LinkedIn Ads

Marketing is getting more personal. After two years of beta testing, LinkedIn officially launched their PPC advertising service last week. Formerly known as DirectAds, the platform offered the ability to target age, gender, geography and job function. Now rebranded as LinkedIn Ads, the text-advertising service expands targeting options to include job title, LinkedIn groups and actual companies. There are over 10,000 available titles to choose from, and marketers can target up to 100 titles in a campaign.

So now, LinkedIn provides the opportunity to target specific people at specific companies. That’s really getting personal. Kinda neat and scary. Apparently the ad service uses only non-personally identifiable information, and if a campaign has too restricted an audience, LinkedIn won't allow it to run. But the parameters are fuzzy and not well-defined.

I bet this is going to create quite a bit of commotion. From an advertiser’s perspective, it’s a dream. That is, if users see the ads at all. Did you notice them? I didn't.

The professional network with an impressive reach: 90 million members worldwide, 32 million in the U.S., 7.9 million business decision makers and 4.2 million corporate executives. Minimum budgets on LinkedIn start at $10 a day.

LinkedIn is preparing to go public. That sounds like it could be a good return on investment. I'm just sayin'..