When marketing managers try out LinkedIn ad creation, the next thing is to understand how to analyze LinkedIn campaigns. Measuring the LinkedIn 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. It allows tracking metrics like click-through rate, cost per click, impressions, conversions, leads, cost per impression, cost per conversion, and cost per lead. You can also track the LinkedIn campaign with different audience demographics. However, it’s essential 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.
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 analyzing trends, patterns, similarities, and behaviors among the target audience. By creating a prospect-oriented LinkedIn campaign, you show the customers that you know their purchasing pains intimately, encouraging them to interact with your business more.
Now, first, analyze the CTR (Click-Through Rate)
CTR depends on the campaign’s objective. For instance, sometimes the CTR will be lower for brand awareness campaigns 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 campaign. Furthermore, it’s also important to examine the CTR to understand if the expected audience is actually interested in the ads. For instance, entry-level employees can boost the CTR overall, but if you’re trying to reach board members, it doesn’t contribute to the campaign.
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. Moreover, it’s vital for marketing managers to understand that when bidding CPM, they’re incentivizing 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 analyze CPC
While CPC is important for LinkedIn advertising, it’s only beneficial when marketers understand how the clicks convert into new business or leads. For example, if someone clicked on your LinkedIn ad doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to buy. Moreover, the average LinkedIn ads’ CPC is $5.26. When bidding CPC, you are transferring the onus of campaign performance to the platform. This implies that you’ll not pay if your ad fails to persuade the audience to click. However, it’s not a charity that the platform provides for the risk that it takes. The ads you run will shortly stop receiving impressions if they’re unsuccessful in receiving clicks.
Besides that, when the ads get significant engagement rates on different platforms, the platform quickly provides discounts on the CPC because the ads are earning them money more often than other marketers. However, LinkedIn isn’t so generous in this regard. Rather than counting on LinkedIn to proactively give discounts, we recommend lowering the bids until you’re at the stage of naturally hitting the daily budget. That’ll produce the cheapest clicks and serve as your discounting mechanism.
Measure frequency as well
It’s the number of times the prospect will see an ad from the campaign in a certain period. Analyzing this metric will help inform marketing managers on how many ads to include in a campaign, how many should run when you would need more, and when to increase or decrease spend and narrow or widen the audience. Moreover, it’s also essential to choose the right ad format for LinkedIn advertising.
Monitor the difference in ad spending between ads
Advertising revolves around a budget. Make the monthly ad spend a prime discussion in the marketing endeavors. When you invest more in marketing, do you experience better success? Which ads in the campaign 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 the 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 too short 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. That’s why we suggest running a campaign with a small daily budget but can get you at least 15 clicks per day. Marketers can then analyze the results every 10 days and make necessary optimizations on the regions, creatives, or targeting options.
Never forget to analyze LinkedIn ads in terms of demographics
Use professional demographic data to find and target new audiences. It allows marketers to draw crucial insights about the potential audience, like their professional traits, preferences, dislikes, etc. With such customer-centric data in hand, marketers can produce tailor-made content, thereby increasing the chances of converting leads into retaining clients. Moreover, having a holistic view of visitors helps target the existing customer better, and also identifies multiple opportunities for reaching out to a wide range of qualified leads.
BONUS: Selecting the “Recent or permanent location”
Many self-serve marketers make this mistake and potentially push their ads 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
Analyze if your titles are the right ones or not. The right titles will help your campaign scale and will significantly increase CTR whereas; misleading titles will lead to poor ad performance.
Industry
Ensure that your campaign is targeting the right industry or else the damage will start from the lead generation and then will spread to the entire business. A lead generation system that doesn’t generate results and marketers who don’t get responses 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. After setting 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 organization, 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.
Lastly, make use of Exclusion and Inclusion functions
By using the exclusion function, marketers can find audiences they want to connect with. It means they spend less time going through endless leads and focus more on the people who’re likely to need their offering. Moreover, this function allows for eliminating searches for irrelevant terms and helps find leads faster. It’s also recommended to use the exclude function if there are too many impressions in one category, or the include function when there aren’t enough.
Conclusion
LinkedIn campaigns are a powerful tool for a marketer to grow a business of all sizes. 97% of b2b marketers claim that they use LinkedIn for content marketing. Now that you understand how to analyze LinkedIn campaigns, it’s time to reach a professional audience, focus on a particular industry, and significantly increase conversion rates. However, whether LinkedIn campaigns are worth it will depend entirely on the target audience and specific business goals. The platform’s 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 in LinkedIn ads. Moreover, don’t blind yourself to titles or seniority and ensure to get the full picture, and sometimes you don’t get it right on the first attempt.
