Last week LinkedIn came out of nowhere to announce a revamped interface for their horribly out-of-date ad interface. For a company as large as LinkedIn the self-serve platform has always been a disappointment, so this is a big deal for them.
What You Get
From the LinkedIn announcement:
- Campaign search, so you can easily find the campaigns you’re looking for
- Dynamic visual reporting that re-calculates and displays only data that satisfies your search or filter settings
- A detailed breakout of social actions related to your Sponsored Updates campaigns, including Likes, Shares, Comments, and Follows
- Audience insights that enable you to see a detailed view of the demographic categories of LinkedIn members clicking on your ads, available at the account, campaign, and creative level
- Campaign start date, which now allows you to schedule your campaigns to launch in the future
- The ability to post rich media (e.g. image files, documents) for Direct Sponsored Content, so you can more easily test and optimize engaging images in your Sponsored Updates campaigns
- An account overview page that makes it easier to locate and access multiple advertising accounts
That’s pretty awesome and you can get lots of screenshots over at the aimClear blog.
However, I did notice something that didn’t get mentioned and deserves it.
Archive Campaigns
That’s right, you can archive campaigns with this little guy:
That helps clean up your main dashboard and you can still view those archived campaigns by looking in this handy dropdown:
This little housekeeping feature is awesome for keeping the important stuff right in front of you and effectively filing away older campaigns to the file cabinet so they’re not cluttering up your desk.
What They Missed
As nice as this is, LinkedIn missed the most obvious improvement: a bulk editing tool. I asked for it in July of 2013 and again as my Christmas wish of 2013, but alas this didn’t address it. Even if all you could do was download your campaigns into Excel, make changes, and upload the new CSV it would be a big improvement. Actually, I have a hard time believing that this doesn’t already exist internally, but for some reason they won’t let advertisers use it. So for now we’ll gladly take the improvement and cross our fingers it portends more to come.
