The 22 Most Important LinkedIn Ads Metrics for Measuring ROI

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).

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.

Pipeline and Revenue Metrics

LinkedIn Campaign Manager now includes Pipeline Amount, Revenue Won, and other custom columns that connect ad performance directly to business outcomes.

For years, connecting ad performance to actual pipeline and revenue meant juggling spreadsheets, CRM exports and third-party attribution tools. These metrics are built right into the platform.

What you can track directly in Campaign Manager:

Pipeline Amount – The total value of opportunities influenced by your campaigns
Revenue Won – Actual closed-won revenue attributed to your ads
Custom conversion values – Define what matters to your business

This means you’re no longer stopping at CTR or lead gen form fills. You can show pipeline influence and revenue contribution without leaving LinkedIn’s reporting interface.

The real value here is that marketing can speak the same language as revenue teams. Instead of reporting “we generated 150 leads,” you can say “we influenced $2.3M in pipeline with a 5:1 ROI.”

To enable these columns, navigate to your Campaign Manager’s performance view and click on “Columns” to customize your view. Make sure your conversion tracking is properly set up with value tracking enabled.

Data Drive Attribution

LinkedIn offers Data-Driven Attribution metrics that use machine learning to allocate credit across multiple ad touchpoints in the buyer’s journey, not just the last click or view.

What makes this different is that it shows the true contribution of each touchpoint rather than giving full credit to the last interaction. For B2B companies with longer sales cycles, this provides a more accurate picture of which campaigns actually influence conversions.

Currently, this metric only appears in the performance chart view, and you might notice lower numbers compared to “Each” or “Last-Touch” attribution models. That’s because it’s distributing credit across all meaningful touchpoints rather than counting every touch equally.

When monitoring this metric, continue tracking your standard conversion metrics for context but use Data-Driven Attribution to understand which campaigns truly drive performance versus those that just happen to be at the end of the journey.

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.

Expert Tip: a CTR below 0.5% is really penalizing your campaigns and reach. With a low CTR your ads are perceived as not relevant for your audience. The result is you’re paying more because when you enter the ad auction with other advertisers due to your poor relevancy, you get higher CPC and also higher cost per reach that limits your reach.

Try new creatives and messaging with different pain point/benefits angles. At least 4 ads per campaign. After a couple of weeks with enough data you should keep the winners and pause the losers.

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).

Average Dwell Time

Average dwell time measures how long users spend looking at your ad before scrolling past. This metric is available under engagement metrics in Campaign Manager and provides insights into whether your creative is capturing attention.

Here’s how to interpret dwell time for single-image ads:

Under 2 seconds: Your ad isn’t resonating with the audience. Either the creative needs work or you’re targeting the wrong people. Time to test new messaging or revisit your targeting parameters.

Between 2-3 seconds: Solid performance. Most well-targeted ads fall into this range. Your audience is engaging with the content at a healthy rate.

Over 3 seconds: You’ve hit the sweet spot of ad/audience fit. Your creative is capturing attention and holding it.

Keep in mind that Thought Leader Ads naturally see much higher dwell times (5+ seconds) due to their format and personal nature.

Expert Tip: Dwell time doesn’t directly correlate with CTR or conversions. You might have an ad with high dwell time but low clicks or vice versa. Use this metric as one signal among many, it tells you if people are stopping to read and not necessarily if they’re ready to act. Think of dwell time as your “attention quality” metric. It helps you understand if your message is interesting enough to stop the scroll even if that interest doesn’t immediately translate to clicks.

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.

Expert Tip: Check your average frequency constantly and if you are equal to or more than 3 for a cold audience it’s probably time to refresh your ads. We don’t keep ads more than 2.5 average frequency in general because banner fatigue is real and drags down your campaign performance.

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 and Reach 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.

Audience Penetration

Audience Penetration shows the percentage of your defined audience that has already seen your ads. This metric is crucial for making smart budget decisions and understanding how much opportunity remains within your selected audience.

Here’s how to use it:

Low penetration (under 20%): it means a large portion of your audience hasn’t been reached yetIncreasing budget and/or improving CTR here will help you reach new people and expand awareness effectively.

Medium penetration (30-50%): You’re reaching a large portion of your audience. Monitor frequency alongside penetration to ensure you’re not overwhelming the same people.

High penetration (over 70%): You’ve reached most of your available audience. Adding more budget here risks over-saturating the same people, driving up frequency and reducing efficiency. This is when you need to refresh creative or explore new audience segments.

Expert Tip: Before increasing any campaign budget, check your Audience Penetration first. It tells you whether scaling spend will actually reach new people or just annoy the ones who’ve already seen your ads. Also, your audience penetration goal should always be 40% or 50%. if your audience penetration is stuck around 20% it’s probably because your poor ads relevancy and CTR penalize you and LinkedIn won’t reach more people to show your ads.

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.