Advertising on Facebook these days has become a fairly pointless exercise with any statements just being more noise on a cacophonous background. Unfortunately, while LinkedIn seems like a better place to spend my hard earned advertising dollars, their platform is in dire need of development work. It seems like not only have they done very little testing, they are also running a highly unstable system with little or no means for users to feedback problems to their developers – below are my experiences so far.
Managing Advertising
Every time I go in to advertising section of my LinkedIn account I am gleefully told:
“Your account is currently on hold. Please edit your billing details by entering a valid credit card.”
Little do they (LinkedIn) know the gauntlet of errors, timed out pages and random redirection I’ve had to deal with in my quest to give them my money.
Attempting To Add A Credit Card
When I attempted to add my Caribbean credit card to the account, it repeatedly failed – I can copy with that but for the love of god please fix your payment form so that all information isn’t lost every single time your worthless system kicks up an error!
I had to re-enter my credit card number, expiry date and security code over and over. On the occasions when the script timed out (or randomly made me login again), I had to renter everything – this happened many, many times.
Attempting To Add A Debit Card
I decided to do treat LinkedIn with kid gloves as clearly they aren’t ready to accept payments from non-mainstream locations so I resorted to my UK current account debit card – you can’t get much more plain and simple.
Please enter a valid VAT number.
Despite my copying our VAT number from the certificate sent by the HMRC, it seems that LinkedIn knows better (than the organisation that issues VAT numbers) and my VAT number is incorrect. Again, all the other form details were lost when giving me this error.
Unhelpful Random Errors
After finally getting LinkedIn to accept a bank card a few weeks ago, I ran a trial advert and all appeared well. Today I wanted to re-start this on a more long term bases – I really though the worst was behind me but alas every time I tried to re-enable my campaign I was shown an almost blank screen with this rather unhelpful titbit in the corner:
