Hunting Vampires on LinkedIn
Certain organisations are drinking your LinkedIn B2B advertising budgets dry, without any likelihood of ever buying your products or services. Find out who the biggest ‘vampires’ are, and what you can do to stop wasting your money advertising to them, and instead profile your ideal customers so you can run more targeted marketing campaigns.
Does this sound familiar?
As a B2B marketer responsible for social media advertising, the worry about whether your spend will translate into high-quality leads (and ultimately sales) is pretty constant. Even a campaign getting lots of impressions and clicks may not result in the quality of leads or revenue you were hoping for, and it’s often hard to know why.
And of course, this results in the bigger fear that if you can’t deliver tangible value, you and your team get marginalised, have your budgets cut, and get less time to spend on the creative, fulfilling work all of us B2B marketers want to be doing.
Trust us when we say we’ve been there, and know these feelings all too well!
But what can you do to address these challenges? How can you ensure you’re delivering high ROI and meaningful value to your businesses, while sleeping easier at night?
Introducing vampires
To improve returns on your LinkedIn ad spend, and boost your reputation within your company, a good place to begin is to stop advertising to organisations that are likely to click on your ads, but extremely unlikely to buy your products or services. These organisations are what we call vampires, because they drink your LinkedIn ad budget dry.
Who are the vampires on LinkedIn?
To help you stop wasting your budgets on these vampire organisations, we did some research using Adzact data to identify who they are. And there were three key findings:
Draculas: There are some big, super-vampires whose employees consistently consume large portions of organisations’ LinkedIn advertising budgets, despite never becoming customers. These come up time and again, pretty much regardless of the sector you operate in. They’re generally very large, well-known corporations. We call them Draculas.
Smaller vampires: There’s a long tail of smaller vampires, which together account for a further significant drain on B2B marketing budgets.
Demons: As well as being affected by Draculas and smaller vampires, each organisation will have its own unique set of demons Let’s look at each of these findings in more detail, and reveal 50 of the biggest Draculas. We’ll then show you why this vampire problem exists, and what you can start doing about it today.
170K
Impressions
34M
Companies
23
Months
What we analysed
Our dataset was made up of B2B ads that resulted in more than 34 million impressions, and almost 170,000 clicks, from 23 companies over a 12-month period. These businesses operate in a range of industries, including technology, data and analytics, financial services, professional services, recruitment, performance management, real estate, and education.
All 23 businesses advertise on LinkedIn, targeting UK companies across a variety of sectors, and have B2B revenues ranging from £5M to £200M.
For each company, we looked at which organisations their ads had been served to, and how many impressions and clicks the employees of these businesses had accounted for. We overlayed this with our data on who the advertisers’ customers are, to identify which organisations had cost the advertisers significant amounts of money, but not ultimately bought from them.
We then analysed the vampires’ characteristics, to pick out themes that united them.
Finding #1: Meet the Draculas of LinkedIn advertising
So let’s get to the bit you’ve been waiting for – who are the Draculas? Below, we’ve listed 50 of the biggest, along with the total number of impressions and clicks each Dracula’s employees accounted for across our dataset. And remember this is just 12 months’ worth of data. Many of these Draculas will have been draining businesses’ ad budgets for far longer.
What’s immediately clear is that these are all relatively big organisations, with large numbers of employees, and significant volumes of assets on their balance sheets.
Hello, World!
| Organisation | Number of Impressions | Number of Clicks |
|---|---|---|
| HSBC | 338,193 | 2,177 |
| Accenture | 300,709 | 1,503 |
| Amazon | 260,537 | 1,464 |
| Bayer | 166,208 | 1,355 |
| EY | 372,220 | 1,144 |
| BNP Paribas | 161,399 | 1,129 |
| Barclays | 163,604 | 1,126 |
| Tata Consultancy Services | 170,915 | 1,055 |
| JPMorgan Chase & Co. | 136,864 | 1,041 |
| Standard Chartered Bank | 100,296 | 989 |
| Pfizer | 123,734 | 907 |
| UBS | 113,232 | 750 |
| Citi | 79,664 | 742 |
| IBM | 202,825 | 733 |
| Allianz | 90,463 | 671 |
| Deutsche Bank | 90,813 | 633 |
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | 217,271 | 631 |
| Generali | 74,835 | 622 |
| Cognizant | 88,387 | 574 |
| Capitec | 35,644 | 565 |
| IQVIA | 71,764 | 557 |
| Zurich Insurance | 75,839 | 525 |
| BT Group | 108,002 | 524 |
| American Express | 73,692 | 523 |
| Oracle | 288,798 | 513 |
| European Commission | 88,106 | 507 |
| Bristol Myers Squibb | 31,307 | 498 |
| AbbVie | 49,496 | 478 |
| Nestlé | 68,179 | 474 |
| AIB | 79,698 | 447 |
| J.P. Morgan | 73,125 | 440 |
| PwC | 145,274 | 407 |
| L'Oréal | 69,938 | 406 |
| Meta | 134,421 | 391 |
| Virgin Media O2 | 44,452 | 382 |
| Sainsbury's | 53,130 | 359 |
| Salesforce | 208,210 | 346 |
| Scania Group | 76,765 | 344 |
| Novartis | 67,744 | 332 |
| Philips | 64,192 | 332 |
| Abbott | 68,076 | 332 |
| Investec | 30,435 | 314 |
| KPMG UK | 115,375 | 305 |
| Shell | 52,923 | 299 |
| Eli Lilly and Company | 27,907 | 298 |
| Sky | 51,076 | 295 |
| PepsiCo | 60,269 | 288 |
| Renault Group | 50,254 | 287 |
| Nationwide Building Society | 41,720 | 282 |
| Apple | 45,768 | 270 |
Finding #2: Understanding the smaller (but very significant) vampires
In addition to the big Draculas, our research found a significant long tail of other vampires. When put together, these organisations were responsible for consuming a further big proportion of our advertisers’ budgets. To give you a sense of the scale, the next 300 organisations in the list accounted for over 37,000 clicks between them.
Looking at the characteristics of the smaller vampires in this long tail, we found that compared to organisations that did buy from our advertisers, they tended to have:
A higher click-through rate (0.59% compared to 0.38%), indicating that it’s harder to engage those who do ultimately buy your product or service
Fewer assets (£51M compared to £397M), indicating that they’re generally smaller organisations
Been established for less time (23 years compared to 28 years)
Finding #3: Know your Demons
The third takeaway is that every advertiser on LinkedIn has its own unique set of demons, which also consume large proportions of their ad budgets, despite being very unlikely to buy.
We’ll discuss how you can identify your own demons shortly. But before we do, it’s essential to understand why this vampire situation exists. Once you do, you’ll be able to equip yourself and your team to minimise the effect of vampires, and thereby increase the quality of leads you’re providing to your sales team.
What is the Vampire Problem?
Most digital advertising platforms used by B2B marketers are built for the B2C world. This includes Facebook, Google, and yes, even LinkedIn, which at its heart is a (very good) B2C recruitment platform.
In B2C advertising, pretty much any human internet user is a potential buyer of your product or service. Consequently, it makes sense that B2C ad platforms focus on getting your message in front of as many people as possible, and then getting those individuals onto your website to buy the product. In this environment, impressions and clicks are generally a good measure of ad or campaign success.
B2B is different, because there’s massive variability in the value of a click. There are large numbers of employees in both good-fit and poor-fit organisations that can click on your ads, but who cannot influence a purchasing decision, no matter how much they may want to. In addition, a company will generally only buy your product or service once, regardless of whether they have one employee or 100,000. There isn’t the linear relationship between the number of people you can advertise to and the number of potential customers.
As a result, impressions and clicks alone aren’t a great measure of B2B ad campaign success. And yet, they’re the metrics that B2B advertisers are traditionally working with – and they’re what most ad platforms seek to maximise. This is a massive contributor to the vampire problem, because serving ads to these organisations pushes up impressions and clicks, which is in the interests of the platform provider, given you’ll be paying per impression or click.
To help tackle the vampire challenge, B2B marketers are now looking for smarter ways to target their ads, and better ways of measuring campaign success.
To increase the impact of your paid social campaigns, you first need to improve the way you’re measuring. Rather than solely focusing on impressions and clicks, and associated metrics such as cost per click, more meaningful measures include:
Click% – The number of organisations with at least one click, divided by the total number of unique organisations advertised to. This metric accounts for the fact that a company can usually only buy your service once
Buy-through rate – The number of purchases divided by the number of clicks or the number of impressions (choose based on what you’re paying for). Of course, given the long sales cycles in B2B, the main value of this metric is for longer-term historical analysis, rather than to measure campaign success in the short term To increase the impact of your paid social campaigns, you first need to improve the way you’re measuring. Rather than solely focusing on impressions and clicks, and associated metrics such as cost per click, more meaningful measures include:
Click-through rate (CTR) can also be a useful metric, but it relies on you being absolutely sure that the audience you’re advertising to is the right one – or in other words, that these organisations are very likely to want to purchase from you.
And this brings us nicely to the other area where B2B marketers deserve better, which is the ability to target more effectively. By using the more meaningful metrics above, targeting can be transformed, enabling you to focus your advertising on organisations that have a high likelihood of buying from you.
Let’s now look at what you can do (starting today) to tackle the Draculas, vampires and demons that are sucking up your ad budgets.
Practical steps to tackle the vampires and your demons
Step 1: Get rid of the Draculas
You may decide it’s strategically valuable to advertise to large organisations, including those in our Dracula list, even though they’re unlikely to buy from you. However, most B2B marketers’ focus will be on revenue, in which case it makes sense to stop advertising to these businesses immediately.
If this applies to you, the first simple step is to suppress these companies in your campaigns. Go into the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, open up the campaign in question, hit edit, and upload a CSV file containing the company names as a suppression list. This should instantly boost the effectiveness of your campaigns.
But as our research uncovered, there are two other categories of organisation you want to address as well.
Step 2: Tackle the other vampires and your own demons
Having removed the cross-sector super-vampires from the equation, you can now go one better by getting a tailored report for your business on the organisations you’re advertising to, but who are very unlikely to buy – as well as those that are likely to.
Case Study: Software product company
The data on the table comes from an Adzact Audience Audit for a company making tools for software delivery teams in small and mid-size organisations with moderately sized engineering functions. Larger businesses, with bigger engineering teams, are not their target customers and are unlikely to buy from them, because most will have their own bespoke tooling that solves these problems.
And yet, the Adzact Audience Audit data shows that 87% of the organisations they advertised to were a poor fit, and when you look at their list of vampires and demons, they’re all large corporations with mature, in-house tech functions (Amazon, IBM, Cognizant, etc). They’re nowhere near the right fit for this customer, and yet they were all being advertised to and consuming huge amounts of the company’s ad budget.
The Audience Audit insights have since enabled this business to massively increase the effectiveness of its advertising spend by targeting only those organisations that are the right fit.
Adzact offers a free Audience Audit, which gives you audience intelligence including:
Who the smaller vampires are that are draining your budgets
Your specific demons
A list of companies that are likely to buy
The insights you get will enable you to target current and future campaigns far more effectively. And the great news is that you’ll get these actionable insights within a few days, meaning you can quickly start improving the effectiveness of your campaigns – and sleeping better.