At LinkedIn, we’re passionate about helping marketers prove and improve the impact of their campaigns. That’s why we’ve put together this 101 primer on LinkedIn Ads measurement and optimization.
It’s critical to justify and maximize your marketing investments in the top destination for B2B content and conversations. The Content Marketing Institute's 2024 report revealed that 84% of B2B marketers found LinkedIn to be most valuable for their social media efforts, with 72% reporting an increase in their LinkedIn usage over the past year.
Strong practices around measurement and optimization will help your brand differentiate from the pack, and nailing down the fundamentals is simple. Read on to learn how you can use LinkedIn Ads to drive great campaign outcomes and see the results clearly.
Start with Clear Goals and Meaningful Metrics
The best-performing campaigns start with a clear end-goal in mind. Identify the goals for your unique campaign and the metrics you will use to measure progress toward them. These goals and metrics will drive every aspect of your campaign that follows, from the creative to the calls to action to the bidding strategy.
LinkedIn utilizes objective-based advertising, which allows B2B marketers to create full-funnel campaigns by selecting a goal that best represents their advertising needs. These objectives fall into three categories: awareness at the top of the sales funnel, consideration at the middle and conversions at the bottom.
Each of these campaign types is trying to achieve different objectives, so your key performance indicators (KPIs) will need to align with those objectives. These are a few of the most pertinent metrics for each objective:
Awareness (upper funnel)
- Branded search. In the days and weeks after launching your campaign, have you seen an increase in searches featuring your brand? Such an increase would indicate raised awareness of your brand.
- Impressions: Are more LinkedIn members seeing your posts? Are they appearing in the right audience’s feeds?
- LinkedIn follows. Are more LinkedIn members following your Page?
Consideration (middle funnel)
- Website and referral traffic lift. Use your website analytics tools to determine if you are receiving an increase in traffic to your website from LinkedIn.
- Page engagement. Look at page views for targeted pages, but also pages per visit and time on site. Is your content inspiring people to dig deeper into your website?
- Post engagement: Who is engaging with your LinkedIn posts? Are they liking, sharing, or commenting? Do they go on to look at your Page or interact with any of your other posts?
- Subscriber lift. Are more people opting-in to your email newsletter or subscribing to your blog?
Conversions (lower funnel)
- Website conversions. Are your ads on LinkedIn drawing relevant prospects who are not just visiting your website but also filling out forms, sharing their email addresses and becoming leads?
- InMail response rate: Have you seen an uptick in the number of prospects who are responding to your sales team's outreach on LinkedIn?
- Growth in qualified leads. Are your ads attracting people who have influence or budget authority (or both) in the purchase of your solution?
- Cost per lead. Are the ads attracting sufficient numbers of quality leads to bring down your overall CPL?
Of course, these are only a few examples of the kind of metrics you should track for each of your campaign objectives. For much more information on optimizing your metric tracking and reporting, check out the LinkedIn Marketing Labs training on Reporting and Analytics for LinkedIn Ads.
Track Performance for LinkedIn Ads
With clear goals documented and metrics in place, you can launch your campaigns and begin monitoring performance. We recommend running multiple variations of an ad at the same time, to test which version performs best and optimize. To gauge how well your ads are doing, it’s important to track them both on LinkedIn and on your site.
Keep an eye on your LinkedIn Campaign Manager dashboard. You will have access to your LinkedIn ads’ total impressions and clicks. For Sponsored Content, you will also see your engagement rate, which tracks clicks, shares, and comments.
For off-site performance, make the URLs in your ads unique. That way it’s easy to attribute the source of traffic to your target pages. Make the tracking codes different for each variation on your campaign to see which campaign best achieves your goals.
For example, you may find one ad may get fewer clicks from LinkedIn, but a high percentage of those who click complete your offer and have a shorter cycle to purchase. With trackable URLs, you will have a more complete picture of each ad variation’s performance. You can also import your conversion data directly to Campaign Manager to ensure you can use your offline data to inform future campaigns on LinkedIn seamlessly. You can now also use Website Actions to measure key off-site results from your ads and set up retargeting campaigns.
For more information on how to track and understand your campaign performance, see LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ best practice guides on analyzing your campaign performance and tracking online conversions and leads from your ads.
Optimize and Improve Results with LinkedIn Ads
The way LinkedIn members engage with your ads is part of the algorithm that determines which ad wins an auction. If your ads historically have a higher CTR, you get a boost; that means you can win an auction without being the highest bidder. So it’s important to keep optimizing.
Here’s what to do:
1. Run multiple variations of each ad, with one variable changed (this tactic is known as A/B testing).
2. Focus your budget on your top performers, and cut spend on low performers.
3. Use the data generated to improve each round of ads.
4. For Sponsored Content, use Direct Sponsored Content to test variations without oversaturating your LinkedIn Page.
This primer is just the start. Get the latest insights into how to optimize your LinkedIn Ads campaigns delivered straight to your inbox – subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads blog.