LinkedIn ads - what are we doing wrong?
A post mortem on our first campaign
Josh and I marketed Free Blocks with a $500 budget on LinkedIn in the hopes of getting more users for a product we believe solves a big pain point around availability sharing. Unfortunately, the results thus far have been terrible:
To recap:
$254 spent on campaign
~10.8K impressions
108 clicks (1% click through rate)
All of this got us:
3 users added over 3 day campaign
We wanted to double check this was accurate and used Google’s `licenseNotification` API as a proxy for installs and then backfilled the data in Klaviyo using their Track API. The results are similarly disappointing:
LinkedIn Campaign Manager undoubtedly works great for some companies. In our case, we found it was a low return on investment tool and for whatever reason 108 landings on our workspace app led to three downloads. Some other interesting takeaways:
A 1% click through rate seems to be normal for display ads depending on who you listen to. This article claims the LinkedIn Sponsored Content average is 0.39%
Measuring true conversion rate here would’ve required us to somehow connect clicks to an install. We can use the results from the licenseNotification API as a proxy for conversions, but we don’t have a clear way of knowing that those who installed the app saw the ad. Ad campaigns like this were likely meant for companies redirecting users to their own website where they control the client and server side code as opposed to an app marketplace
Money can buy audience… but so can organic posts. Both Josh and my posts on LinkedIn have occasionally generated a few thousand impressions, and $500 buys you about 20K impressions. Why not post a few times and earn those impressions for free?
Overall, we swung and missed here but at least got some learnings about advertising along the way.
If you’re still reading this, give Free Blocks a download and let us know what you think. Our vision is to connect productivity tools beyond calendars and emails. We’re hoping to launch a Slack app in the next few weeks and are currently looking for beta testers.