Social Network Advertising & LinkedIn.com Before You Buy In...Read the Warning Label

To: Steve Patrizi, VP of Advertising Sales

After establishing a PPC ad program via LinkedIn at beginning of week, it took less than two days to recognize that the campaign in question has been charged for noticeably more clicks/visitors than we have documented for the same period of time by two different site traffic applications that are installed on the destination website.

One of those meters is google analytics, the other is a tool provided by AMZN. 

After presenting this to LinkedIn advertising "online support", and requesting explanation or otherwise a credit, we were disheartened to receive a canned email reply indicating someone would eventually send another canned reply.   Surprising that you don't have a live chat staffed by people to service paying customers, but I suppose that would be a reach..In the mean time, it would be nice if someone were to actually reach out and address the issue. Would hate to instruct credit card company to dispute the charges...or to be the source of 'unhappy customer testimonial'

Thanks in advance for your reply.





To customer support:
This is the second attempt to contact support re: what definitely appears to be your double-charging us for clicks on recently-implemented PPC program.

After noticing that you have charged us for almost 2x the number of clicks than the number of actual LinkedIn referrals reported by two different traffic logs that we maintain,  we immediately reported this issue and we scaled back our program by half. Six hours later, we noticed you reported 2x the traffic than what our traffic logs reported for the remaining ads that were 'live".

Dear ,

Thank you for your quick response.

We do not provide support for third party web tracking or analytics software. Because of this, we are unable to supply information regarding possible differences.

We are confident in the information provided by reporting tools that monitor the clicks redirected to your site as well as our other reporting tools across the entire LinkedIn platform. At this time, we would encourage you to contact the third party vendor directly for questions related to their software or potential discrepancies in reporting.

Thank you for your continued use of our DirectAds product.

Regards,

Stephanie
LinkedIn Customer Support

Thank you Stephanie…

We didn’t suggest that you do support third party traffic log reporting software.

But the fact is, when two independent applications report exactly the same thing and completely contradict your reports and you respond to customers by insisting  that your charges are accurate, and that your reporting meter works better, or is more accurate than Google Analytics, or Amazon’s vendor tools, any reasonably experienced advertiser would take exception to your reply.

After noticing that you had charged us for almost 2x the number of clicks than the number of actual LinkedIn referrals reported by two different traffic logs that we maintain,  we immediately reported this issue and we scaled back our program by half. Six hours later, we noticed you reported 2x the traffic than what our traffic logs reported for the remaining ads that were 'live".

Needless to say, we will be terminating our ad program with LinkedIn immediately, disputing the charges with our credit card company, and we’ll look forward to sharing this experience within the various LinkedIn groups that we participate in, as well as the various industry blogs that we contribute to on a regular basis.

Best of luck in your career!