The company I'm working for has had great success with facebook ads(as I see many people have) and asked to continue to look for similar opportunities for super targeted advertising. I suggested that we try linked in because of the ability to geo-target as well and focus on age and gender. We go ahead and agree to 30,000 impressions at $16 cpm and put an ad thats worked for us in the past on Google ad words.
30,000 impressions later and $500 bucks lighter I have a total of 10 clicks...
What a giant fucking waste of money.
Are those banner ads? If there's one thing I've learned, it's that no one clicks on banner ads. (feel free to point out counter examples)
If not, consider it from the CPM side. If you were on AdWords and looking to pay 50 cents a click, that's 32 clicks per thousand or a 3.2% click-through rate for a single content ad. I might be wrong, but that's a really freaking high CTR for a content ad, which is effectively what those CPM ads are.
In short, when playing the CPM game, one must have a pretty good idea of what the CTR is on that ad beforehand (a chicken/egg scenario in many cases).
Bit companies pay those rates for more than the CTR, they want to burn a brand into the viewers brain, which pays off in the long run. We are effectively direct marketers - we want action NOW, not in 5 years when the viewer has a warm fuzzy about a brand and buys it. That's why CPC works so well in AM.
Also Linked In is one of the most expensive places for CPM rates. Other sites are lucky to get $15 CPM for the whole page of ads, not just a single ad. LinkedIn just kills it with CPM because of the targeting and audience I guess, getting up to $75 per page from what I've heard.
I looked at CPM ads at another site and they only wanted $6 CPM for an ad -- still high, but targeted at real estate investors, which is what I was after. I still passed, mostly because I res arched how low CTR can be on banner ads.
Be glad, others have paid a lot more than you to learn that lesson.