Guest blog by Carris Wakefield, LetMC
LinkedIn rolled out its video ads nearly a year ago now but it doesn’t appear to be widely used. At LetMC we are always interested in trying something new, and really love videos, so when we saw this opportunity we jumped at the chance. We’ve been running a set of video ads for 2 months and it’s now time to review their success so I thought this was a good opportunity to share our findings.
The basics
LinkedIn say that video ads will give you 3x better click through rate (CTR) than their standard advertising and gives you the opportunity to give more information to you audience. You can set them up in the same way as standard adverts through their self-serve platform, you simply write your copy and pop in a link to a YouTube video, choose the type of people you want to see the ads and voila it’s all done. Just sit back and wait for people to click on the ad, when the video finishes the viewer will be able to click through to your website and request to be sent more information (Leads). Sorted!
Our video ads
Although the CTR was good (0.025% which is the average on LinkedIn) our standard text ads actually perform better and have an average CTR of 0.034%. This could be down to the ad content so we have been running alternate copy to see if this makes a difference… not so far.
The second point we measured was the leads being generated from the video ads compared to the text adverts. The video ads we set up in this campaign are yet to generate a single lead, where as our text ads generate about 2 a week (not massive figures I’ll admit but they are a regular source of enquiry). Obviously this could be down to the nature and message of the video not appealing to the target audience.
In reality
You need to be 100% about the message you are trying to get across and what your target audience will interact with before you start. With a text advert you can change the content and message quickly and easily, and have multiple running at the same time to test which works best.
You can either set it so that you pay every time the advert is shown ($4 min per 1000 impressions) or every time someone clicks (a minimum of $4 a click). Paying for impressions may be good for brand awareness and if you have a very small target group but we have a large target group so were worried about the cost of this escalating quickly.
In summary
I love the idea of video ads and think they could work exceptionally well as video is far easier to digest then text (I possibly should have done a video for this instead of written it!). However, you need to have a very clear message before you get started, you can’t wing it! You also need to be sure that you will have the time to dedicate to reviewing the adverts, otherwise you could end up spending a fortune for no return on investment. Whatever you have to say it needs to be quick and concise.