Creating a killer marketing campaign on LinkedIn, either by yourself or through a LinkedIn ads agency, is only half of the battle.

Measuring the performance of your campaigns and LinkedIn ads benchmarks for each metrics is crucial to make sure they’re on track in performing as they should, and subsequently, will be bringing in a decent return-on-investment (ROI).

Case Study: How We Helped a Security Analytics Software Company Generate 42% More SQLs Using LinkedIn Ads

1 – Return-on-Investment Metrics

LinkedIn provides its own native metric system for measuring how well your ads are performing in terms of garnering a ROI and making good strategic decisions going forward. LinkedIn’s ROI metrics include:

– Cost per thousand Impressions

– Conversion rate

– Cost per lead

– Number of leads generated

– Ad spend

– Campaign spend (Series of ads)

– Cost Per Click (CPC)

Let’s break these metrics down to fully understand how they function and how they can help support you and your campaign:

Cost per thousand Impressions

Cost per thousand impressions, otherwise known as CPM (cost per mille), are the total amount of monies spent per thousand ad impressions (engagements).

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate on LinkedIn shows you how many conversions have been achieved as a result of your campaign.

Cost per lead

Cost per lead (CPL) is the total monies spent on generating a warm lead via your LinkedIn campaign.

Number of leads generated

This refers to the calculation of how many leads you’re generating in total from a LinkedIn ad campaign.

It is one of the most important metrics, as the overall goal of any marketer is to generate as many leads as possible.

Ad spend

This is fairly self-explanatory, but it is the overall figure accrued on your campaign (from start to finish/present).

Many marketers on LinkedIn run multiple ads at any given time, which further drums in the importance of keeping an eye on your metrics and measuring your ROI.

Campaign spend

Just to slightly confuse the matter, but your campaign spend is the total funds spent on various different LinkedIn ads, which usually run simultaneously and come as a bundle for a specific ad campaign on LinkedIn.

CPC (cost per click)

CPC ad metrics show you the specific amount you spend to create one ad click on your ad campaign/s. This figure varies depending on the objective you selected when setting up your campaign. This will give you an idea of how your ad is performing in terms of how many leads are clicking on it.

Conversions

Again, self-explanatory, but this metric is the specific conversion event/engagement you have set up within your campaign (e.g.: ‘Download our eBook’, ‘Sign Up’, ‘Purchase our X/Y/Z’, etc).

If the end goal is to send the lead to your website to be converted there – no problem. LinkedIn will allow you to install a pixel on your website to monitor the conversions that take place there.

Case Study: How We Helped Kodo Survey to Generate 167% More Leads in 3 Months Using LinkedIn Ads

Cost per acquisition

CPA (cost per acquisition) looks at the cost of acquiring a lead. As LinkedIn works a little differently in terms of ad metrics, this generally means the overall spend of your ad budget. It is calculated by dividing the number of leads acquired by the money spent on ads.

2 – Engagement Metrics

If you want to step away from monitoring the bigger picture (your ROI) and just focus on your ad’s engagement metrics – no problem. Here are the LinkedIn metrics that help you keep tabs on your campaign’s engagement success:

– Campaign Engagement

– Campaign Engagement Rate

– Video Engagement Metrics

– Clicks

– Click Through Rate (CTR)

– Number of Likes

– Comments

– Shares

Campaign engagement

This is the combined number of ad clicks, comments, reactions, , and shares across campaigns, which is designed to give you a full insight into how your campaign is getting the maximum engagement from your target audience.

Campaign engagement rate

Engagement means the impressions (reactions) that your audience provides on your campaign’s content and will give you a total of impressions achieved at any given time during which your ad is live on LinkedIn and being interacted with. It can also provide a percentage of your clickthrough rate, which you can compare with the number of clicks your ad is receiving.

Video engagement metrics

Many LinkedIn marketers are using videos on the channel as a lucrative form of advertising, so if you choose to do so too, you have two metrics to monitor here: video views and video completion. The former sheds light on how many times your video was clicked on – which doesn’t necessarily mean the full content was consumed by a lead. This is where video completion metrics come in use. These will provide insight not only on how users engage with your video, but also at what point most of them tend to stop watching (click away), which can help you improve your future ads.

Clicks

Ad clicks can be one of the most crucial metrics to monitor on LinkedIn because it shows you how many audience members are clicking on your ad, thus showing whether your campaign is performing as you hope.

CTR (click through rate)

Click through rate on LinkedIn shows you the ad clicks in conjunction with the total number of impressions, which are then calculated in terms of percentages. This can be more enlightening than just relying on ad click metrics.

Number of likes

As the title suggests, this gives an indication of how many likes your ad is receiving in real-time. Although a ‘like’ doesn’t necessarily mean a conversion, it can give you an idea of whether your ad’s content is good or not, which again, can be useful for future content creation.

Number of comments

Similar to the above, this totals the amount of comments your ad is receiving. Paying attention to what’s being said in the comments can also be priceless feedback. This is generally only a useful metric when you’ve got multiple campaigns live on LinkedIn.

Number of shares

Sharing is important because it further spreads the word of your ad without you having to do anything, thus heightening its exposure.

This metric provides insight on who is sharing, giving a clue as to who is finding your content useful (and who thinks it’ll be useful to their own followers on LinkedIn).

LinkedIn Ad Frequency?

Ad frequency on LinkedIn is the total number of times your ad campaign is seen by a unique user. It is calculated by dividing your total number of ad impressions by your total ad reach.

Page views

This metric shows the number of times your company page is clicked on via your campaign. This is shown even if they are visiting for a second time during the campaign’s span. Unique visitors, however, will only count a user/view once, regardless of how many times they visit your page.

3 – Brand Awareness Metrics

New followers

This is naturally an important metric to use when building your brand’s reputation or online presence is the objective behind your campaign. This not only shows you how good your ad’s content is, but whether or not it is delivering the message correctly and showing your company in the right light.

Please note: it is worth being aware that new followers aren’t always the result of your ad.

Ad impressions

This metric serves to show you how many times your ad is displayed on your audiences’ LinkedIn feed. If you’re not happy with the amount of times it is being shown, you will need to increase your ad budget.

Conclusion

Metrics matter.

When running a campaign on LinkedIn, it would be very foolish not to take advantage of the ample metric options the channel provides – all of which can help you see how well your ad is performing at any given time and can provide priceless information that will help you shape and improve future campaigns

If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through LinkedIn advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.

The 18 Most Important LinkedIn Ads Metrics for Measuring ROI