By Owen Fay . Posted on August 2, 2022For years, LinkedIn was an afterthought for advertising, but in recent years, the platform has grown in users, and engagement, plus increased the focus on ads.
Organizations that run ads on LinkedIn typically want to generate more leads, drive website traffic, and increase brand awareness. LinkedIn is a great place to do all of these things because it is a business-focused social media platform.
If you have thought about using the platform to run ads, you might have searched for “how much do LinkedIn ads cost?” or “how much should I pay on LinkedIn ads?” and found that running ads on their platform comes at a premium. Leading you to ask, “are LinkedIn ads really worth it?”
The simple answer is they can be, with optimized headlines, copy, and creative you can run ads that help achieve your goals. But a lot of organizations don’t want to pay the high price to test ads or run ones that don’t get results. That’s why in this blog we are going to discuss why LinkedIn ads can be worth the high price, and how to optimize your ads before launch to reduce your CPC.
Why Consider LinkedIn Ads?
According to LinkedIn statistics, there are over 600 million users on the platform, actively engaging as professionals in their field.
This means you have the opportunity to engage and target users by job titles, industries, skills, company, and more. With the massive pool of users, LinkedIn advertising can quickly become a lead generator, making it a potential revenue stream for your business.
But, if you’re ready to run ads on LinkedIn first ask yourself ‘Does my target audience spend time on LinkedIn?’ and ‘What is my target CPC and can I get there?’
As we know running ads on the social media platform is expensive, especially if your ads aren’t optimized before you launch. One option to run the best ads is running an A/B test on LinkedIn, but that comes with an even higher cost and could take weeks or months to create statistical significance.
The other option and the more realistic one is to run a pre-live, remote usability A/B test with Poll the People.
How to Optimize Ads Before Launch
Poll the People offers a great alternative to LinkedIn A/B testing and can help an organization optimize ads before launch, for less. Our testing platform helps to reduce your CPC once ads do go live by allowing you to make decisions based on real user feedback to run the most effective ads.
We provide users with templates for testing everything from headlines, to copy, and creative, to find the combinations that work the best, the elements of your ads that are the most important, and match your ads with user expectations and needs.
To test a researcher will put two versions of a LinkedIn ad to the test, against each other to understand what users prefer, understand the best, and will engage with.
With tests taking under one hour, you will get actionable feedback fast, and instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on ads that don’t produce results, each response costs $1.00. You’ll spend far less on testing your ads, resulting in optimized ads that cost less once they are live.
How to Test Ads with Poll the People
Ad testing to reduce CPC should start when you are designing advertisements and have decided to commit to running a campaign on LinkedIn. You’ll want to conduct a test that gives you general feedback on user expectations, preferences, and experiences through analyzing and comparing branding, messaging, copy, and overall ad design.
This will help you find the best way to create ads that resonate with the users. Your tests should become more specific as the business and advertisements move through the product life cycle.
Now that you know why and how you should test your ads, we can jump into the process of testing. If you want an overview guide to running usability A/B tests, take a look at this page.
Identify the Resources to Test
You can test many different types of ads or parts of your ads, and it could be a headline, image, copy, or a combination of elements. When you choose the type of ad you want to run, consider where they will be posted. For example, an ad on YouTube will be different from a Google Search Ad. Considering the platform you’re posting on goes a long way in creating a successful ad.
Poll the People allows you to test copy, creative (images, audio, video), or a full ad with curated templates that help you run a successful test.
The platform lets you test the ads and has users vote on the version they like the most. Unlike traditional A/B testing, participants then have to give a detailed explanation as to why they chose one option over the other. This method allows you to find the best ad and understand why it is the better ad and use that insight moving forward.
Ask Your Test Question
What makes one ad better than another? Appeal, uniqueness, believability, and relevance are major factors in making a good ad.
- Appeal – is the ad visually and textually engaging to your audience?
- Uniqueness – does your ad stand out from the crowd?
- Believability – is the ad credible?
- Relevance – does the ad fill the user’s needs and wants?
- Intent – Will the ad motivate your audience to buy?
You can measure these factors by asking the right questions in your test. Keeping these questions in mind gives you clear goals for testing your ad. Asking questions like “How believable is this ad?” or “Does this ad motivate you to buy the product?” will help you understand how to improve your ads.
Depending on the goal of your ad, you’ll want to focus on different key metrics. If you want to focus on differentiation, then the uniqueness of your ad is most important. If you want to focus on brand recognition, the ad’s appeal is more important.
Launch the Test
Many traditional market research platforms require you to either send your test to your own audience or spend a lot of time and money on the platform’s audience. It might be hard to get statistically significant data with your audience or be a long and expensive process by paying for an audience.
Luckily, Poll the People is different; our tests can be created, launched, and gather statistically significant data in under an hour. Testing with a dedicated panel of users is also less expensive than traditional platforms at $1.00 per response.
Our market research panel allows you to specify how many respondents you need and receive valuable insights fast and cost-effectively, making an ad test even more sensible for your business. This method allows you to spend less than a focus group or personal interviews while also requiring participants to give in-depth explanations similar to a focus group or interview.
Once you have identified your audience, reviewed all of the resources, and analyzed the test design, click launch and wait for the responses to roll in, under an hour.
Analyze The Results
Once you have created, launched, and received your feedback, you’re ready to dive into the results. Poll the People provides an easy-to-digest dashboard that gives you the winner of the test with quantitative and qualitative data to understand all of the users’ rationale.
You can also filter the users who chose version A from those who chose version B and analyze their responses as to why. This will let you understand what was liked about the ad and what wasn’t. The feedback is valuable because some of the negative feedback might give you improvements to your ad that could be very helpful. The positive feedback will allow you to continue to make successful ads with the layout or features the audience likes most.
Conclusion
Even before you launch your ad campaign, usability A/B testing of your ads will help you improve their effectiveness. With our simple process, you can quickly assess factors like ad copy and style, test your advertising with many iterations, and determine whether the product you want to advertise is popular with customers.
Comparing LinkedIn to other top ad platforms, its lead conversion rates are three times greater. A/B testing LinkedIn ads is a good technique to make the most of your marketing campaigns.
Running ongoing A/B tests for your LinkedIn advertisements has the advantage that, with continual improvement, you’ll eventually find a “perfect spot” for particular ad kinds that demonstrate unmistakable excellence for your company and your target demographic. However, as many marketers know LinkedIn A/B testing is extremely expensive and could take months to complete.
The best alternative is usability A/B testing with Poll the People, it is far less expensive, and you will get all of your feedback in under one hour. With expert-built templates to test any part of your digital ads and a dedicated user panel of over half a million users, Poll the People has all of the features you need to create the most powerful LinkedIn ads that reduce your CPC.
Once you are ready to optimize your LinkedIn ads sign up for free and create your first test in under 5 minutes. For a detailed look at real examples of usability A/B tests run on our platform head over to our examples page. Happy testing!
- How To Retain SEO Ranking After A Redesign - February 22, 2023
- Ultimate Guide: How to Write Brand Names - February 17, 2023
- 10 Best Practices for Using Video in Your Email Marketing Campaigns - February 8, 2023
