LinkedIn Ads

Denver DataMan will be hosting a Email Marketing seminar on 12/2 and I am trying to expand the audience for the session. To do this I started looking at LinkedIn events and I posted the event and then decided to connect this with a LinkedIn events ad.

Creating the event was very easy once I figured out how to get into the interface. I had to click on another event and then it showed me a main page for LinkedIn events. You can get into LinkedIn Event at http://events.linkedin.com. Like the rest of LinkedIn you are very limited on formating. You can see what an event looks like at http://events.linkedin.com/pub/15457.

I like that the events are linked to the person who created it so you can see their LinkedIn profile information. I also like that you can see the public profiles of people who are attending.

After you create an event it asks you if you want to buy adds for the event. I did not want to buy an add for the first event I posted - http://events.linkedin.com/pub/15453 - because the event is free but when I posted my e-mail seminar I chose to buy an ad.

Ads on LinkedIn are sold by impressions (number of times the ad will be shown). You can filter out who you want to see the add by geography, industry, gender, age, company size and similar demographic information. As you do this the size of the population of users you will reach is updated as well as the price. For example I paid $16 per-1000 impressions.

There is a $25 minimum order - and unlike other Ad tools there does not appear to be a way to set budgets. For example on Google you can say I want to spend up $50 over the month. Here you are pre-paying for impressions.

Overall I like the interface for both LinkedIn ads and LinkedIn events. I look forward to seeing how effective either will be for the promotion of events.