LinkedIn Releases Video Ads

Anne Garcia - November 1, 2012

LinkedIn has introduced video ads on their social media advertising platform to target to its 175 million members. The new video ads will appear in the standard 300×250 ad units across the LinkedIn site and will compete with traditional text and image ads for impressions.

The targeted video ads take over the entire ad space when clicked and allow LinkedIn users to click directly through to an advertiser’s site once the video has completed playing. In addition, advertisers can target professionals by job title or function, industry, geography, company size or name as well as other targeting options for these video ads.

Advertisers can create video ads on LinkedIn by using existing YouTube videos. When creating a new video ad, advertisers can enter the YouTube video URL during the ad creation process.

These video ads are available on pay-per-view and pay-per-click models and can be created without having a set media buy. Advertisers can set daily budgets for a campaign as low as ten dollars per day with a minimum cost-per-click of two dollars.

The network says that video ads have a three time higher click through rate than regular ads on the network. The average click through rate on LinkedIn is approximately 0.20%.

Below is a screen shot of how to create a video ad on LinkedIn.