I have previously outlined why and how LinkedIn can be a great advertising platform for you B2B PPC strategy (here and here)
And now they have added another wonderful, FREE feature called Lead Collection for advertisers who are running LinkedIn ads. This new feature gives users that click to your site an easy way to contact your company by showing a “Request Contact” button above your website.
How it works
When a user clicks on your LinkedIn ad and is directed to your website, they will see a lead collection bar above your site which gives the user the option to be contacted by your company.
For each lead you will receive the member's name, headline and a link to their LinkedIn Profile. LinkedIn members have the option of sharing their email address as well. You will receive this information via email to either the email address associated with a personal account, or the contact associated with the Business Account.
You can also view your leads in the Ads Dashboard under the leads tab. Here you can filter out leads by time frame, contact status and you can even see which campaign the lead came from.
You will also see a Lead count in the Ads Dashboard in the Ad Campaign Tab.
How Do I Set This Up?!!?
The great news – it’s very simple … so there is no excuse not to use this feature! (Did I mention, it’s FREE?)
All you have to do is go to your campaign settings and check “Yes” for the Collect Leads option:
No tracking or back-end coding needs to be set up as everything is tracked in the LinkedIn interface.
My 2 Cents
LinkedIn is still a relatively new player in the PPC space but this shows that they are making improvements to their product and offering more options for advertisers to connect with potential leads.
While you are most likely sending users to a landing page with some sort of contact form, it doesn’t hurt to give them as many options as possible to reach out to you! Especially when you can track the lead!
By collecting the leads via LinkedIn Lead Collection could also hold much more value to your sales team. For example: You are already (or should be) targeting users in your key demographic. The user resonated with your ad, clicked to your site and reached out to be contacted by you. You then have insta-access to their company information to determine if that lead actually holds value to you and whether or not it will be worth pursuing.
On the downside, this feature could get tricky if you are using a dummy account for your campaign (which I do not recommend via the tips section in my previous post, Using LinkedIn For Your B2B Strategy.
At this time, I am not exactly sure how contacting the leads will work as I have not set this up for a client yet (working on that), but I am assuming you will only be able to contact the lead directly via the account associated with the ad campaign. If you are using a dummy account you will need to be sure to check the email address associated with the account often as well as the campaign performance in the interface (which you should be checking daily!) to ensure you are following up with the lead in a timely manner. You may still be able to contact them as you choose since you will have the users information. You just won’t be able to see a breakdown of leads contacted vs. non-contacted in the leads tab of the LinkedIn interface.
This leads me to a few questions – Will this affect ad quality if users do not interact with the Request Contact button? Will LinkedIn remove the feature for companies that do not follow up with the leads properly? Will users interact with the button and find it helpful, or is it a bit creepy?
What are your thoughts? Will you test this new feature?
Follow me on Twitter!
