Linkedin sponsored ads

[NAMECATCHER]

Has anyone tried selling a domain via linkedin sponsored ads? If so how did it go and what costs are involved?

Ive also tried email marketing this evening so fingers crossed.

 

[Pierre Barnard]

Good question, would also like to know.

Good luck with marketing.

 

[wonder_lander]

This is something I'm currently exploring and how I sold AgileTesting for £650.

Here are the stats from that campaign:
213,154 impressions
25 clicks
£44.15 spend

Avg CPC£1.77
Here was he ad creative, I wanted to try and ensure all clicks were going to be interested in buying and they knew the price up front:
Buy AgileTesting.co.uk
Buy Now £650 - Domain name for sale, includes the rights to AgileTesting.uk

And the landing page was the domainmanage sales lander.

I refined the audience over the time of campaign, concentrating on skills, location (UK) and job seniority.

I'm running 4 more campaigns for other names to determine whether it's viable longer term. I'm trying different CPC's to see how that affects things.

 

[Edwin]

Wow, some absolutely fascinating data. Thanks. If that sort of success can be replicated even with 2-3x that ad spend per domain, you're onto a massive winner.

Over what period did you accumulate the views and clicks? Was it a "whoosh and it's sold" experience, or a long slog?

 

[wonder_lander]

I originally put 24 domains up and was concerned of massive spend so cut it back. The ad would have been active for around 7 days and the audience I ended up with was 13,000+ members.

I'm trying some geo specific domains and some broader domains too. The key thing with all these things is to refine and target the right people. I think the job seniority helps a lot with that!

 

[NAMECATCHER]

..

 

[NAMECATCHER]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I think its something that is deffinitly worth testing. May have a little tinker with it nown
and see how it goes.

 

[Edwin]

Can you target ads down to the level of a single company? If so, then if you knew there were eg 30 potential buyers for the domain, you could limit the ad displays to just people from those 30 organisations...

 

[Edwin]

Facebook ads might also be worth a try. There are an insane number of targetting opportunities to narrow the sales funnel, as summarised beautifully by this infographic:
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/27/facebook-ad-targeting-options-infographic

(The other benefit is that they're dirt cheap, according to a friend who advertises - admittedly in the consumer space - all over the place. He finds them cheaper than just about anywhere else once he's stuck appropriate filters in.)

 

[wonder_lander]

Here's the campaign over the month and you can see the days it was on and off. No clicks = not enabled

I trialled ad copy asking for offers but felt this was routing people who weren't engaged to buy.

 

[Edwin]

Sorry for the flurry of posts, but the idea has my mind racing...

Presumably a future test would be to see how price (in)sensitive buyers are.

It may turn out that (say) only 1% of senior managers "get" the concept of paying for the best possible domain for their business, but those do get it already are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege because it all comes out of the pool of marketing spend anyway.

If you can bump the average sales price up by speaking straight to people who already get it, it gives you much more flexibility with experimenting.

 

[wonder_lander]

Can you target ads down to the level of a single company? If so, then if you knew there were eg 30 potential buyers for the domain, you could limit the ad displays to just people from those 30 organisations...

Yes there is an "Includes" company name option which then offers suggestions for other similar names.

 

[wonder_lander]

Sorry for the flurry of posts, but the idea has my mind racing...

Presumably a future test would be to see how price (in)sensitive buyers are.

It may turn out that (say) only 1% of senior managers "get" the concept of paying for the best possible domain for their business, but those do get it already are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege because it all comes out of the pool of marketing spend anyway.

If you can bump the average sales price up by speaking straight to people who already get it, it gives you much more flexibility with experimenting.

There are certainly lots of options on how you target it, and it may be that it works best for certain sectors.

As I say I'm in no way an expert but this seemed like a good investment to target switched on buyers. Just need to more sales under the belt to see how viable the model is!

 

[scottmccloud]

@wonder_lander Thanks for this, very interesting.

I'd not considered Linkedin ads but I was taking a look at their premium accounts where you get 15 - 20 or so InMails per month.

On a slight aside, l recently gave selling domains by post a go with one domain. 5 companies identified, got the names of their Managing Directors from Linkedin and sent them what I usually would by email. Two replies, one sale of £500.

It's definitely something I'll be doing again, it's about as targeted as it gets and gets straight through to the decision maker.

 

[wonder_lander]

Oh and weekend impressions drop like a stone! I was getting 100k impressions over some campaigns on the Friday, come Saturday and it was 1k!

 

[wonder_lander]

@wonder_lander Thanks for this, very interesting.

I'd not considered Linkedin ads but I was taking a look at their premium accounts where you get 15 - 20 or so InMails per month.

On a slight aside, l recently gave selling domains by post a go with one domain. 5 companies identified, got the names of their Managing Directors from Linkedin and sent them what I usually would by email. Two replies, one sale of £500.

It's definitely something I'll be doing again, it's about as targeted as it gets and gets straight through to the decision maker.

If you're a regular user of linked in you'll see a $50 promotion often for ad spend, this converted to £40 when I redeemed it so was a great way to try risk free as a start!

 

[timter51]

Do targetted users see who the ad is from and can view your profile? If so, I guess it's important to have a decent looking profile to give credibility, in case people dig further?

 

[wonder_lander]

Do targetted users see who the ad is from and can view your profile? If so, I guess it's important to have a decent looking profile to give credibility, in case people dig further?

Not at all, there are 2 options for the ads, link to your profile or link to a webpage. In this case I link to the for sale page of the domain itself.

 

[aZooZa]

I don't know about LI's sponsored ads, but as @scottmccloud says, it's invaluable for finding organ grinders. We made the 5th highest UK ccTLD sale for 2016 according to Ron Jenkins. Without a direct route to exactly the right chap via LI, it would have been a hard slog - certainly much harder than it was. The premium membership isn't cheap, but worth its weight when you need it.

Edit: Sorry, 3rd highest UK.

 

[timter51]

I don't know about LI's sponsored ads, but as @scottmccloud says, it's invaluable for finding organ grinders. We made the 5th highest UK ccTLD sale for 2016 according to Ron Jenkins. Without a direct route to exactly the right chap via LI, it would have been a hard slog - certainly much harder than it was. The premium membership isn't cheap, but worth its weight when you need it.

Slightly OT, but what were the top 5 reported?