AdWeek: LinkedIn Launches Programmatic Advertising for Display Ads

LinkedIn is beginning to offer advertisers the option to buy display ads programmatically for desktop devices.

Marketers will be able to buy display ads through an open auction or through LinkedIn's Private Auctions, using first- or third-party data along with LinkedIn's targeting of audience segments—such as visitors of the LinkedIn home page—on the professional network.

Testing began in the third quarter last year with tech advertisers for both software and hardware, as well as other industries such as telecoms and financial services.

According to Russell Glass, LinkedIn's head of products, the service is part of a two- to three-year overhaul of the company's ads business in order to simplify and extend advertising on the platform. He said the scale of LinkedIn's professional network across the Internet, combined with a logged-in audience is attractive to business-to-business marketers.

"We don't want to reinvent the wheel," he said in an interview. "We want to build table stakes capabilities into our platform in a way that highlights our differences, but is kind of what marketers have come to expect."

For example, the LinkedIn Account Targeting product launched in March, which allows marketers running native ads to target user profiles based on which companies they're trying to reach.

According to the company's first-quarter 2015 earnings announcement in late April, advertising through LinkedIn Marketing Solutions grew 29 percent year over year to $154 million. Sponsored content now accounts for 56 percent of that total revenue.