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Robbed by LinkedIn, Digital Advertising Gone Wrong

2 points by bretpiatt 10y ago

bretpiatt 10y ago
Author here, will answer any questions AMA style in comments.
- sharemywin 10y ago
  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.
  - bretpiatt 10y ago
    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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
shostack 10y ago
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.
- bretpiatt 10y ago
  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.
  - shostack 10y ago
    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.

2 points by bretpiatt 10y ago

bretpiatt 10y ago

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

sharemywin 10y ago
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.
- bretpiatt 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

shostack 10y ago

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.

bretpiatt 10y ago
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.
- shostack 10y ago
  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.