When marketing managers having in-depth knowledge of digital advertising try out LinkedIn ads creation, the first thing they need to understand is how to analyse LinkedIn campaigns. Measuring the LinkedIn ads campaign is key for marketers to get valuable insights needed for the business to thrive.
For instance, after creating ads, you can generate reports using the Campaign Manager dashboard. Like Google analytics, it shows all the ad performance data in a performance chart and allows tracking key metrics of LinkedIn ads like click-through rate, cost per click, impressions, conversions, leads, cost per impression, cost per conversion, and cost per lead.
Improving ad performance
You can also track LinkedIn ad campaigns with different audience demographics. If you’ve been running LinkedIn ads for a while but with lacklustre results, it’s high time to focus primarily on what will be bringing in a significant return on investment. Luckily, that’s what we’ll be covering in this post. Besides that, the extent to which you’re able to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns determines the quality of your insights, the effectiveness of your optimisation strategy, and the clarity of your results.
A well-defined buyer persona is crucial from the beginning
Marketers’ prime aim is to meet the audience’s requirements profitably. When you put a range of interests, ages, and experiences to a customer, you effectively illuminate their values and can clearly understand what they need and expect from your offering.
Furthermore, creating well-defined buyer personas helps in analysing trends, patterns, similarities, and behaviours among the target audience. By creating prospect-oriented LinkedIn ad campaigns, you show the customers that you know their purchasing pains intimately, encouraging them to interact with your business more.
Now, first, analyse the CTR (Click-Through Rate)
CTR depends on the campaign’s objective. For instance, sometimes the CTR will be lower for brand awareness campaign and higher for traffic campaigns. It defines how interesting a campaign is. If the CTR is high, it means people are finding the campaign compelling enough to click. When the CTR is low, it indicates that you may be targeting the wrong audience or have a dull ad campaign.
Furthermore, it’s also important to examine the CTR in the LinkedIn campaign manager to understand if the expected audience is actually interested in the ads. For instance, Entry-level employees can certainly contribute to a higher overall CTR on LinkedIn ads. Including them in your target audience can help increase your overall engagement and potentially lead to more conversions.
Make sure audience and ad content match
However, if your goal is to reach board members or other high-level executives, including entry-level employees in your LinkedIn ads may not be as effective. These individuals may not have the decision-making power or budget authority to make purchasing decisions for their organisation. Instead, it may be more effective to target individuals with more seniority or decision-making power within their company.
Moreover, according to LinkedIn’s internal data, the average CTR for LinkedIn-sponsored content on the platform is around 0.5%. This may seem relatively low compared to other advertising platforms, but it’s important to note that LinkedIn’s audience is highly specialised and often harder to reach through other channels.
Second, Measure the CPM
The insight stage’s key metric is Cost per thousand or CPM. This is directly related to the campaign’s impressions and thus offers a clear vision of brand awareness. Therefore, it’s being used at the Top Of the Funnel or the Knowledge stage. Average CPM is to a large degree determined by the competition and the difficulty in getting clicks from the selected audience.
Moreover, it’s vital for marketing managers to understand that when bidding CPM, they’re incentivising the network to show the ad, regardless of how well it functions from an engagement standpoint. Remember that CPM bidding usually results in more impressions than CPC, so if you’re in hurry for traffic, CPM can be the most effective approach. Also, the costs per result can be significantly high in this process, however; it has the potential to push volume rapidly.
Next, it’s time to analyse CPC (Cost Per Click)
CPC is a key performance indicator (KPI) that reveals the average amount an advertiser pays for each click on their LinkedIn ad. Analysing CPC data is vital as it sheds light on the efficiency and effectiveness of a LinkedIn ad campaign, allowing marketers to optimise their strategies and allocate budgets wisely.
First and foremost, analysing CPC provides insights into the economic viability of a LinkedIn campaign. By calculating the average CPC, marketers can determine the cost-effectiveness of their ads, as it measures the investment required to drive traffic to a landing page or website. A lower CPC suggests that an advertiser is achieving more clicks at a lower cost, resulting in higher returns on investment (ROI) and greater value for money. On the other hand, a higher CPC may indicate that an ad is underperforming or that the targeting is not optimised, leading to inefficient spending. Overall the average CPC should be at a level that delivers a acceptable cost per client at the end of the funnel.
Measure frequency as well
It’s the number of times the prospect will see an ad from the marketing campaigns in a certain period. Analysing this key metric will help inform marketing managers on how many ads to include in campaign groups, how many LinkedIn ads should run, when to increase or decrease spending, and narrow or widen the audience to increase conversion rate.
Moreover, it’s also essential to choose the right ad format for LinkedIn advertising. For example, sometimes LinkedIn video ads are more effective in increasing brand awareness than simple image-based LinkedIn ads. Each ad format has its unique advantages and disadvantages, and businesses should choose the format that best aligns with their advertising goals and budget. For example, sponsored content is great to increase brand awareness, while sponsored InMail is more effective for driving conversions.
Monitor the difference in ad spending between ads
LinkedIn advertising platform revolves around a budget. Make the monthly ad spend a prime discussion in the marketing endeavours as it’s one of the key performance indicators. When you invest more in marketing, do you experience better success? Which ads in the marketing campaigns are burning the ad spend and which ones are bringing in significant ROI? You might perform a comparison of monthly conversions and monthly ad spending. If there is a significant, positive correlation, it would be wise to increase your budget.
Additionally, when setting up LinkedIn campaigns, it’s advised to include a daily budget. It allows marketers to determine which region, creative, and targeting work best before they go all in. Moreover, never run short multiple campaigns. Because LinkedIn’s CPC is significantly higher than other platforms, marketers sometimes need triple the testing time to get sufficient data and a clear picture and ultimately increase the conversion rate. That’s why we suggest running Linkedin ads campaigns with a small daily budget but can get you at least 15 clicks per day. Marketers can then analyse the results every 10 days and make necessary optimisations on the regions, creatives, or targeting options.
Never forget to analyse LinkedIn ads in terms of campaign demographics
Use professional demographic insights to find and target new audiences. It provide valuable insights about the potential audience, like their professional traits, preferences, dislikes, etc., and helps analyse advertising performance. With such customer-centric data in hand, marketers can produce tailor-made LinkedIn ad, thereby increasing the chances of converting leads into retaining clients.
Moreover, having a holistic view of website visitors helps target the existing customer better, and also identifies multiple opportunities for reaching out to a wide range of qualified leads. To extract more in depth demographic data, Google data studio comes in very handy.
BONUS: Selecting the “Recent or permanent location” to enhance LinkedIn ad performance
Many self-serve marketers make this mistake and potentially push their LinkedIn campaign to audiences that aren’t from the regions they want to target, hence wasting valuable money. When entering the regions or countries you want to target, there’s a box named “Recent or permanent location”, which implies that it’ll target everyone with IP addresses of your selected regions.
For instance, if you’re targeting the U.S. and someone from the UK is working there temporarily during the time the LinkedIn campaign is running, the UK member may view and click the ad too. To avoid this, choose the “Permanent location” to target the audience that actually works at the regions you’ve selected. Click here to learn about the 5 biggest LinkedIn ad mistakes.
Job titles
When it comes to analysing the performance of LinkedIn ad campaigns, an often overlooked but crucial aspect is the analysis of job titles. Analyse if your titles are the right ones or not. The right titles will help your ad campaigns scale and will significantly increase CTR whereas; misleading titles will lead to poor ad campaign performance and pose a significant risk to future ad campaigns as well.
Moreover, LinkedIn allows advertisers to target their ads based on job titles, allowing them to reach specific professional audiences. By analysing the job titles of the users who clicked on or interacted with the ads, marketers can assess the accuracy and effectiveness of their targeting. This analysis can reveal if the ad campaign is reaching the intended audience or if adjustments are needed to align the targeting with the desired job titles or professional roles.
Furthermore, analysing job titles can provide insights into the performance of the ad campaign in different industries or sectors. Job titles can vary significantly across industries, and analysing which job titles are generating more clicks or conversions can reveal which industries or sectors are responding well to the ad campaign. This information can help marketers identify the most lucrative segments and optimise their ad campaigns accordingly, by allocating more budget or resources to the industries or sectors that are performing well.
Industry
Ensure that your ad campaigns are targeting the right industry or else the damage will start from the lead generation and then will spread to the entire business. The lead gen forms that don’t generate leads and marketers who don’t get responses because of wrong data analysis are two symptoms that are wrong industry has been targeted.
However, it may also be because of having the right industry but addressing the wrong issue. Therefore, ask yourself these questions to ensure you’ve targeted the right industry:
- Is your messaging relevant to the target industry?
- How many attempts have you made to generate desired responses?
- Is your message about you, or them?
- Are you getting unqualified leads?
- Are you getting more visitors than actual customers?
These questions will help you understand whether you’ve targeted the right or wrong industry and will help you optimize LinkedIn ad performance. After targeting the right industry, ensure to set regular audits to determine how the campaign is performing and whether or not needs some alterations.
Seniority
Seniority defines the influence of a person’s current role in any organisation, which is determined by their job title. Targeting by seniority is an effective way to connect with those having influence over a purchasing decision. Ensure that you’re using the job seniority filter in the campaigns correctly or else you’ll be lowering the chances of getting the best possible potential clients. Utilising the seniority levels wisely can boost the LinkedIn campaign performance.
Lastly, make use of exclusion and inclusion functions
With the vast number of users and content available on LinkedIn, data analysis has become challenging to ensure that your LinkedIn ads are being seen by the right people at the right time. This is where the exclude and include functions on LinkedIn can be useful.
The exclude function allows advertisers to exclude specific groups of people from seeing their LinkedIn ads, while the include function does the opposite, allowing advertisers to target specific groups. By using these functions, marketers can control who sees their LinkedIn ads, ensuring that they are reaching the right people and not wasting their budget on impressions that are unlikely to convert into leads/sales or even contribute to improving the ad performance.
One common scenario where the exclude function can be useful for LinkedIn ads is when there are too many impressions in one category. For example, if a LinkedIn ad is being shown to a large number of people who are not likely to be interested in their offering, it can lead to a high number of impressions but low engagement rates. This can result in a wasted budget and a lower return on investment (ROI) for the advertiser.
To avoid this, marketers can use the exclude function to exclude specific groups of people who are unlikely to be interested in their offering. For example, if an advertiser is targeting IT professionals, they may want to exclude people who work in finance or marketing, as they are less likely to be interested in the advertiser’s IT offering. This can help ensure that the LinkedIn ads are only shown to people who are more likely to engage with it and potentially convert it into leads or sales.
Don’t forget to use the include function!
On the other hand, the include function can be useful when there are not enough impressions in a particular category. For example, if an advertiser is targeting a specific niche market, they may find that there are not enough people within that category to generate sufficient impressions. In this case, the include function can be used to get all the data to expand the audience who may be interested in the offering but aren’t within the original category.
For example, if an advertiser is targeting veterinarians and is not generating enough impressions, they could use the include function to include people who have an interest in animals or who have visited animal-related websites. This can help expand the audience and generate more impressions without sacrificing relevance or targeting.
Never neglect conversion tracking
Besides, to track conversions, harness the power of LinkedIn conversion tracking. It provides insights into view-through and post-click conversions of LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Furthermore, conversion tracking enables businesses to make informed decisions about their marketing budget, audience targeting, and ad placement to achieve the best possible ROI. In addition, conversion tracking provides valuable insights into user behaviour, allowing marketing managers to refine their marketing strategies, improve their website’s user experience, and enhance their ads performance and future campaigns.
Don’t underestimate your competitors
It’s essential to monitor your competition. Analysing your competitors’ advertising campaigns can help you identify areas where you can improve your own advertising campaign. You can also use their campaign data to refine your targeting and messaging to gain a competitive edge.
How often should you evaluate LinkedIn ads?
Evaluating your LinkedIn ad campaign performance regularly is crucial to ensure that your efforts are effective in achieving your marketing goals. The frequency of evaluation depends on the duration of the campaign, the level of activity, and the nature of the campaign.
However, as a general rule, it is recommended to evaluate your LinkedIn ads and the marketing budget on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. This allows you to keep track of the marketing performance, identify any issues or opportunities for improvement, and make necessary adjustments in real time.
Running ads on LinkedIn is beneficial no matter what the company size is!
The LinkedIn campaign is a powerful tool for marketers to grow a business of all sizes. 97% of b2b marketers claim that they use LinkedIn for content marketing. Running a successful LinkedIn ad campaign requires more than just setting up ads and waiting for the conversions to roll in.
Now that you understand how to analyse LinkedIn campaigns, it’s time to reach a professional audience, focus on a particular industry, and significantly increase the conversion rate. However, whether LinkedIn campaigns are worth it will depend entirely on the target audience and specific business goals.
The LinkedIn user base is composed of decision-makers and business professionals. If your target audience isn’t one of them, it may not be worth investing money and time on LinkedIn ads.
Analyse, Test, Optimise, Repeat!
When it comes to running a successful LinkedIn advertising campaign, analysing performance from day one is crucial. By closely monitoring the performance of your ads, you can quickly identify what is and isn’t working and make necessary adjustments to optimise your campaign. As you monitor your campaign, be sure to exclude anything that strays far from your target audience.
Moreover, don’t blind yourself to titles or seniority and ensure to get the full picture, and remember, sometimes you don’t get it right on the first attempt.
