Dave Rigotti is Bizible’s head of pipeline marketing, and he shared his story of spending $50K on LinkedIn ads. According to Rigotti, one of the major draws of LinkedIn was the demographic makeup of its user base, which includes top professionals from around the world and from just about every industry. The major takeaways from his experience are:
- CPCs are much higher for LinkedIn – upwards of 5 to 10x the cost of other platforms – but the conversion rates are much higher and leads are often of better quality, making it worth the added expense.
- Unlike in PPC, where the US tends to have the highest CPCs, other countries have higher baseline bids than the US, so it’s a good idea to sort ads into groups by country to see what your regional costs are.
- If you can afford them, use Sales Development Reps. SDRs follow up with inbound leads, either through an email or a phone call, and Rigotti stated that when they started using them, conversion rate from lead opportunity jumped 68%.
- Mobile users and gated content do not mix well. Most people probably don’t want to futz with filling out personal information, even just a name and email address, on a smart phone. This probably explains a mobile bounce rate that was 26% higher than the desktop bounce rate for ads that took people to gated content.