I deleted my LinkedIn account because it attracted an endless number of bad business partners. I got sick and tired of all the "Joe Blow"(s) on LinkedIn who claim to be "Joe Blow Inc." (I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one person.)
I've certainly found work on LinkedIn, but my experience is that for other kinds of sales and networking it is a terrible time sink.
Based on the intense level of BS I can't imagine that advertising would have really worked there.
Exactly - although most jurisdictions do require that a corporation have more than one person involved; in the UK you can have a corporation with one director but it must have a secretary as well.
When it comes to both taxes (in the UK you can be more tax efficient than trading as a sole trader) and limited liability, why wouldn't you want to have a limited company?
Considering all the new developments in the UK, all at the expense of the employee, there's a real business opportunity for someone who can help workers incorporate themselves as contractors under their individual limited companies. Especially when companieshouse has as much oversight on the database as I know about isolated Renshaw flux oscillation signatures.
In india, they added OPC (one person company) which is an extension of limited liability for individuals. I think it's becoming quite common across countries.
Hard to know how much is ad fraud and how much is people just not being interested in what is being advertised. Don't see why I should care about yet another webinar especially if I'm already a successful CEO and get five thousand webinar requests a day. Might click for more info but then after 10 seconds on the page (and seeing it's more BS) I'll probably bail.
Same as this quote:
>“You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing.
No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail.
edit: Also at only 11 clicks, the metrics are pure noise. Sure they each cost $45 but it's still only 11 clicks. Can't even blame the CPC estimation for being off at such a low number.
> No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail.
Exactly. Even if I was thinking about requesting a demo when I clicked the ad, I then want to see a lot of information on the target site before proceeding. I'm not going to sign up for a demo unless I think there's a pretty good chance I'll want to buy.
Most vendor websites don't provide nearly enough information for me to make that judgment. As someone who doesn't consider talking to sales people to be a recreational activity, that leaves me with little choice but to bail.
Same. I hate when I need to get on a call to just get pricing for something, or even worse, to just renew a yearly subscription.
Plus this was analytics software which is a dime a dozen nowadays. So you need to make your value proposition known very well and very quickly. Even then you'll get a very low conversion rate unless you've done a very good branding campaign to get your name out there.
No, thanks. Unless the person giving me the demo is the CEO, their entire salary and taxes are being taken out of my price, and it's most likely not the kind of company I want to do business with.
"LinkedIn says 11, our server logs show 10, our actual reporting software's only showing 8 people. The only reason that we would not see them pop up in this logging tool is that they were on the site and bounced so quickly that the logging tool was unable to load and capture anything of their session [We've went back and forth will the session recording company multiple times to confirm that]"
Seems awareness of ad/trackblocking and disabling JavaScript is low in this space.
Still, he could absolutely be right some portion of them are misclicks.
I'm sure Facebook will be lower than this in terms of awareness of adblock, considering the number of oldies there (including my relatives) who can't distinguish between sponsored content and original content. I'm honestly surprised LinkedIn has such high numbers, since I assumed the LinkedIn crowd would be more technologically savvy.
Tech savvy crowd and engineers probably only use linkedin once a full moon to fill out their details. The rest are recruiters, PR, management, students, and so on. Those are the regulars. You don't use linkedin when you have a job unless that is your job.
Employed engineer here. I use linkedin to network and as a result I get a few inbound recruiting requests a week. Most are contract roles I'm not interested in, but some are for interesting companies that I wouldn't have found on a job board. I try to take interviews for the latter.
Going through an interview with nothing to lose helps me keep up my networking and interviewing soft skills. The best time to find a job is when you don't need one.
I think the parent comment is about adblock awareness by advertisers. One reason their invasive tracking might say they have less visitors than their ad network is because some of the people clicking their ads block their invasive tracking.
> The only reason that we would not see them pop up in this logging tool is that they were on the site and bounced so quickly that the logging tool was unable to load and capture anything of their session.
I'm really happy to hear this shows up in site metrics, since it's exactly what I do when I follow a link into ad-laden crap. I don't block ads by default, but I also have zero tolerance for keeping crap open.
Or the pop-up filled marketing sites. "Come chat with us." "Click this big banner for a discount." "Come to this webinar if you can't find the small X to close this banner." "This site uses cookies." "Watch these fifty background animations play."
CPC estimation is not an exact science anywhere - most places are comparing it based on other ads with similar targeting to yours, they have no idea how much your ad content makes people want to click or not which is a big factor.
For some reason or other LinkedIn keeps thinking I must be very interested in Shell and Raytheon, though that couldn't be farther off the mark.
Having selected "I find this ad annoying or not interesting" numerous times without any effect. What is this algorithm behind that thinking? Certainly not a good way to get some ad revenue from me (tbh I'm a lost cause anyway in that regard.. can count the no. of ad clicks I ever made on one hand. So I guess LI is helping me here).
Let's face it Shell and Raytheon have much much larger ad buying budget than probably any/all of your actual interests combined. If Shell/Raytheon/types target the same audience as smaller vendors with smaller ad buys, then they will always lose the auction. If someone has a $500/month budget, they will lose to someone with a $5000 budget. This is why I think these "targeted" ad pushers are the actual fraud.
Other mediums of advertising sell you a specific ad on a certain page of a website/newspaper/magazine/etc. You have no idea how many people really look at it. You make your decision on if the site/paper/zine attracts the crowd you are interested in. Buying TV/Radio ads also says for your ad buy you will get X number of ads in certain time spots, or for more money you can have your ad played during specific times during specific shows. Again, you have no idea on the exact number of people seeing/hearing your ad, but at least you know it's getting played.
If this is the case then why does LI even have the "I find this ad annoying or not interesting". I thought the whole point of that option was to counteract a company that the user is explicitly not interested in from winning the ad auction.
If the option doesn't work than that seems like an issue on the part of LI, either dishonesty (pretending it does something when it doesn't) or incompetence. Given the company we're talking about, neither would surprise me.
You must be thinking that the button is meant to improve your ad experience. All ad platforms care about are fulfilling their obligation of serving ads. They claim they are targeted. Again, that's not for your enjoyment. It's a way to get advertisers to spend more money. You clicking the button says you're an actual human like the 'unsubscribe' link in spam while being a placebo. Am I cynical, maybe? Am I wrong, ??
Perhaps we can find a reason in the article "Why the world is full of buttons that don't work"[0]:
"They're sometimes called "placebo buttons" -- buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who pioneered a concept known as the "illusion of control."
"They do have a psychological effect," she said in a phone interview. "Taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation, and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander."
I’ve done the same to at least a dozen “Daily Show with Trevor Noah” ads on YouTube. I’m pretty sure there is no algorithm behind it. A switch connected to nothing that exists only to provide an outlet for user frustration.
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.
> “You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing.
This guy is deluded. People click random things to get more info, and they might not have liked the more info they got so didn’t go ahead with the demo.
I stopped reading the content of marketing websites ages ago, I just click on whatever is big and orange or other flashy colors until I see something that looks like a list of features, or whatever I'm looking for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to be the only one to have this marketing blindness. I guess I'm a bot based on my behaviour?
If the landing page has a bunch of soft stuff like 'expands synergy' on it I am just going to assume I was not the target audience. I'm not a CEO, I'm a practitioner. Put something crunchy in there. Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao.
> The point is to keep my real interests private from creepy marketing departments.
Which is why you block all ads?
Companies don't care about 'real interests'. They see the things you click on and show you more ads based on it. They earn money. That's it.
The marketing department knows the sites you visit because it has to serve the ad so this thing can click on it.
Exactly, there's more than 1 factor while his campaign didn't work at all.
As mentioned in other comments, his ad spend was pretty low anyway, you can't come to conclusions if a campaign is successful from 11 clicks.
The main problem is that his creative/lander or his copy didn't convert.
Having the clicks differentiate from the ad source compared to your tracking tool is pretty common as well. If you're using just GA to track it, the numbers are going to be wildly different with people having Adblockers.
I've worked on some large B2B ad campaigns on LinkedIn, some of them we only ever got 1 lead, but that lead was worth a lot more than that the campaign budget, so that was a success for us.
I lost a couple of thousand dollars using their services (literally 5x my ad budget) because they "refill" your ad account based on the ceiling you intend to spend - without an email notification or other notification in your main profile. It cycled through my ~$300 ad budget and charged me that amount multiple times before I caught it on my bill. Never received the refund they said they'd send either.
People say that half of all advertising dollars are wasted, you just don't know which half, but this company has perfected it to 5-10x what you mean to spend on advertising is wasted, and you don't know until they've taken it from you and then shown you the fine print.
If they advertise increased click-through rate and they increase it, what stops them from claiming they fulfilled their end of the bargain? It could even be click bots.
If LI were still a public company, this behaviour would destroy their stock price. There is something to be said for public markets and accountability.
Is there? To me, it seems like either this behavior would hurt their profits, in which case it doesn't really matter that much whether they're public or not (they get hurt either way), or it wouldn't but a public company would have more backlash, in which case it seems like an efficient market would have actors that look for companies getting backlash, buy the cheap stock, and then enjoy the (unaffected, by assumption) profits.
Except as a product, the company (MSFT) is insulated from their crappy behavior, where if it were a stand alone company, there would be more accountability.
Maybe that's a new platform company strategy: build a bunch of low-volatility/low-margin enterprise products for long term revenue generation, then fund a bunch of shadey operations as products to be pools for off-the-books bonuses and incentives.
When a company like Microsoft buys a company like LinkedIn, they aren't after direct profits. They're buying eyeballs and personal information for ad targeting. Microsoft already got what they wanted out of the purchase. It's the same reason Facebook buys tons of companies that will never directly turn a profit.
I agree with your larger point, that LinkedIn isn't really accountable to anyone; the Microsoft shareholders don't care what LinkedIn does.
this could very well be the case. in which case, using oculus as a model -- the company's promises to you as the user are only as good as the last company who acquired them.
I don't really know if a chargeback would work here, but the basis would be "I agreed to pay X and LinkedIn charged me Y", not "LinkedIn did not deliver the services advertised".
Is it really that bad? I know land lords that have had to go to small claims court, they spent like a day dealing with things. I’m not totally sure you’ll break even but it’s not a total loss either.
Not all. A major US Bank (rhymes w/ Pace Bank) used to provide this feature back in the 2000s and then rolled it back. I discovered this ~4 months ago when I wanted to buy something online but didn't fully trust the vendor. Then ended up going with Privacy.com.
I'm a huge fan and would def recommend them to anyone looking for better control over subscription charges
I have a Capital One card and wanted to use that feature. As far as I could tell, the only way to use it was to install their "assistant" browser extension and give it permission to view everything you do. Then if you were on a merchant site it could suggest you use a new card number for it. I considered toggling the assistant on and off just as needed but instead said nope. Was there another way to do it?
Totally bogus, isn’t it? I just did that very thing with CapOne. The only saving grace is that once you create the temp card with their definitely-not-spyware web browser extension, you can uninstall it completely and manage the card through the website. I’ve installed it, visited a single site, and uninstalled it several times so far and it seems to get the job done.
You can give selective access[0] to the extensions in Chrome. The restrictive access is that it will get access to the webpage only when you click the extension. Read under "Let extensions read and change site data"
Apple Card does this (and obviously Apple Pay in general). It's not nearly as powerful as Privacy though since the card numbers can't be cancelled or paused from what I can tell.
What you lose in credit card points, you 10X in savings on:
1. Unexpected "recurring" charges and
2. Time spent avoiding unintelligible unsubscribe UXs
Plus, I feel a lot more comfortable trying services that require a credit card for a free trial which has led me to some extra value that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Just set the budget on the card to $1.
Some people might feel bad for all the SaaS companies that are getting failed payment alerts, but I don't. It took a lot of dark patterns and group think to create a market for something like privacy.com.
I'm still waiting on my $600 from Dropbox, which they charged over five years for an inactive account without ever sending a receipt. Never again with privacy.com.
What is the purpose of allowing the user to set a "budget" if they automatically refill it? That doesn't sound like a budget at all, and highly deceptive on their end if that's what they called it
Yeah, but affiliate marketing is a pretty raw deal for the person doing it because they carry all risk. It's just a job working in sales for other companies but without benefits.
There needs to be some adjustment for "your marketing/product is shit and will therefore be much harder to sell."
Adtech companies don't really want to be held responsible for the effectiveness of your advertisement or the conversion rate of your landing page. When such models exist (called CPA or cost-per-action usually), there's a significant premium attached for that risk. Most advertisers don't want to pay that premium.
Google has a such product but I think it is nowhere close to the majority of ad spending. A part of the reasons is that it needs campaigns' conversion volumes to be above a certain threshold (so their model has a reasonable amount of training data) while advertisers may exploit the system by not reporting legitimate conversions. So Google requires them to be eligible by some unknown criteria.
The problem is that this website is down and no-one can access its content. This problem would not exist if the author had simply released their static content on a CDN. Your 5€ DO droplet is not helping me access this content.
Don't know if it's a personal site or not, it sounds like it is. But at least my case is that a VPS provider provides a hard stop to spend. Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill.
That said, I've topped HN before and nginx happily handled that load on a 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM host with a static site. A lot of these personal site meltdowns are Wordpress with no caching plugins.
> Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill.
The last time an article on my site reached the top of HN, my AWS bill was a couple of dollars for the month, across S3, Cloudfront, Athena and SNS.
I get the concern that you'll spend more than you intended with AWS, but it's honestly hard to blow a budget on a static site hosted in S3 and served by Cloudfront. Those two services have heavy guard rails on what you can accidentally commit to doing, unlike the myriad compute services.
The point is this is static web content; it should be delivered by a CDN, but it's not, and that's why it's down. If it was delivered by a CDN it wouldn't be down.
Facebook gives you better returns as well as Google Ads, Linkedin was not a good convertion rate at all and they don't really care about it so yes you're correct about the statement of "Money Pit" it's because we're used to Facebook and Google conversions that we expect the same from Linkedin and actually it's different platforms with different goals and objectives, not sure why you should expect the same "money's worth" on every platform out there each one has a different objetive and different users that's how it works they're different.
I can't read the source article (site is down) but judging from the header I'm kinda glad LinkedIn is not selling many ads. The last years it's become an even more fake stream of glossy PR marketing crap filled with stock photos of smiling faces, and people commenting how much they adore the company line. I get enough of all that on the company's own sites, thank you.
I get that people don't want to be critical in public, but you don't have to repost every piece of marketing BS that comes your way :) Especially when I know some of these people tell a completely different story in person.
And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. There's constantly people bothering me with their 'services' which are totally not relevant to my role if they'd even bothered to glance at my profile. I wish I could report them somehow.
The only reason I still have it is because it's almost impossible to get a job without it :) Because the business world loves it. But it's more fake than FaceBook now. Everyone is one successful talented employee who is completely in line with the corporate hive mind.
I don't really use LinkedIn that much, so this confuses me:
> And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now.
Do you mean simply having an account? Or are there now fees for, e.g. avoiding recruiters? I thought that the business model of LinkedIn had only companies/recruiters pay to reach (free) users.
No, having an account is free. But many features are behind a paywall now, like seeing who is visiting your profile.
It used to be it was only not shown if you were browsing privately youself, but recently it changed and you can only see the first two.
Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option.
Especially lately I get a lot of spam from SAP related businesses even though I don't work with ERP systems nor have I ever done so. It's super annoying. If it was even remotely related to my work it would be much less so.
> Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option.
You do. Check your settings and privacy preferences closer. They employ some dark ux to make it less obvious, but it's there.
Ok fair enough, I will have a look again.. It is indeed all over the place, I went through it all once about a year and a half ago, so it could be some things have changed.
It sounds like they are moaning that their client side rendered React-based landing page had a lot of bounces which they don't believe because client side rendered react pages are known to be "very very fast" and "some of the very fastest available technology". (This is around the 15:30 mark)
That's baloney, client side rendered JavaScript landing pages are much slower than server-side rendered.
App Annie actually banned me once when I logged with javascript disabled and privacy badger installed. I had to contact their customer support, and they just said to disable my extensions and don't do it again otherwise I'll be banned permanently.
I was about to comment the same thing. They talked about how it's a progressive web app: good, built in react: good, client side rendered: no no no why!
As a general rule, Web "apps" should be client rendered (think FB, Twitter, Gmail, etc), Web "sites" should be server rendered. I wish React made it more clear what the difference between the two is and why you should use one versus the other. I know frameworks like Next and Gatsby do it but I wish it was a more ingrained part of React.
I agree with you, no valid reason (even stupid) from a performance point of view to render on the client for such pages. Client-side rendering backed up by Server-side rendering could increase performance on _following_ navigation when the performance/payload-penalty has been taken on first page load.
I actually do have several friends and other people in my network (some quite accomplished professionally) who are very active on LinkedIn, and there's not much shady about them. But yes, it's weird.
Well, that and colleagues of mine from over in the the marketing and sales departments, who can't understand why it takes me an average of 2 months to get around to accepting their connection requests.
Lots of people use it. The feed aspect of it is useless. But in terms of a network it's great. I've found 2 out of my last 3 jobs there. Assume it's also great for organic marketing as well where you target associates of your current clients.
Not just shady ones. I notice a lot of legitimate recruiters find me on LinkedIn and it leads to real work for me.
I personally avoid it like the plague, but I do keep my CV up to date there. (Actually it's out of date right now, but I'll update it when I start looking again.)
I think Linkedin is quite useless as a social network - their business model selling your contacts to "digital strategists" who try to contact you. Most of the content is marketing spam, and nobody uses it.
Still, when we happen to recruit, we get like 10-20 decent applicants (of which 5 were pretty good) for $250 o so.
it's pretty easy to click on competitors ads with bots to run out competitors credit and then run your ads for the rest of the day for cheap prices. But the same happens with Google adwords. I guess they don't have any way to prevent it
> LinkedIn Ads network is likely awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic
Just like every single other adnet? The very fact of massive adfraud groups allegedly specialising on one or another net means that they must be making money somehow.
By the definition, those guy must be one step ahead of the adnet, or they don't make money, and fizzle in a few months.
My impression is that there are groups which have consistently defeated all, and every bot detection method the entirety of ad industry threw on them.
LinkedIn is one of those things you have and probably only use when you need a job or are desperate for clients.
No one is there to get decent information or to genuinely connect with people. It's the digital equivalent of the super fake networking seminars people go to. Everyone is a seller and on one is a buyer.
Makes sense that their ad network is sketchy and buggy.
I know plenty of technical founders who are quite active on LinkedIn. Without disclosing any names, I can assure you they are not looking for new jobs or desperate for anything.
At one point I was convinced that everybody is leaving FB just because I and a few people I knew were leaving FB. Years later it's still a dominant social network. Beware of confirmation bias and the firehouse effect[0].
I know several very active founders on LinkedIn as well, but it’s clear that they’re all using LI for the intended purpose: Building their personal brand and business network. They may not be actively looking for jobs or desperate for clients, but they are working the system to elevate their own status.
It’s possible to find halfway decent content on LI, but it takes a lot of work to filter out the fluff. Even then, you have to be honest about why people are doing it in the first place: Networking and brand building. No busy founder is going to frequently take time away from their growing business to write LI content without expectation of personal or business gain.
That’s not to say you can’t find diamonds in the rough, but you need to be realistic about the context to separate it from the brand building.
B2B SaaS founder here. I had exactly the same experience. I built my own code for tracking signups, and discovered that the actual conversions were a big fat zero. That's when I stopped burning money on LinkedIn ads.
Mind you, this experience wasn't much different for other ad networks. Quora was slightly better in that at least there seemed to be some interest shown by people landing (or perhaps this was the only ad site that sent actual people my way?).
I dont agree with bowdlerization happening on Hacker News, wrt legitimate titles. This is effectively censorship @dang (I'm addressing it to you because you speak most often here, and set the tone, not because you personally did it. )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation
I do understand that having less clickbaity _content_ is noble goal (and reason we read HN), but let US do our job in giving upvotes to good topic or flaging bad ones, while having ORIGINAL titles author of the post intended, not the one the censor considers proper.
The problem is that a title on HN's front page doesn't just represent what the author believes. It also represents what "HN" believes, to some extent.
Of course, HN doesn't exist as a person and doesn't believe anything at all, but that doesn't matter, because people receive those titles as if it does. So there are multiple ways that a title can be misleading and we have to balance them.
Upvotes alone don't solve this. On the contrary: indignation routinely gets the most upvotes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not—people just upvote angry shit more than they upvote anything else. If we don't want the front page to be all-angry and mostly-false all day, then moderators have to intervene. Is that censorship? That's up to you—people use that word to mean whatever sort of intervention they don't like.
I know nothing about advertising, but does it really matter if you are getting bot traffic if you are still getting conversions from the ads? If you know that for every $10 you spend on LinkedIn ads, you get 1 person to sign up for your service, then it doesn't matter how many mistaken clicks or bots clicked on the ad since click through isn't the main metric you are using. Isn't that why websites have so much tracking? So they can attribute an ad to a conversion rather than just looking at the number of clicks?
I don't think they are intending to make money on the clicks itself, but having a bot click on ads would seem to make it appear more "real" and less likely to get discovered.
Sooo, I've spent hundreds of thousands on LinkedIn Ads on behalf of clients. Here is my take:
Ad platforms work in varying degrees for different products and companies. You should not dismiss an ad platform based on poor performance alone without understanding why it performed poorly.
It's sort of like with airlines: If you boycott an airline for every minor offense, pretty soon you'll have no option but to take the train.
In this case, it's disingenuous to paint an entire ad platform--that does hundreds of millions in revenue[1]--as "awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic" based on a campaign that ran for just 1.5 days and resulted in 11 clicks. (They say they saw similar results from larger campaigns, but they don't show them.)
But Ok, let's say we take out the generalizations. I get that it's disconcerting for any company to find they were charged for traffic that bounced within a second. In that case you need to look for the root cause, and see if it can be resolved or worked around.
In this case the root cause should be painfully obvious to experienced marketers like the authors: Most of the 11 clicks seems to be from mobile traffic (as seen in their Fullstory report), where it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. They do mention this possibility in both the video and the title, but they seem to underestimate the likelihood of this being the root cause, and talk too much about bots instead. I've seen this exact misclick behavior in Twitter and for that reason I stopped advertising there.
Unlike Twitter, however, LinkedIn lets you work around this. They offer a "lead gen" campaign type, which requires two clicks (one on the ad, and one more on the "submit form" button) and sharing of contact information before the advertiser is charged. I've still seen funky results from this--such as users saying they don't recall submitting any form--but in much fewer cases than with simple image ads.
Today, when I run LinkedIn campaigns, it is almost always with lead gen ads. The results are far better than this anecdotal post suggests. Some issues still come up, and I've found that attempting to troubleshoot them leads to a better outcome for the business than dismissing the entire ad platform.
A sample size of of 2,000 impressions is absolutely useless. Even the larger example is completely useless.
I don’t even considering analyzing a campaign with less than 50k impressions, and I won’t look at a variable if it’s under 10k. Realistically I want a few hundred thousand impressions before trying to make big claims about fraud.
I hear you, but often times in B2B advertising, your target audiences are going to be small. How would you suggest assessing the success/failure of your ad campaigns if it's an order of magnitude less than your 50k threshold?
Yeah, it was a wake-up call for me that b2b tech companies are first and foremost sales companies. Once place I worked the actual product was developed and maintained by a team of about 20 people that included dev, ops, and product managers but sales was about 200 people.
Just getting a meeting with a decision maker at a med-large company could take a whole team months. I don't envy their jobs.
So if your audience is actually that small, you should do account based marketing (ABM) which looks entirely different. Rather than spend money on LinkedIn ads trying to target “decision makers at IT companies” you spend your time actively pursuing individual companies.
I’ve never actually worked in a role like that, but have had clients move from abm to general b2b marketing.
I'm confused, why would a fraud bot click on ads that makes LinkedIn money? Normally ad-fraud is when a fraudulent publisher is set up, made to look legit, hosts ads, which a bot then clicks the hell out of. Where's the incentive here for a bad actor on LinkedIn?
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadI've certainly found work on LinkedIn, but my experience is that for other kinds of sales and networking it is a terrible time sink.
Based on the intense level of BS I can't imagine that advertising would have really worked there.
No, it is the limited liability. Don't want to lose your house because of a bad business deal.
https://www.qualitycompanyformations.co.uk/blog/can-you-set-...
For future people getting here - the site went down. Most likely from the massive attention from this post.
Same as this quote:
>“You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing.
No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail.
edit: Also at only 11 clicks, the metrics are pure noise. Sure they each cost $45 but it's still only 11 clicks. Can't even blame the CPC estimation for being off at such a low number.
Exactly. Even if I was thinking about requesting a demo when I clicked the ad, I then want to see a lot of information on the target site before proceeding. I'm not going to sign up for a demo unless I think there's a pretty good chance I'll want to buy.
Most vendor websites don't provide nearly enough information for me to make that judgment. As someone who doesn't consider talking to sales people to be a recreational activity, that leaves me with little choice but to bail.
Plus this was analytics software which is a dime a dozen nowadays. So you need to make your value proposition known very well and very quickly. Even then you'll get a very low conversion rate unless you've done a very good branding campaign to get your name out there.
Seems awareness of ad/trackblocking and disabling JavaScript is low in this space.
Still, he could absolutely be right some portion of them are misclicks.
Going through an interview with nothing to lose helps me keep up my networking and interviewing soft skills. The best time to find a job is when you don't need one.
Back in my old firm, I knew a ton of bankers and consultants who used LinkedIn regularly (mostly for stalking top performers).
I'm really happy to hear this shows up in site metrics, since it's exactly what I do when I follow a link into ad-laden crap. I don't block ads by default, but I also have zero tolerance for keeping crap open.
Sadly, it is quite close to what actually happens.
Having selected "I find this ad annoying or not interesting" numerous times without any effect. What is this algorithm behind that thinking? Certainly not a good way to get some ad revenue from me (tbh I'm a lost cause anyway in that regard.. can count the no. of ad clicks I ever made on one hand. So I guess LI is helping me here).
Just because you're not interested in hearing it doesn't mean advertisers don't want to try to tell you anyway.
Other mediums of advertising sell you a specific ad on a certain page of a website/newspaper/magazine/etc. You have no idea how many people really look at it. You make your decision on if the site/paper/zine attracts the crowd you are interested in. Buying TV/Radio ads also says for your ad buy you will get X number of ads in certain time spots, or for more money you can have your ad played during specific times during specific shows. Again, you have no idea on the exact number of people seeing/hearing your ad, but at least you know it's getting played.
If the option doesn't work than that seems like an issue on the part of LI, either dishonesty (pretending it does something when it doesn't) or incompetence. Given the company we're talking about, neither would surprise me.
"They're sometimes called "placebo buttons" -- buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who pioneered a concept known as the "illusion of control." "They do have a psychological effect," she said in a phone interview. "Taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation, and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander."
[0] https://www.cnn.com/style/article/placebo-buttons-design/ind...
Dunno if they actually use that info though.
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.
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've hit that one. Usually I found I was able to delete an ad if I started by creating two more. It's like a reverse hydra kind of thing.
This guy is deluded. People click random things to get more info, and they might not have liked the more info they got so didn’t go ahead with the demo.
Ad nauseam did exactly this until the extension was banned from chrome store: https://adnauseam.io/
If you want to piss off as dev or act like a bot, only then use it.
To load an ad, you have to allow trackers. If you allow a tracker, you might as well allow the ad instead of hiding it. AdNauseam just hides it.
How is this not increasing privacy? The point is to keep my real interests private from creepy marketing departments.
Which is why you block all ads? Companies don't care about 'real interests'. They see the things you click on and show you more ads based on it. They earn money. That's it.
The marketing department knows the sites you visit because it has to serve the ad so this thing can click on it.
Use uBlock Origin.
As mentioned in other comments, his ad spend was pretty low anyway, you can't come to conclusions if a campaign is successful from 11 clicks.
The main problem is that his creative/lander or his copy didn't convert.
Having the clicks differentiate from the ad source compared to your tracking tool is pretty common as well. If you're using just GA to track it, the numbers are going to be wildly different with people having Adblockers.
I've worked on some large B2B ad campaigns on LinkedIn, some of them we only ever got 1 lead, but that lead was worth a lot more than that the campaign budget, so that was a success for us.
People say that half of all advertising dollars are wasted, you just don't know which half, but this company has perfected it to 5-10x what you mean to spend on advertising is wasted, and you don't know until they've taken it from you and then shown you the fine print.
In short, avoid.
Maybe that's a new platform company strategy: build a bunch of low-volatility/low-margin enterprise products for long term revenue generation, then fund a bunch of shadey operations as products to be pools for off-the-books bonuses and incentives.
I agree with your larger point, that LinkedIn isn't really accountable to anyone; the Microsoft shareholders don't care what LinkedIn does.
https://privacy.com/
I'm a huge fan and would def recommend them to anyone looking for better control over subscription charges
[0] https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?p=...
What you lose in credit card points, you 10X in savings on:
1. Unexpected "recurring" charges and
2. Time spent avoiding unintelligible unsubscribe UXs
Plus, I feel a lot more comfortable trying services that require a credit card for a free trial which has led me to some extra value that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Just set the budget on the card to $1.
Some people might feel bad for all the SaaS companies that are getting failed payment alerts, but I don't. It took a lot of dark patterns and group think to create a market for something like privacy.com.
I'm still waiting on my $600 from Dropbox, which they charged over five years for an inactive account without ever sending a receipt. Never again with privacy.com.
Edit: format/clarify
As an owner of a small SaaS business I can say that our payment processor has fairly strict requirements to allow recurring charges:
- Product description has to be very clear that it's a recurring payment
- Terms and conditions have to have a section with details on how to cancel the subscription
- We have to send email notifications in advance before every recurring charge
Does this exist anywhere, aside from affiliate deals?
I'd be happy to pay 50% for each digital product sale, since those are 96% profit.
There needs to be some adjustment for "your marketing/product is shit and will therefore be much harder to sell."
You will have to when the advertising network figures out the value of a sale.
Google has a such product but I think it is nowhere close to the majority of ad spending. A part of the reasons is that it needs campaigns' conversion volumes to be above a certain threshold (so their model has a reasonable amount of training data) while advertisers may exploit the system by not reporting legitimate conversions. So Google requires them to be eligible by some unknown criteria.
Based on the title I'm guessing this could have been delivered as a static web page delivered by a CDN.
I've never understood why some people want to set up their own web servers to deliver static content.
I've a Digital Ocean droplet running several static sites for €5 a month. Whats the problem?
That said, I've topped HN before and nginx happily handled that load on a 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM host with a static site. A lot of these personal site meltdowns are Wordpress with no caching plugins.
The last time an article on my site reached the top of HN, my AWS bill was a couple of dollars for the month, across S3, Cloudfront, Athena and SNS.
I get the concern that you'll spend more than you intended with AWS, but it's honestly hard to blow a budget on a static site hosted in S3 and served by Cloudfront. Those two services have heavy guard rails on what you can accidentally commit to doing, unlike the myriad compute services.
If you're more comfortable paying for something, it's easy to set up a prepaid BunnyCDN to hit an S3 bucket.
I get that people don't want to be critical in public, but you don't have to repost every piece of marketing BS that comes your way :) Especially when I know some of these people tell a completely different story in person.
And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. There's constantly people bothering me with their 'services' which are totally not relevant to my role if they'd even bothered to glance at my profile. I wish I could report them somehow.
The only reason I still have it is because it's almost impossible to get a job without it :) Because the business world loves it. But it's more fake than FaceBook now. Everyone is one successful talented employee who is completely in line with the corporate hive mind.
> And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now.
Do you mean simply having an account? Or are there now fees for, e.g. avoiding recruiters? I thought that the business model of LinkedIn had only companies/recruiters pay to reach (free) users.
It used to be it was only not shown if you were browsing privately youself, but recently it changed and you can only see the first two.
Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option.
Especially lately I get a lot of spam from SAP related businesses even though I don't work with ERP systems nor have I ever done so. It's super annoying. If it was even remotely related to my work it would be much less so.
You do. Check your settings and privacy preferences closer. They employ some dark ux to make it less obvious, but it's there.
It sounds like they are moaning that their client side rendered React-based landing page had a lot of bounces which they don't believe because client side rendered react pages are known to be "very very fast" and "some of the very fastest available technology". (This is around the 15:30 mark)
That's baloney, client side rendered JavaScript landing pages are much slower than server-side rendered.
When greeted by a blank page, I frequently "react" by just going elsewhere.
I don't use their service anymore.
As a general rule, Web "apps" should be client rendered (think FB, Twitter, Gmail, etc), Web "sites" should be server rendered. I wish React made it more clear what the difference between the two is and why you should use one versus the other. I know frameworks like Next and Gatsby do it but I wish it was a more ingrained part of React.
It's an automatically-updating and linked rolodex. Rolodexes tell you that you know X. They don't say who X knows.
I personally avoid it like the plague, but I do keep my CV up to date there. (Actually it's out of date right now, but I'll update it when I start looking again.)
Still, when we happen to recruit, we get like 10-20 decent applicants (of which 5 were pretty good) for $250 o so.
Just like every single other adnet? The very fact of massive adfraud groups allegedly specialising on one or another net means that they must be making money somehow.
By the definition, those guy must be one step ahead of the adnet, or they don't make money, and fizzle in a few months.
My impression is that there are groups which have consistently defeated all, and every bot detection method the entirety of ad industry threw on them.
No one is there to get decent information or to genuinely connect with people. It's the digital equivalent of the super fake networking seminars people go to. Everyone is a seller and on one is a buyer.
Makes sense that their ad network is sketchy and buggy.
At one point I was convinced that everybody is leaving FB just because I and a few people I knew were leaving FB. Years later it's still a dominant social network. Beware of confirmation bias and the firehouse effect[0].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-mart...
It’s possible to find halfway decent content on LI, but it takes a lot of work to filter out the fluff. Even then, you have to be honest about why people are doing it in the first place: Networking and brand building. No busy founder is going to frequently take time away from their growing business to write LI content without expectation of personal or business gain.
That’s not to say you can’t find diamonds in the rough, but you need to be realistic about the context to separate it from the brand building.
That's the very purpose of LinkedIn, no?
Mind you, this experience wasn't much different for other ad networks. Quora was slightly better in that at least there seemed to be some interest shown by people landing (or perhaps this was the only ad site that sent actual people my way?).
I do understand that having less clickbaity _content_ is noble goal (and reason we read HN), but let US do our job in giving upvotes to good topic or flaging bad ones, while having ORIGINAL titles author of the post intended, not the one the censor considers proper.
Of course, HN doesn't exist as a person and doesn't believe anything at all, but that doesn't matter, because people receive those titles as if it does. So there are multiple ways that a title can be misleading and we have to balance them.
Upvotes alone don't solve this. On the contrary: indignation routinely gets the most upvotes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not—people just upvote angry shit more than they upvote anything else. If we don't want the front page to be all-angry and mostly-false all day, then moderators have to intervene. Is that censorship? That's up to you—people use that word to mean whatever sort of intervention they don't like.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
How does a third party (not LinkedIn, and not the advertiser) make money from this?
Ad platforms work in varying degrees for different products and companies. You should not dismiss an ad platform based on poor performance alone without understanding why it performed poorly.
It's sort of like with airlines: If you boycott an airline for every minor offense, pretty soon you'll have no option but to take the train.
In this case, it's disingenuous to paint an entire ad platform--that does hundreds of millions in revenue[1]--as "awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic" based on a campaign that ran for just 1.5 days and resulted in 11 clicks. (They say they saw similar results from larger campaigns, but they don't show them.)
But Ok, let's say we take out the generalizations. I get that it's disconcerting for any company to find they were charged for traffic that bounced within a second. In that case you need to look for the root cause, and see if it can be resolved or worked around.
In this case the root cause should be painfully obvious to experienced marketers like the authors: Most of the 11 clicks seems to be from mobile traffic (as seen in their Fullstory report), where it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. They do mention this possibility in both the video and the title, but they seem to underestimate the likelihood of this being the root cause, and talk too much about bots instead. I've seen this exact misclick behavior in Twitter and for that reason I stopped advertising there.
Unlike Twitter, however, LinkedIn lets you work around this. They offer a "lead gen" campaign type, which requires two clicks (one on the ad, and one more on the "submit form" button) and sharing of contact information before the advertiser is charged. I've still seen funky results from this--such as users saying they don't recall submitting any form--but in much fewer cases than with simple image ads.
Today, when I run LinkedIn campaigns, it is almost always with lead gen ads. The results are far better than this anecdotal post suggests. Some issues still come up, and I've found that attempting to troubleshoot them leads to a better outcome for the business than dismissing the entire ad platform.
[0] https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/ [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/#3
This is especially true in a mobile browser. The website is incredibly slow and borderline unusable on a mobile phone.
I think the title should be "Someone has a bad experience marketing on LinkedIn, gets frustrated, and assumes LinkedIn is to blame".
I don’t even considering analyzing a campaign with less than 50k impressions, and I won’t look at a variable if it’s under 10k. Realistically I want a few hundred thousand impressions before trying to make big claims about fraud.
Just getting a meeting with a decision maker at a med-large company could take a whole team months. I don't envy their jobs.
I’ve never actually worked in a role like that, but have had clients move from abm to general b2b marketing.