LinkedIn Marketing Solutions vs. Microsoft Advertising

LinkedIn has a much higher CPC than most commonly used platforms resulting in a much higher CPL/CPA. For businesses that don't have big CPC budgets, it would be difficult to be able to run tests without breaking the bank. Unless they get it right out of the gate, they may not find success with their efforts. On the opposite side of that, if a business can afford higher acquisition costs, this platform is likely worth exploring. They offer precise targeting with audiences full of professionals so often the leads are really high quality if you get it right.

Incentivized

Despite using our account for advertising with every other social media company, Microsoft flagged ours as fraudulent. After dealing with them for weeks, we finally got to a manager, who said that they didn’t know anything, couldn’t provide any information, and was unable to do anything about it. It seems odd, but it would flagger account every time we try to upload the campaigns from Google directly into their ad manager. I would suggest if you try and use their platform, don’t tell them you’re using Google cause they seem to have a thing against it. Once your account is flagged, they have no reasonable way of resolving it, nor they are able to offer any support. You’re better off to just try a different way. Ultimately, just don’t use Microsoft advertising if you can possibly avoid it. Hopefully soon DuckDuckGo will have their own advertising platform and we can eliminate Microsoft given the terrible time we have working with this one of many, social media platforms.

• Targets the exact right audience for your B2B messaging: you don't have to guess based on likes or any other periphery data to determine whether you're reaching the right audience - you can hit by job title, years of experience, job function, seniority, and other great ways to ensure precision delivery to the correct audience.
• Offers a helpful variety of ad units that are great for different types of campaigns to make sure you're reaching your audience in the right format for the ask.
• Self-service platform now for all ad units, enabling you to take control of your LInkedIn marketing with a hands-on approach.

Incentivized

• Familiar interface, offers editor for bulk changes, adding negative keywords is much easier than in Google Ads
• Nice reporting tools within the interface, detailed reports can be made fairly easily
• Had very nice tools to help import/export ads directly from Google Ads, which saves a ton of time

Incentivized

• LinkedIn has a relatively limited audience size when compared to other social media platforms.
• There is a large group of LinkedIn users that create an account and never return, but messages still hit their inboxes.
• LinkedIn targeting by job title can be limiting, as they set a hard limit on targeted titles per campaign.

Incentivized

• Bing's ad platform could definitely use some improvements - it hasn't been updated in a long time, and it feels very outdated.
• We feel that the optimization algorithms don't always perform as well for Bing Ads as they do in Google Ads (optimize for conversions, etc.).
• It would be great to have even more integrations with LinkedIn audience targeting offered - right now, you can just make some bid optimizations in a couple of areas; we'd really like to get more robust options there, and maybe even things like cross-platform tracking.

Incentivized

We have had good success with it over all of our clients. We continually recommend bing to reach "the rest of the searchers".

Incentivized

in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.

Incentivized

It's very easy to use overall. It has an import from Google Ads to make things simpler. Overall, I would say you can get up and running very quickly. It's similar to other platforms, so if you have used them, it's intuitive.

Incentivized

So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.

Incentivized

Our Bing Ads reps are very good and attentive. They've offered good recommendations and are quick to resolve unexpected issues and problems. Occasionally they have roped in technical support folks that have been friendly and helpful too. The general helpline for Bing Ads is also very good, especially when compared to Google's customer support.

Incentivized

LinkedIn offered a different way to market and that was through direct messaging on the platform. Those direct messages result in a push notification and an email (depending on the user's settings), so we knew that was a more creative and attention-getting spend. It made more sense for our professional clientele as well.

Incentivized

Obviously Google is a huge competitor. Typically Google is top of the game for many advertising solutions including search. Microsoft ads has a lower scale and reach compared to Google. However, Microsoft ads audience does not overlap much with Googles, providing incremental reach. Although Microsoft ads lags a bit behind in adapting the new updates that Google comes out with, their customer service is very good and they are likely to go out of their way to adapt their platform to your needs whereas their competitor does not

Incentivized

• As an agency, LinkedIn gives us one more way to demonstrate worth: we're managing the LinkedIn page of many of our clients, and this is demonstratively an improvement from before.
• Also as an agency, LinkedIn ads allow us to offer an additional way to get leads in the door. When we've struck out on other ad programs, we usually try LinkedIn Ads before moving on to a higher investment channel (such as list rental).

Incentivized

• We've had a very hard time spending our budgets on Bing which has caused us a lot of extra work on our end. We've essentially had to move that money back to Google or other platforms.
• It does have an easy import from Google so you're not doubling efforts.
• The CPCs tend to be less expensive than Google - which is always good for business owners.

Incentivized