While different platforms may work better or worse for different companies, here’s our opinion regarding each and how they might help you in your paid advertising strategy.

Advertising with LinkedIn

If you’re budget-conscious, then this LinkedIn tidbit will really appeal to you: the cost per click can be significantly less than what you’ll might pay using Google AdWords.  The reason for this is because LinkedIn ads are determined by competition, rather than by bidding for keywords; if you bid on a particularly popular keyword using AdWords, you can expect to pay top dollar in exchange for a top position on the SERPs.

LinkedIn’s competition approach means that the pay per click cost depends on how many other advertisers on the platform want to target the same audience that you do. Net, net = smaller budgets can go a lot further on LinkedIn than on AdWords, although your reach is a lot smaller.

Why is this, you ask? The LinkedIn network is built for businesses and professionals, which will have considerable impact if you’re focusing on B2B advertising…but it also means you have a smaller (albeit powerful) audience. However, you shouldn’t be viewing this as a drawback as LinkedIn offers the ability to hyper-target your ads, by filters such as industry, geographic area, and job title. This means you can target a CEO in the retail software market in Toronto, ensuring clicks to your ads are highly targeted, thereby increasing your likelihood of a conversion.

While you may not be able to draw a large audience to your ads like you would be able to with AdWords, you’ll decrease the number of erroneous clicks to your ad, and the cost of paying for those clicks.

One other consideration for LinkedIn is it’s weaker ability to track conversions. There is no direct conversion tracking available within the advertising platform, so you need to either setup specific conversions pages on your site to be able to see whether or not your conversion came from LinkedIn, and there will be a bit more manual work involved to really see how ads perform in terms of your actual goals.

Advertising with Google Adwords

In contrast, Google PPC ads offer the benefits of a larger audience – not just those professionals or businesses with a LinkedIn account. Also, because Google Ad campaigns are set up with selected keywords, anyone viewing your ad has already searched for the keyword that you’ve chosen to target – which means you’re reaching out to them at a later stage in the buying process, which increases the likelihood of converting their click into a sale.

PPC with Google can get you a bigger audience for your advertising campaigns, but it does come at a price, and can be a costly investment if not managed properly. While Google Search Ads don’t have the ability to showcase images or videos at a basic level (unlike LinkedIn, which allows for photos in the standard ad format), they are highly visible at the top of the SERPs and can include valuable text exerpts to describe your business, products or services. Video and Display advertising are also other options though, which allow for this additional ability, to show up via YouTube (video) and in the Google Display Network (GDN) for images. 

Conclusion

While Google may take the cake when it comes to viewership size and driving traffic to your site, LinkedIn offers B2B marketers the huge benefit of a highly targeted professional network for a smaller budget.

That said, we’d like to stress, as always, the importance of testing your advertising campaigns to find out which gets you the best results and the biggest ROI for your budget. It may make sense to market on both platforms based on your business goals, and to expand your reach to the right audience. If you’d like more guidance on choosing the best advertising platform for your business, please contact us for a consultation from one of our Certified Inbound Specialists.

In the meantime, check out our free guide to Google AdWords to help you understand the basics of running a PPC campaign, and determining the goals and metrics that matter for your advertising strategy.