A perfect fit for EDU advertisers
The moment we’ve been waiting for is here! Bing has finally announced the integration of LinkedIn Profile Targeting in Search through Bing Ads. After purchasing the “world’s largest professional network” in 2016 for $26 million, Microsoft has focused on enhancing user experience within the LinkedIn platform. Earlier in 2018, Bing added LinkedIn targeting to its native network through Audience Ads, but the ability to layer LinkedIn targeting segments of “Company”, “Job Function”, and “Industry” is just now being rolled out in beta.
As education advertisers, our team is especially excited about the opportunity to tap into LinkedIn’s rich, highly-relevant data that is unique to Bing and LinkedIn. LinkedIn Profile Targeting in Search is limited to “Bid Only” or “Observation” with the ability to increase or decrease bid modifiers, but Bing has plans to allow advertisers to specifically target these audiences in the future.
Bing offers the ability to target LinkedIn users that identify themselves as employees of 80,000 different companies. Schools can target employees of companies where partnerships are in place or known tuition reimbursement programs are highly utilized.
Advertisers can target Bing searchers based on the type of functions they perform. For example, a school could layer on a “Marketing” LinkedIn audience onto a search campaign with graduate business degree keywords to monitor performance and make bidding adjustments to be aggressive with an audience that might be looking for career advancement through education.
There are 145 industries from LinkedIn available to target through Bing search. Schools can easily match relevant industries to relevant degree programs to gain more insight into performance and change bids based on audience data.
Thruline was able to work with our Bing team to include one of our partners into the pilot in early October. We launched by matching “Job Function” with relevant program-specific campaigns. Based on early results of about 4% of Bing spend going toward LinkedIn targeting, CPCs are raised, but the audience is converting at a higher rate, balancing with slightly higher Cost / Conv than overall Bing Search.
The Thruline digital media team will be testing LinkedIn Profile Targeting in Bing for a number of other clients in the coming weeks.
Myron Liu, Digital Media Manager
