LinkedIn has a new service to help expand advertisers’ reach to thousands of other sites and apps.
The Microsoft-owned company this week launched the LinkedIn Audience Network, a new way to help advertisers reach their audiences “wherever they are on the Web.”
“The LinkedIn Audience Network is designed to increase your marketing footprint beyond the LinkedIn platform so you can extend your campaign’s reach, deliver on your budget more easily and get your content in front of the right people, wherever they are,” Divye Khilnani, who is in charge of product management at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post.
“To date, more than 6,000 LinkedIn advertisers have participated in our Audience Network beta program. On average, these advertisers have seen a three to 13 percent increase in unique impressions served, and up to an 80 percent increase in unique clicks. This means that advertisers running campaigns in the Audience Network are reaching new people they hadn’t yet engaged on one of LinkedIn’s owned and operated properties.”
LinkedIn is partnering with five mobile ad exchanges — AppNexus, Google Ad Exchange, Sharethrough, MoPub, and Rubicon — to enable businesses and brands to advertise with a number of different English-speaking publishers in Australia, Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and India.
LinkedIn vets all of its partner publishers and blocks any “controversial or offensive” apps or websites such as dating apps and celebrity news publishers. It also regularly monitors campaign activity on its partner properties in the network to ensure ads are placed in “brand-safe environments that are free of unwanted activity.”
Advertisers will be given control over where their ads appear on the network via block-listing at the publisher level and the IAB category level.
“If you do not want your ads to appear on publishers within a certain IAB category, such as financial planning or air travel, then you can choose to exclude those kinds of placements from your Audience Network campaign,” Khilnani explained. “In Campaign Manager, all you need to do is check the categories you wish to exclude. Your ads won’t appear on apps or sites matching the categories you block.”
Advertisers can also block particular apps or sites from their campaign simply by uploading a custom list of domains, Apple App Store URLs, or Google Play Store URLs where they do not want the ads to appear.
