
Robbed by LinkedIn, Digital Advertising Gone Wrong - bretpiatt
https://www.jungledisk.com/blog/2016/10/14/robbed-by-linkedin-advertising/
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shostack
I can't help but notice your entire post focuses on click and engagement
metrics without any mention of conversion metrics.

You don't mention a branding strategy, or how you plan to map branding efforts
to revenue (arguably a hard problem), so my assumption would be you are most
interested in seeing people signup as a result of this, and in fact you have
some goal completions, but it isn't clear what those goals are.

If your LTV is several hundred dollars, and your current campaign CPA is
~$300, while likely not statistically significant at this point, that could
potentially be profitable if that cohort's quality pans out. If those are just
lead goals, then yeah, you might not be super successful here, but 3
conversions seems a bit on the low side to draw that conclusion.

But here's where the analysis failed to go deeper...

\- Digging into conversion metrics and how people are finding you. Do you have
a long sales cycle with multiple touch points? The reports you've shown all
use last click attribution in a 30 day window. If you check the
Conversions>>Attribution and Multi-Channel reports, you might find this was
actually a big assist channel and maybe you're getting the final conversion
off of Direct or Organic (or even phone calls...call tracking rocks)

\- Spending $1k for less than a month when presumably you have a decently long
sales cycle and relatively low volume/high LTV sales and saying your test was
a failure seems like the test may not have been structured very well. That's a
relatively tiny test budget and making a decision after 100 clicks seems like
not the best idea (unless of course you're looking at post-impression metrics,
but my guess is that isn't the case)

Overall, this comes across as a click-baity headline while the actual article
seems rife with holes in terms of laying out the details of the test, what was
measured and why, and a whole host of other missing information that would
likely point to this test not running nearly long enough or with enough volume
to draw any meaningful conclusions.

As someone who does this for a living, I kindly suggest you revisit your test
assumptions, methodology, how other business metrics are factored in, and
whether it is good for your brand to publicly jump to conclusions like this in
a way that comes across as rather uninformed, or at the very least doesn't
paint the entire picture.

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bretpiatt
I didn't put the entire picture in the post. In reply to your questions:

We're an online sign-up primary channel (businesses start with us for $4/mo).
Our visitors sign up within 10 days of first visit in almost all cases. 30 day
tracking is plenty long for us.

We measure goals through to sale. The high level bucket of goals shown in the
post contain all actions (ex. Clicking a contact us form but not completing
it).

This test was aborted because the traffic was so poor. At 2 seconds per $9.78
CPC I'll stay on Adwords where I know I get LTV positive campaigns.

If you have an example of a successful B2B SaaS LinkedIn campaign I'd love to
see a blog post on it.

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shostack
My general point was that your sample size is too small to draw a meaningful
conclusion. Unfortunately, this is the downside to advertising for low-volume
B2B businesses.

Your entire article focused on the click and engagement aspects, and I would
encourage you to keep at it and optimizing things against conversion metrics.

------
bretpiatt
Author here, will answer any questions AMA style in comments.

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sharemywin
You mention facebook worked out better. I've never be able to get very good
results with facebook. Google, to me is the best, if you can find good
keywords. Although, expensive. I've just always assumed banner type traffic
just sucks.

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bretpiatt
With Facebook we get quality content engagement. I'll make a post about it in
the future. From my experience Facebook isn't great for straight intent to
purchase unless you're a mobile app.

