I advertised on LI about a year ago. I had reasonable success (in terms of new leads/signups). Here is what I remember from the experience.
I found that the interface for managing ads was terribly buggy and shouldn't even be considered production ready. One bug that I remember is that it wasn't possible to remove ads, and the button to suspend an add didn't work most of the time.
In typical LI fashion the interface was full of dark patterns, it was really tricky to limit the expenses. In the blink of an eye you could be spending hundreds of USD per day.
Analytics were somewhat available, but basically useless. For no reason the CPC could jump to dollars per click, and no way to discover why.
Advertising, especially for a tech SaaS, is hard. The tools available are usually terrible to use, expensive and often shady. In my experience, doing advertisements is one of the worst parts of starting a new service.
Strange. I always thought the reason they weren’t improving the Consumer end user GUI was because they focused monetization on Enterprise. I guess it was crap all around. (Perhaps they under invest because they have such a defensible position as the one place for online resumes)
Their Sales Navigator offering is utter crap, too. Borderline useless. I canceled after about a year because changes to the free version made it sufficient for my use.
As a further warning, don't even consider utilizing the LinkedIn platform as a creator or community builder. For example, I manage some popular groups, and one day LinkedIn decided that I send too many messages by welcoming new members. Even though their documentation still stated that group managers could message their members without limit, my account kept getting suspended. What did their support tell me? (and I was still paying $100/month at the time) "If you keep sending messages, then you risk being permanently banned." Creating value on the platform, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users, has no weight at LinkedIn.
I found that the interface for managing ads was terribly buggy and shouldn't even be considered production ready. One bug that I remember is that it wasn't possible to remove ads, and the button to suspend an add didn't work most of the time.
In typical LI fashion the interface was full of dark patterns, it was really tricky to limit the expenses. In the blink of an eye you could be spending hundreds of USD per day.
Analytics were somewhat available, but basically useless. For no reason the CPC could jump to dollars per click, and no way to discover why.
Advertising, especially for a tech SaaS, is hard. The tools available are usually terrible to use, expensive and often shady. In my experience, doing advertisements is one of the worst parts of starting a new service.