Targeting

Both LinkedIn and Facebook offer unique targeting options. Few sites have the data that theses sites do, which makes up that targeting foundation. Even Google, which still stands as the gold standard, can’t match (without getting into some real trouble) the same level of gender and demographic specificity. Between these two social networks, which targeting you prefer, will depend on what you want to advertise. Overall, given it is a new, more flexible platform, Facebook offers a much greater range of options. The one in particular that I like is the ability to target by company. LinkedIn has the data, but they haven’t made it available yet. Below is a screenshot of the LinkedIn targeting page. Besides not allowing an option for company, the biggest weakness is the restriction with respect to how many targeting selects one can select. They allow you up to three. My guess is that such a restriction has to do with their not wanting to segment the audience too small. Facebook on the other hand, allows you to practically advertise to a single person if desired.

According to LinkedIn, my audience is almost 550,000 people. Good for them but no so good for me where specificity over reach matter. Here is a screenshot of the parallel screen in the Facebook process.

My audience here is less than 15,000. That’s fine with me, and if anything, I suspect it’s actually inflated.

Next up in the evaluation process is what the user sees and how the process was for me to set up.

Ad Unit / Creative Shown

Both companies have a long, long way to go before their platform’s scalability matches that of their audience. Facebook in particular will benefit greatly once they open up an API for ad creation. It’s a very manually process for both, more so for Facebook only because they allow you to slice and dice the audience so well. It makes you want to test. There are a handful of third-party tools which in effect just take your data points then enter them onto the Facebook site as if they were you. That speeds things up, but the entire process is the equivalent of a lead generator giving leads to a client by having to fill out the client’s form for each lead they collected, instead of being able to post the data directly.

As for the ad creation process, both are relatively straightforward.  First-up Facebook.

And now, LinkedIn’s:

Both, let you copy existing ads for use in a new ad, which is very helpful especially if you have some specific targeting options selected.  The one thing we won’t really discuss which has become relatively standardized is the ability to run a variety of different products/services under one account. As a commerce platform though, Facebook is the winner here because they designed their system around supporting multiple campaigns.  I can run many ads for LeadsCon and many ads for something unrelated but have them visually separated and reported differently. Not so with the current LinkedIn platform.  As for the ads themselves:

Despite the personal touch of the LinkedIn ad, whose language tries to increase the trust and value of the ad by inserting a level of accountability, I prefer the Facebook one. Facebook has two big advantages.
1) Size of the image – much bigger, and
2) Amount of text – you can say much more than you can with LinkedIn. And LInkedIn doesn’t help you as you create the ad by letting you know how many characters can go on each line.

Pricing

While you could make a case that Facebook snuck out a close victory on each of the previous rounds, this one doesn’t even come close. Both sites share similar pricing models in that you can pay either on a cost per click basis or on a cost per thousand basis. The sites differ dramatically on those minimums. Facebook uses their own algorithm to determine minimum cpc’s and cpm’s. In the end, the company tries to hit an effective revenue per thousand, so paying per click becomes more affordable for those with higher click through rate ads. A high click through rate means you don’t need as high of a click cost for them to hit their target. The better your perform, the more impressions you see. It’s the same market place dynamics we see in any competitive ad landscape. The nice with Facebook is that the cost to start playing is relatively affordable. They are willing to show your ad without them necessarily making a lot. If your ad doesn’t perform well initially, then it will quickly lose impressions, and the only option becomes to increase the payout or design a new ad that will presumably yield a higher effective return for Facebook.

With Facebook on my B2B ad, the estimated cost per click came in at a not too cheap $.70. Were I to pay on a CPM instead of a CPC basis, I could have paid in the $.50. I chose CPC and set the minimum bid to several dollars though knowing they would need some room to play with if I were to get any distribution. Here is a snippet. It’s still a modest spend despite my having a $100 limit. There are alas only so many people who will click on a LeadsCon ad.

LinkedIn has dramatically higher pricing – good for LinkedIn but not as immediately good for me, especially given the less granular targeting. My ad shows to a broader group for more money. As for pricing, the minimum CPM is $3.00. The minimum CPC is $2.00. Doing the math, if you ad will get a better than 0.15% CTR, pay on a CPM. If not, do CPC. I didn’t think I would beat that CTR but I still chose CPM. Chosing CPM wasn’t a great choice as we can see from the below:

Results

Unfortunately for me, both Facebook and LinkedIn suck so far for promoting LeadsCon. Despite the call to action of potentially free admission, none of the clicks have yielded in a short form submission. I have created several different landing pages, both single step and multi-step with the same overall result. While I potentially haven’t hit statistical significant, at $2/click+, it’s already hitting pocketbook significance.