By Krystal Scanlon • July 11, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
LinkedIn is set to join its platform peers by officially rolling out its own AI-powered campaign tool called Accelerate by the end of the year following a period of testing.
A spokesperson for the professional networking app confirmed to Digiday that the team expects to make it “globally available to all advertisers by early fall,” though did not confirm a specific date.
Accelerate, which is one of the team’s early investments into the AI space, was quietly launched in October 2023 to a select number of North American advertisers. Eight months later during the Cannes Lions conference last month, Tom Pepper, senior director of EMEA and LATAM at LinkedIn, told Digiday that Accelerate had already reached 50% global roll out in beta.
What does it do?
Similar to all the other AI-black boxes that have been launched, Accelerate is all about efficiency — in particular cutting down the process of building a LinkedIn campaign from 15 hours to five minutes. The tool recommends an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimizations to reach the right B2B audience. Advertisers can then tweak any aspects of the campaign that they need to before launching.
As Pepper put it, marketers can simply let LinkedIn’s Accelerate do all the [hard] work for them.
“It [Accelerate] will come back within five minutes with a ready-to-go campaign at that moment, advertisers can hit go, and they will have the full targeting capabilities, the creative and the optimization of measurement,” he said. “Even the reports are created at the end, ready to go to their CFO.”
How does it work?
Advertisers simply need to type in the URL for the product they’re advertising. Accelerate will then use AI to analyze the website the marketer shared, their company’s LinkedIn page, and their accounts prior to Linkedin ads, to recommend a campaign, according to the platform’s announcement about the product back in October. Using the customer data, Accelerate then builds creatives and a relevant audience, meaning advertisers can simply adjust copy, images and refine any targeting parameters (such as geography) to their needs.
To make the job even easier, LinkedIn has also integrated Microsoft Designer functionality to the Accelerate product, enabling advertisers to draft creatives and further refine their targeting, such as excluding companies and third-party lists.
One U.S. ad agency that preferred to remain anonymous for this article, has had access to it on behalf of several clients’ accounts since October. However, the team noted that back when it first launched, there were many restrictions, such as only certain objectives and targeting could be used, for example. That, paired with the lite information the team received from their LinkedIn reps meant the agency’s clients didn’t move forward with using it at the time.
“Although LinkedIn has expanded it [in recent months], we’ve not used it for clients because the ones we work with generally have very specific targeting they want to reach on LinkedIn due to how niche the targeting is,” said an ad exec from the agency.
That’s not to say that they won’t ever use it in the future, as the ad exec said that the team is “still very intentional when we recommend tools, such as Accelerate, to our clients.”
“Our customers are seeing great results — with advertisers creating campaigns 15% more efficiently and driving a 52% lower cost per action than with classic campaigns,” Lindsey Edwards, vp of product management at LinkedIn, wrote in a LinkedIn article last month.
Which seems to chime with what Sean Johnston, vp of advertising at Closed Loop has seen so far.
“Accelerate Campaigns far surpassed the lead conversion performance we saw from even our best performing manual audiences for Calendly,” he said. “The Lead Form Completion rate increased over 3X and delivered a 66% cheaper cost per lead (CPL), while the higher conversion rates and more efficient CPLs really convinced me this works.” Though he didn’t share specific figures.
https://digiday.com/?p=549756
