Current bid adjustments on BingAds and Google Adwords made great strides, but if there is one future request which can only materialize by combining the capabilities of BingAds and Linkedin (following the Microsoft acquisition), then that would be a “bid adjustment” based on the job role of the searcher.
The current situation: Role based advertising evolved, but is limited to display advertising on the Linkedin B2B platform as the only credible way to reach specific decision makers. This is a great start, however extending future functionality to search to provide for the needs of people in specific job roles will really solve a pressing need in the industry. This will be more powerful then remarketing or anything else we’ve seen so far.
The benefits of such a solution will be that the advertiser can really zoom in on key decision makers who actually search for a service, whereas the platform will command a premium fee. Most of my clients agree that if a CEO or other key decision maker in an industry searches for a specific term, a bid adjustment of up to 400% will be entirely justified.
In the meantime, you will be pleased to know that at least the display options on Linkedin include email delivery through In-mail, text ads that will target very specific individuals by job role, age, company, company size, location and other targeting criteria – as well as feeds that will use multiple targeting criteria. I am sure that everyone is looking forward to a major breakthrough in search targeting, let’s hope the engineers can work out an awesome solution!