously made Yahoo! stand up and take notice… more importantly it has forced Yahoo! to take a serious look at their current PPC services, now re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing, and improve their service offering so they can compete on the same playing field as Google.

Some of the biggest benefits that Google had over Yahoo! Search Marketing were:

- Setting up and having an account online within minutes
- Split-testing PPC ads for maximum response
- Specifying where in the country you want your ads to be shown
- Scheduling the days of the week and the times of day you want your ads to be shown
- Automatic insertion of keywords into title and descriptions

Yahoo! Search Marketing is now releasing its new PPC platform, offering all the services that only Google previously offered.

They expect to fully rollout in the United States by early 2007. And although there is no mention of when it will rollout to the rest of the world, I’m sure it won’t be too far behind.

Is this the return of Yahoo!?