LinkedIn is a professional social network that is pretty quite while still having that inner punch and influence that it may not realize.
As one of Microsoft's properties, the social network for professionals is starting to allow advertisers to serve their native mobile ads, or also called Sponsored Contents, on other publishers' networks. This essentially expands LinkedIn's reach to tens of thousands on apps and websites on the internet.
The project is called LinkedIn Audience Network. Announced on August 6th, 2017, it is designed to increase LinkedIn advertisers' reach using existing contents to new consumers beyond the LinkedIn platform.
This offering is pretty much similar to Facebook's Audience Network.
Initially, LinkedIn is working with five major mobile ad exchanges: AppNexus, Google Ad Exchange, Sharethrough, MoPub, and Rubicon.
They in turn will serve the advertisements across a variety of publishers in English-speaking markets such as U.S. UK, Canada, Australia and India.
How LinkedIn manages to target consumers depends on the information LinkedIn users have provided on their profile page, as well as the matched audiences, said Divye Khilnani, product management at LinkedIn. Initiailly, the ads serve up on websites owned or affiliated with parent company Microsoft, such as Outlook.com and MSN.com, as well as apps such as MyFitnessPal.
As usual, bidding is based on cost-per-click basis (CPC) to ensure that advertisers only pay for the clicks that are sending people to the advertisers' page.
During the Audience Network beta program, there have been more than 6,000 LinkedIn advertisers that participated.
With the program, they are seeing an average increase of between 3 percent to 13 percent of unique impressions, with an 80 percent increased in the number of clicks.
Advertisers have their own report page where they can download the information. There are information about analysis of clicks, impressions and engagements on ads. These will allow advertisers to compare network performance against onsite performance.