Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
15% of people love their jobs. The other 85% are either indifferent or miserable.
Indifference and misery seldom translate into engagement. Although you can serve your LinkedIn ads to users based on their careers, you can’t be sure those people like their jobs enough to care.
Engagement like this is hard to come by. Via LinkedIn.
In fact, your LinkedIn prospects may hate their jobs so much that your career-targeted ads actually upset them. Unless you have a working arrangement with Sarah McLachlan, making people upset isn’t going to drive returns.
My point: most people have professional interests outside of their current jobs. For advertisers, that means there’s a ton of potential for serving LinkedIn ads that people actually want to see.
Enter: LinkedIn interest targeting.
What is LinkedIn interest targeting?
The newest feature made available to LinkedIn advertisers, interest targeting gives you the power to serve your ads to exclusive, highly relevant audiences.
It operates according to the same idea as does Facebook interest targeting: although you can’t advertise to consumers while they’re deliberately looking for solutions, you can advertise to the people whose behavior indicates that they’re interested in what you’re offering.
Here’s how it works.
LinkedIn, like Facebook, tracks user behavior. Every time you engage with content—whether it’s through liking, commenting, sharing, or posting—LinkedIn takes note of the subject matter.
If I consistently like and share posts related to social media marketing, LinkedIn determines that it’s an interest of mine. As such, it makes sense for a social media management software like Sprout Social to advertise to me.
Alternatively, Sprout Social could simply advertise to people who list social media marketing as their jobs. Although not a bad tactic, some of those people are far more interested in other professional fields. Some of them would rather see content related to cloud computing.
By leveraging interest targeting, you ensure that your impressions come only from LinkedIn users who’ve demonstrated legitimate interest in your product or service.
How does it compare to Facebook interest targeting?
Here’s how Facebook interest targeting breaks down:
Business & Industry: advertising, design, retail, etc.
Entertainment: games, movies, TV, etc.
Family & Relationships: dating, fatherhood, weddings, etc.
Fitness & Wellness: meditation, running, weight training, etc.
Food & Drink: cooking, alcohol, restaurants, etc.
Hobbies & Activities: current events, travel, politics, etc.
Shopping & Fashion: beauty, clothing, toys, etc.
Sports & Outdoors: outdoor recreation, sports
Technology: computers, consumer electronics
And here’s the brand new suite of LinkedIn interest targeting options:
Arts & Entertainment: movies, painting, literature, etc.
Business & Management: company acquisitions, human resources, business law, etc.
Careers & Employment: retirement, job interviews, hiring, etc.
Finance & Economy: banking, corporate finances, financial markets, etc.
Marketing & Advertising: market research, B2B marketing, brand management, etc.
Science & Environment: earth sciences, climate change, computer science, etc.
Society & Culture: religion, legislation, charity, etc.
Technology: telecommunications, robotics, IT infrastructure, etc.
Health: medical research, public health, healthcare providers, etc.
Although each platform offers nine categories, LinkedIn seems more niche-oriented. As of today, you can advertise exclusively to users who’ve demonstrated interest in earth sciences. When it comes to professional interests, it doesn’t get much narrower than that.
And that’s exactly what you want—the ability to exclude everyone except the small groups of people you’ve declared most relevant. The more focused the group, the more impressions you’ll turn into clicks.
To be clear: we’re not suggesting that you should abandon Facebook targeting altogether. We consistently say the opposite, actually. Facebook interest targeting is just the tip of the iceberg; you can target users based on demographics, behaviors, and connections, too.
As is often the case in digital marketing, the best course of action is to leverage both platforms. Why? Because people use LinkedIn and Facebook differently.
The content users like and share on LinkedIn is very different from the content they like and share on Facebook. If you were to look at someone’s LinkedIn interests and then look at the same person’s Facebook interests, you’d probably think they came from two different people.
Whereas some of your prospects will only show interest in your product or service on LinkedIn, others will only show interest on Facebook. Use interest targeting on both and you’ll seriously boost your lead volume.
Sound good? Get to it!
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
This video is part of our Weekly Wisdom series which will feature experts on a variety of topics. This week we have Joel Bondorowsky discussing Day Parting Reports for Google Ads. Joel will show you how to create a report so that you can understand how much conversion rate variations, by hour of the day and day of the week, are hurting you so that you can make the proper adjustments.
There seems to still be a lot of confusion surrounding the issue of pagination – what it is, what’s its real purpose, when should it be employed, how to implement it properly, should it be combined with a canonical and more. This first part of a series of three articles will help you navigate through and answer all of your pagination questions.
Earlier this week, we announced that WordStream has signed Mayor Walsh’s groundbreaking 100% Talent Compact. As a part of this pact, WordStream will work with Boston Women’s Workforce Council, a public-private partnership between the City of Boston, Boston University, and more than 220 other Boston-area employers committed to closing the gender wage gap.
In their 2017 report, the Boston Women Workforce Council found that women in the Greater Boston area earned an average of 77 cents to the dollar as compared to their male colleagues. The discrepancy was even larger for Black/African-American women and Hispanic/Latina women, who earned 52 cents and 49 cents to the dollar, respectively.
When CEO Howard Kogan was approached about WordStream’s opportunity to participate in the 100% Talent Compact, he brought the idea to me, and we were both in complete agreement: this is exactly the kind of community impact that we strive for. Not only does the mission of the 100% Talent Compact align with our company values, it was also spectacularly well-timed with some exciting internal efforts.
Committing to Wage Equality
As a customer-focused company, WordStream’s goal is to provide exceptional service and products to our customers. The only way we can do that is to have an impeccable talent base that is fairly compensated and treated well.
Like other companies, WordStream regularly audits employee salaries to identify and rectify any disparities in pay. While this internal system helps us ensure that our hiring practices are fair and competitive, we know that we can accomplish more working together with other organizations in the Boston community.
One of our core company values is transparency. As a signer of the 100% Talent Compact, WordStream will report salary every two years for the Council to review and analyze collectively with other Boston-area companies. Gathering and reporting this data will be key in remaining transparent in our commitment.
By publicly acknowledging and prioritizing our commitment to helping end the gender wage gap, we are making WordStream’s stance and values clear, and we’re making sure that we’ll be held accountable if we don’t.
Forming Women of WordStream
Around the same time that WordStream was approached about the 100% Talent Compact, a grassroots effort was forming internally.
Last summer, WordStream asked each department leader to nominate one woman from their team to attend InfluenceHER Week, a two-day conference with speakers and panels discussing topics like how to network, maintain a work-life balance, or save for your retirement, all aimed to empower women in the workforce.
Afterwards, the WordStream employees who attended gathered to discuss what they learned and, as a part of the nomination process, determine how to present highlights to the office.
The attendees found that they wanted to bring more than just highlights back to the office.
Global Advertising Manager Tara Castagna, one of the employees who attended, said that the event was inspiring for all of them. But it was also a unique opportunity for women across departments to come together for personal and professional growth.
“When I started on the sales team in 2011, I was the only woman in my department, and working on a team with exclusively male colleagues was intimidating,” Tara explained. The demographics have changed since then, but the need for a community hadn’t. “InfluencerHER made us want a unified community of women at WordStream.”
“And it’s not only about female empowerment,” she said. “It’s also about creating a better workplace for everyone.”
Women of WordStream, which just officially launched last week, was formed with this mission. The employee resource group will ensure that we have a community in our company that is supportive of women, not just in experience but also in growthpath and compensation by facilitating educational, motivational, and professional development events and partnering with InfluenceHER.
What’s Next
Moving forward, WordStream will be an active participant in the Boston Women Workforce Council’s efforts to collect information, analyze data, and educate the community. We also hope that our participation will encourage other organizations to sign the 100% Talent Compact, to make Boston the best area in the country for working women.
And here at WordStream, we will continue to evaluate and participate in efforts that enable us to hire the best talent, retain the best talent, and have a positive impact on our community.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
While we were away enjoying the holiday season, some important updates from Google were getting ready to be rolled out (and most of them are live now). If you feel you may have missed some updates and are not sure what those might be, keep reading; everything you need to know is here.