LinkedIn Finally Officially Unveils Self-Service PPC Ads

Jan 26, 2011 at 3:01pm ET by Pamela Parker

After more than two years of beta testing, LinkedIn’s self-service PPC ad offering, now called LinkedIn Ads, officially launched today.

The service, launched in beta in July 2008 under the name LinkedIn DirectAds, originally offered targeting by geography, job function, industry, company size, seniority, age and gender. Now, with the official wide release, advertisers will also be able to target by exact job title, company name or LinkedIn Group.

LinkedIn Ads have won praise from marketers for delivering extensive ways of targeting their professional audience, though the offering has also drawn criticism for being expensive on a per-click basis.

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Search Marketing

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://rockfi.sh steveplunkett

About a year ago.. the firm i was at previously tried these.. i was skeptical …

and they worked great.. FYI..
http://flavors.me/daniellesmyname Danielle Hohmeier

Is there really any change to the format here? I’ve been using Linkedin ads for some clients and after logging in today, it doesn’t look like anything has changed except the name.

They would really benefit from more statstics and billing capabilities (charging more than one credit card from one account). Also, stop putting my name at the bottom of all the ads. I manage the ad accounts, I’m not necessarily the one selling whatever the ad is for.

I’m still skeptical as to how well they work. The targeting is great, but the only stat you see is # of clicks, which is nothing compared to the clicks you get thru AdWords for the same (or lower) price. If they had better stats to qualify those clicks, THAT would be useful.