LinkedIn Dynamic Ads: What Are They and How Do They Perform?
Published: October 17, 2017
Author: Molly McCarty
If you have a LinkedIn account, you’ve probably seen LinkedIn Dynamic ads. They’re the ads that show up on the right-hand side of your homepage and use your own profile image in them to grab your attention. They’re meant to be concise and to-the-point, with little room for creative. Instead, they rely on dynamically populating a user’s profile photo, along with a catchy call-to-action, to garner attention.
Nuts and Bolts
- They are a desktop placement only that runs on the right-hand side (similar to right rail ads on Facebook)
- They only run on CPM bidding (although CPC bidding is on the roadmap to hopefully come out before the end of the year!)
- They are only available to advertisers through an IO, or insertion order (a self-serve platform is on the roadmap for this year!)
- The creative space is very small – there is only room for a square company logo
Along with a user’s photo, Dynamic Ads have space for one small company logo image – so users notice their own photos and also immediately notice what company is trying to get their attention.
Here at 3Q, we’ve seen success with Dynamic Product Ads on Facebook, which personalize your ad based on items your customer added to their cart or viewed on your site. It’s not surprising, then, based on the shared personalization factor, that we have also seen improved performance by LinkedIn Dynamic Ads when compared to LinkedIn’s text ads (which are also a desktop-only placement).
After testing this placement type against Text Ads, we saw CTR improve 280%, despite the fact that Dynamic Ads were bidding CPM while the Text Ads were bidding CPC. Additionally, we noticed that when running only Text Ads, we see spend dip on weekends because of reduced desktop inventory. Running Dynamic Ads helps here as the inventory has been increasing over the course of the year and LinkedIn’s algorithm will favor this campaign type over Text Ads, especially on weekends.
It is definitely worth testing Dynamic Ads on LinkedIn – if you’ve given them a test run, let us know how it went in the comment section below!
