Home Ad Exchange News LinkedIn Rolls Out An Audience Network To Serve Sponsored Content Off-Platform

LinkedIn Rolls Out An Audience Network To Serve Sponsored Content Off-Platform

SHARE:

LinkedIn on Wednesday launched the LinkedIn Audience Network, a platform enabling advertisers to serve sponsored content on sites and apps beyond its own feed.

These properties include desktop placements on parent Microsoft’s properties like MSN and Outlook.com, as well as on third-party publishers through integrations to exchanges like MoPub, Google’s AdX, Rubicon and Sharethrough.

LinkedIn hopes to increase ad revenue while giving marketers more opportunities to hit reach, ROI and impression goals.

For now, LinkedIn Audience Network is limited to sponsored posts, but down the road could extend to other formats like native video, which don’t support ads at this point.

“Over the past year, our content teams have been investing in improving long-form publishing on our platform with the goal of diversifying content created on LinkedIn versus content we get from third parties,” said Divye Raj Khilnani, group product manager for sponsored content at LinkedIn.

“We’ve always tried to strike a balance when it comes to content – [either] organic or [monetized].”

To ensure traffic quality, LinkedIn curated a whitelist of desktop publishers it deemed brand-safe. For mobile apps, LinkedIn is working with its exchange partners to block certain ad ID categories – like dating and gaming – which aren’t relevant to its B2B audience. 

Although LinkedIn isn’t working with any ad verification partners yet, Khilnani said the company has invested in engineering brand safety measures that only serve ads on quality content.

“There are checks and balances in place to ensure the ads from our advertisers serve in the right context on publisher sites and apps,” he added.

Six thousand advertisers took part in LinkedIn Audience Network’s early beta. Advertisers achieved on average 3% to 13% lift in unique impressions served, with up to an 80% increase in unique clicks.

Some advertisers saw up to four times higher engagement for ads served via the LinkedIn Audience Network versus not.

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

Although LinkedIn has flirted with off-platform ad serving through its Bizo acquisition and products like Lead Accelerator, that solution was sunsetted to prioritize sponsored products.

“When we bought Bizo, we got expertise and relationships in the ad exchange and ad network business, but that was more of a starting point to influence our strategy,” Khilnani said. “We wanted to think about [audience network] with a fresh perspective around where the industry is going – which is mobile and native.

Must Read

Uber Launches A Platform-Specific Attention Metric With Adelaide And Kantar

Uber Advertising, in partnership with Adelaide and Kantar, launched a first-of-its-type custom attention metric score for its platform advertisers.

Google Shakes Off Its Troubles And Outperforms On Revenue Yet Again

Alphabet reported on Wednesday that its total Q3 revenue was $102.3 billion, up 16% year over year, while net profit increased by a third to $35 billion.

Olivia Kory, Haus (Photo credit: Sean T. Smith)

For Meta Marketers, Automation Isn’t Always The Advantage (But It’s Complicated)

Meta says “trust the machine” – but marketers are finding out that automated ad platforms, including Advantage+, don’t always know best.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Header Bidding Rapper (Wrapper!)

Prebid.org Is At A Crossroads, And Must Now Decide Whose Interests It Serves

Prebid’s future is up for grabs as the open-source project grows apart from the IAB Tech Lab, the industry’s self-appointed standards authority.

Rest In Privacy, Sandbox

Last week, after nearly six years of development and delays, Google officially retired its Privacy Sandbox.
Which means it’s time for a memorial service.

AWS Launches A Cloud Infrastructure Service For Ad Tech

AWS RTB Fabric offers ad tech platforms more streamlined integrations with ecosystem and infrastructure partners, allegedly lower latency compared to the public internet and discounts on data transfers.