Your campaign metrics are the bridge between LinkedIn ads optimization and a profitable return on investment for your marketing endeavors.
When you launch an advertising campaign on LinkedIn, it is imperative you regularly monitor its performance via the platform’s metrics (which can be located in your Campaign Manager). This holds priceless information as to whether or not your ads are performing as you’d hoped. If not, you can go about optimizing your campaign for better results.
If you’re unsure how to analyze your campaigns’ performance, this article reveals the process our Linkedin ads agency follow to analyze the campaign’s perfomance.
1 – Why We Should Be Monitoring Our LinkedIn Ads’ Performance
After putting in the time, effort, and money to build your killer campaign, surely you’d want to see how your audience is engaging with it, no?
This is the main benefit of monitoring your LinkedIn ads’ performance, but there are also a few others. For example, it gives you insightful evidence into what works well and what doesn’t; what your audience responds best to, and what they don’t.
Furthermore, you will begin to notice trends and nuances within the data in terms of seasonality and your audience’s engagement habits. Without this, you’ll be approaching future campaigns blindly and with no ‘secret to success’.
All of this helps you to manage your ads in real-time, as you will be able to use the performance data to tweak and optimize your campaigns while they’re live, as well as use it as a guiding light when you approach future campaigns.
2 – Key Metrics to Monitor
The great thing about LinkedIn is its wide selection of metrics that help you continually optimize your campaigns. These are:
Cost Per Conversion
Cost per conversion has similarities to cost per click (which we’ll get to shortly), with the one notable difference being dividing your total number of conversions by the total cost (instead of clicks).
The purpose of cost per conversion is to monitor how your ad is performing in terms of driving traffic to your site to convert your leads there. How it differs from CPC is that a click doesn’t necessarily mean a conversion, which is generally the end goal for most campaigns that rely on cost per conversion metrics.
Impressions
You may know ‘impressions’ by their other name: ‘views’. This metric speaks to the number of times your ad has been displayed. Each time it is shown to a LinkedIn audience member, it is considered an impression.
While this can be useful insofar as it helps you understand the reach of your ad, it has a downside: a single audience member can receive multiple impressions for the same ad.
Conversions
Next up is conversions, AKA the number of people committing to the end goal of your campaign.
Depending on the type of campaign you opt for, the method of conversion could be the completion of a lead-gen form, purchasing a product/service, downloading an eBook, or whatever you’re using to entice a potential customer to hit your call-to-action (CTA).
Conversion tracking is super important because it’s the defining way of knowing if your marketing goal is being accomplished with your LinkedIn campaign.
Average CPC (Cost Per Click)
This simply allows you to see how many times audience members are clicking on your ad and how much you’re spending per click. It is measured by dividing your total cost by the total number of clicks.
As we mentioned earlier, it is not the most effective way of seeing whether or not your ad is hitting your marketing goal, but it is invaluable in terms of measuring your ad spend. To dive deeper into understanding the value of each click, you would need to look at revenue per click (RPC). As the name suggests, this metric focuses on the average revenue of a click.
Average CPM (Cost Per Impression)
Naturally, this metric works beautifully with the impressions metric. How it differs is it displays the monetary side of your ad’s impressions and is gauged per one thousand impressions.
Each metric is geared towards different campaign objectives, and your CPM is ideal for ads focusing on brand awareness (i.e.: ads that don’t require conversions).
Average CPR (Click-Through Rate)
This metric focuses on the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times it is displayed. The higher the CTR, the more successful your campaign is in terms of performance.
If you’re finding your campaign isn’t crunching in the numbers you’d hoped, this could be because your audience targeting is slightly off-kilter, or the content isn’t enticing enough.
Clicks
Not to be confused with your CTR or average CPC, clicks focus solely on the number of clicks per audience member. This is designed to help you understand what ads are most appealing to these users.
Clicks are the initial touchpoint from your audience and the first line of potential contact, and even if your ads aren’t converting, clicks can tell you whether or not the ad content is appealing to your audience (or not).
3 – How Can I Evaluate My Ads’ Performance?
There are three key ways to make sense of the metrics data you’re receiving from your LinkedIn ads. They are:
Monitor Your Weekly Performance
Don’t fall into the trap of only intermittently checking the performance of your ads. It should be a weekly (or more frequent) habit.
Doing this will give you hard evidence as to what’s working well about your campaign and what (if anything) isn’t. It also helps you navigate the platform’s metrics and understand which are the right ones for each campaign type.
After each performance review, you should then draft a plan of attack as to which areas of the campaign may need optimizing (and how). Once you’ve implemented these edits, you can then use the metrics to see if they are proving to be productive.
Not only that, LinkedIn also provides a weekly campaign optimization checklist to ensure you don’t miss a beat.
Utilize Campaign Demographics
Again, LinkedIn is generous with the tools it offers marketers to make the best of their campaigns, so, as well as the weekly campaign optimization checklist, you can also make use of the features it provides to track and analyze your campaign’s demographics.
The purpose of this is to help you zero in on your target audience. When it comes to audience demographics, quality trumps quantity every time. A high number of impressions, etc., is only valuable if they’re coming from a profitable audience.
Use Campaign Insights
LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager offers you a Campaign Insights feature, which enables you to make the best of your bids and budgets. This includes your Total Budget, Daily Budget, and your Bid.
This is particularly useful for those running multiple campaigns with varying pricing at the same time.
4 – LinkedIn Ads Cost Benchmarks You Need to Know
It is wise to familiarize yourself with the average costs of LinkedIn ads.
Average CPC (Cost Per Click)
The average CPC cost is circa $5.39, which is only sustainable depending on your budget and your campaign objective. This can be particularly useful for marketers whose goal is brand awareness, as it doesn’t focus on conversion or any action beyond an ad click.
Average CPM (Cost Per Impression)
With the average CPM, you’re looking at around $6.37, which may seem high, but take into consideration that you’re paying for interactions from users, not just clicks, so it’s likely you’d actually end up paying less than you would with CPC.
Average CPS (Cost Per Send)
CPS is applicable only to direct mail LinkedIn ads (known as InMail ads) and the average cost is $0.70, which may seem phenomenally cheap, but bear in mind that this charge occurs for every ad that lands in a user’s mailbox – irrespective of whether they respond or even open it.
5 – Optimizing Your LinkedIn Ads: What to Do
Needing to optimize your ads is normal and healthy for achieving the best possible return on investment. Here’s how to go about it:
Look at Location Targeting
If it is applicable to your particular brand, location targeting can be extremely fruitful for LinkedIn marketers. LinkedIn allows you to focus your targeting per country, state, region, city, and county.
Audience Demographics
We touched upon demographics in terms of metrics earlier, but as for campaign optimization, you can tweak your targeting based on certain user attributes. This can be industry, company name, job title, seniority, and more.
This allows for laser-focused targeting that ensures your overall audience is most likely to engage with and hopefully convert via your ad.
Create Buyer Personas
If you’re not doing this already, you need to get on it. As the name suggests, a buyer persona is an outlined expression of what makes up your ideal audience per individual and it is (or should be) based on data and research.
Creating buyer personas helps you with your marketing practices because they enable you to identify who benefits from your products/services, and therefore how to market in a way that appeals to them (i.e.: by homing in on their pain-points and how your product/service can alleviate them).
When you create them, you should be looking at things like interests, demographics, and professional problems (LinkedIn is aimed at B2B users, after all). Because LinkedIn is targeting specific, you should also be looking at job title, location, and company size.
Final Thoughts
LinkedIn is an invaluable tool for B2B marketers but every campaign you create is only as powerful as the data that backs it up.
Once you understand how to navigate LinkedIn’s metrics, as well as which ones you need to focus on for each individual campaign, you can start creating ads that hit your targets every single time.
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.
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