Twitter and LinkedIn Paid Ads [24 /hr test Full Report]
Hi hackers, Jose from WebDab here. I'm sharing my experience using paid ads with both Twitter and LinkedIn.
My goal was to get visitors to my first medium post here.
Both results are for 24 hours on 12/31/20.
- Costs: $100
- Impressions: 28.765
- Link clicks: 989
- Results rate: 3.44%
- Cosr per Result: $0.10
- Costs: $ 221.65
- Impressions: 5.114
- Link clicks: 31
- Results rate: 0.61%
- Average CPM $43.34
- Average CPC $7.15
Click links vs Actual visits
As you can see reported Click links vs Actual visits never match. Here are the Medium stats:
-
Twitter reported 989 clicks, but Medium only reports 416 visits from Twitter on stats. (Real visits are less than 50%).
-
LinkedIn reported 31 clicks, but Medium only revied 9 visits from LinkedIn. (LinkeIn actual vistis are less than 10%).
It always called my attention to see that the data never matches. I’ve read a lot about this, but in general, I have to say I never quite liked the explanations given by different sites.
In conclusion, I think I will never use LinkedIn again for these types of campaigns. I’m going to test FB to see how it goes.
What do you think? Do you see any discrepancies in your numbers? Honestly, a 10-50% difference is too much for a paid mkt channel.
thanks for sharing Jose, interesting take, i've never seen anyone buy media to redirect the traffic on a medium Article. What was your long game objective doing so?
Hi @watus, Good question thanks for asking. I was actually trying to give a little boost to my post. I was hoping it will eventually get enough claps (likes) to get trending on Medium and maybe get featured.
Very insightful José, thank you for sharing!
I have been in Medium for about a year now and know well how to work with the platform. My most recent story about Business Growth was recommended by curators and featured in The Startup it is rapidly approaching 1K views.
I wrote a Twitter thread about how to be successful in Medium if you would like advice do not hesitate to ask!
Hi @SantiagoM awesome thread -thanks!
This smells like ad-fraud
p.s. https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1345774768746852353
Hey @orliesaurus thanks. LinkedIn has a bad rep. BTW Landing Feedback looks pretty cool.
Hi Josè, same experience with LinkedIn, Facebook and also Google Ads, almost same (low) numbers, also confirmed by two different visits trackers.
However, I am not sure they are fake since I assume there are some clicks (counted from the channel) which never translate into a page visit because the browser or the page is immediately closed; it also happens to me when I click something unintentionally, especially from mobile.
My takeaway: absolute numbers are not representative but the relative difference is appreciable, and from my experience Google Ads perform MUCH better than anything else (nearly double) in terms of page visits.
Hi @techlend Thanks for sharing. I'm going to do another set of paid ads tests and I will include Google Ads in the future.
Hi Jose.
Thanks for sharing.
Personally I do not have experience with Twitter/Linkedin ads.
What was your target audience?
Was for USA only for example?
Or was it worldwide audience.
Br.
Ricardo
It was mainly americas (USA, CAN, MEX, BR, etc) But I also added some english speaking countries such as Australia, NZ, UK, S.A.
Ok.
To comparing prices with what another IH told about ad cost ..
Google for example would be
Costs: $ 50
Link clicks: between 1000 and 2000
In my case, I built a Twitter app so Twitter ads could be a choice.
It seems to be the double of the cost as Google but perhaps is because you made a more "expensive target" campaign (the one I mention was for a worldwide audience).
In my case, I do not know if with Google ads I can target "people that has the official Twitter App installed"
I guess I cannot.
World wide is cheaper, but prob not really HQ converting audience . I I guess it depends what you are looking for.
After running my own ad experiment (LinkedIn vs Facebook vs Reddit) and reading comments around the web, the consensus that LinkedIn Ads are crap rings particularly true.
Btw, ad fraud is real. It's more common with retargetting and ad networks, but I wouldn't be surprised that the numbers your actually see are below 50% of what has been reported. What surprised me was LinkedIn Ads' actual visits were less than 10%. It really is the kind of crappy mkt channels.
Hi Fernando thanks for your reply. I know a big part of the mkt industry is a bit shady, but IMHO LinkedIn is just very bad at this. I guess they should focus on HR and not on ads 🤣 🤣.