Analyzing the performance of your LinkedIn ads is crucial for determining the effectiveness of your campaigns and identifying opportunities for optimization. As the world’s largest professional network with over 810 million members, LinkedIn provides a unique platform to connect with your target B2B and B2C audiences.
With a range of paid advertising options on LinkedIn, including Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Text Ads, and Dynamic Ads, having clear analytics and reporting is essential for measuring your LinkedIn ad results. This allows you to calculate your return on investment and make data-driven decisions about where to allocate your LinkedIn ad spend for maximum impact.
Get Familiar with LinkedIn’s Analytics Capabilities
LinkedIn provides robust analytics within your Campaign Manager to evaluate your ad metrics. Some key analytics to examine for each of your LinkedIn ad campaigns include:
- Impressions: The number of times your ad is displayed.
- Clicks: The total clicks your ad receives.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage. Aim for CTRs of 0.5% or higher.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): The average amount you’re charged each time someone clicks your ad. Lower CPCs are preferable.
- Conversions: The number of desired actions, such as ad clicks, content downloads, sign-ups, purchases, etc.
- Conversion rate: Conversions divided by clicks or impressions.
- Cost-per-conversion: Your total ad spend divided by the number of conversions.
- Share of voice: Your impression share as a percentage of the total number of impressions for your target audience.
Beyond these metrics provided within LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you can also integrate third-party analytics platforms like Google Analytics to track engagement, leads, and sales from your LinkedIn ads across devices.
Calculate Your LinkedIn Ad ROI
Figuring out your LinkedIn advertising return on investment (ROI) is key for determining the financial performance of your campaigns. Here is a step-by-step guide to calculating your LinkedIn ad ROI:
- Identify your target LinkedIn ad KPIs based on your campaign objectives, such as cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale, etc.
- Determine the total revenue or value generated from your LinkedIn ad investment. Add up all sales, leads, sign-ups, downloads, or other conversions driven by your ads.
- Add up the total LinkedIn ad spend for your campaigns over your selected time period.
- Use this formula to calculate ROI:
(Revenue – Ad Spend) / Ad Spend = ROI - Aim for a positive ROI, which indicates your LinkedIn ads generated more value than they cost.
Here’s an example ROI calculation:
- Total revenue from LinkedIn ad conversions: $5,000
- Total LinkedIn ad spend: $2,000
- ROI = ($5,000 – $2,000) / $2,000 = 1.5, or 150%
This sample ROI of 150% indicates the LinkedIn ads generated $1.50 for every $1.00 spent. Tracking ROI over time can show you the overall profitability of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns.
Review Conversion Rates
Examining your LinkedIn ad conversion rates helps reveal how effectively your ads are converting target audiences into desired actions. Important conversion rates to analyze include:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Higher CTRs indicate your ad copy, imagery, and targeting is resonating with your audience.
- Landing Page Conversion Rate: The percentage of ad clicks that convert into leads, sign-ups, purchases, etc. on your landing pages.
- Contact Rate: For Sponsored InMail ads, the percentage of messages that lead to contacts back from prospects.
- InMail Acceptance Rate: The rate at which your InMail messages are accepted by recipients.
Benchmark your conversion rates against industry averages. If any of your rates fall short, try A/B testing different ad creatives, offers, landing pages, or audiences to lift your LinkedIn ad conversion rates.
Analyze by Audience, Offer & Ad Type
For a deeper analysis of your LinkedIn advertising results, segment your performance data in Campaign Manager by:
- Audience: Check metrics for each target audience to see which groups respond best to your ads.
- Ad Type and Placement: Review performance by Sponsored Content vs. Text Ads and their placement (desktop vs. mobile, feed vs. right rail, etc.).
- Ad Creative: Compare metrics on different versions of your ad copy, images, calls-to-action, etc. through A/B split testing.
- Offer: Track engagement for different lead magnets, content offers, promotions, etc.
This analysis can reveal optimal audience targeting, ad formats, placements, creatives, and offers to refine your LinkedIn advertising approach.
Monitor Campaign Trends Over Time
The above performance analyses provide a snapshot of your LinkedIn ad results. It’s also important to monitor trends in your metrics over longer time periods to identify optimization opportunities.
Key trends to track include:
- Impression volume and share of voice over weeks and months
- CTR and conversion rates over your campaign history
- Cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion trends
- Sales volume and ROI trajectory
For example, declining cost-per-conversion with rising click-through and conversion rates may indicate your campaign is steadily optimizing. But a downward trend in ROI could signal issues needing troubleshooting with your targeting, creatives, or landing pages.
Regularly reviewing trend lines in your performance data allows you to speed up optimization and maximise your LinkedIn advertising ROI over the long-term.
Leverage LinkedIn’s Attribution Reporting
With so many factors involved in conversions and sales cycles today, understanding the true impact of your LinkedIn ads can be challenging. This is where LinkedIn’s attribution reporting comes in handy.
LinkedIn attribution shows you how your Sponsored Content, Text Ads, and Dynamic Ads influence conversions across devices. It does this by using statistical modelling to assign conversion value based on factors like:
- Time lapsed between ad impression and conversion
- Proximity of the conversion to a click
- Type of conversion (lead vs. purchase, etc.)
Enabling attribution reporting in Campaign Manager provides a more accurate picture of how your LinkedIn advertising ultimately drives revenue. This insight helps you refine budgets, bidding, creative, audiences, and placements for better conversion performance.
Regularly Review Your Reports
To stay on top of your LinkedIn advertising results, be sure to regularly review your key reports including:
- Campaign reports: Monitor overall performance for each campaign.
- Creative reports: Compare metrics for different ad copy and creative.
- Audience reports: Analyze results for each target audience segment.
- Demographics reports: See ad engagement by member age, gender, industry, job role, etc.
Scheduling time every week to check your reports lets you stay nimble, optimizing your LinkedIn ads on an ongoing basis and achieving the greatest impact from your spend.
Conclusion
Analyzing LinkedIn advertising performance takes some time, but is enormously beneficial. By monitoring metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, cost-per-click, ROI, and attribution, you gain insights to consistently enhance your LinkedIn ad targeting, messaging, formats and placements.
Remember to dig into your analytics across different audience segments, ad types, creatives, time periods, and conversion types. Relying on hard data instead of guesswork will empower you to boost LinkedIn ad results and demonstrate a stronger return on your investment.