LinkedIn advertising provides advertisers with powerful options for tracking campaign performance and optimizing their strategy. When running LinkedIn ads, marketers can track a wide range of metrics to gain insights into how their ads are performing. Some of the key things that can be tracked with LinkedIn ads include:
Campaign Reach and Frequency
LinkedIn allows advertisers to see how many people their ads have reached, as well as the frequency of exposure per user. This helps provide an understanding of how broadly the campaign is reaching the target audience and the level of repetition in serves. Important metrics include:
- Impressions: The number of times an ad is displayed.
- Reach: The number of unique people who have seen the ad.
- Frequency: How many times on average each user has seen the ad.
Analyzing reach and frequency indicates whether the targeting and budget is effective or needs adjustment. High frequency may indicate the need to expand reach, while low frequency could signify inadequate budget.
Clicks and Clickthrough Rates
The number of clicks an ad receives, and the clickthrough rate, are fundamental indicators of performance. Key metrics include:
- Clicks: The total clicks on the ad creative or call-to-action button.
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): Clicks divided by impressions, showing engagement.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): The average cost for each click.
These metrics demonstrate how appealing and relevant the ads are to the target audience. High clickthrough rates indicate strong messaging and targeting. Analyzing CTR by ad creative or audience segment can optimize targeting.
Engagement and Conversions
LinkedIn ads enable tracking engagement actions and conversions, such as:
- Website visits
- Content downloads
- Lead generation form submissions
- Sales/purchases
- Account creations
- Email list sign-ups
This shows how well the ads convert audiences into valued actions after clicking. Conversion metrics help quantify ROI and optimize ads to improve conversion rates.
Video Metrics
For video ads, LinkedIn provides metrics like:
- Video views: Number of times the video played until 25% completed.
- Completions: Number of times the video played until 100% completed.
- Quartile completion rate: Percentage of times the 25/50/75/100% video quartile was reached.
These metrics demonstrate how captivating the video content is. High completion rates indicate engaging content.
Company and Product Interest
LinkedIn’s pixel allows tracking website visitors from LinkedIn ads and analyzing their company information and product/service interest data. This reveals which companies and products prospects who clicked on the ads work for or are researching.
Retargeting Pools
LinkedIn ads enable creating retargeting pools based on engagement and website visitor actions. For example, create a pool of people who visited a pricing page to re-target with special offers. This allows personalized messaging to people based on their interest.
Account Targeting
LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences feature enables targeting ads to customer accounts a brand already has a relationship with. Advertisers can upload company name lists to target their ads to people who work at those companies.
Audience Analytics
LinkedIn Audience Network allows tracking LinkedIn audience data segments that ads target or reach. It provides aggregate demographic analytics on audience age, gender, industry, job function, seniority, location, interests, skills, and more.
Ad Creative Performance
LinkedIn ad reporting breaks down metrics for each ad creative variation used in campaigns. This enables analysis to determine which messaging, offers, designs, videos, etc. resonate best with each audience to optimize ad creatives.
Ad Costs
LinkedIn provides robust ad cost data, including:
- Impression cost: Average cost per 1,000 impressions.
- Click cost: Average cost per click.
- Conversion cost: Average cost per conversion action.
- ROI: Return-on-ad-spend.
Monitoring cost metrics ensures campaigns stay on budget and calculates tangible return on investment.
Engagement Demographics
LinkedIn’s reporting breaks down engagement and conversions by demographics like job title, company size, industry, job function, and seniority. This enables optimizing targeting and messaging by audience segment.
Attribution
LinkedIn integrates with analytics platforms to attribute downstream website actions and sales to LinkedIn ad clicks and views. This tracks the complete customer journey and conversion path.
Visualizing LinkedIn Ad Metrics
LinkedIn provides advertisers with robust reporting dashboards to visualize campaign metrics. However, additional visualization can help distill insights. Here are some effective ways to visualize LinkedIn ad data:
Reach and Frequency Chart
A bar chart displaying total reach and average frequency side-by-side makes it easy to assess depth of exposure. For example:
Campaign | Reach | Avg. Frequency |
---|---|---|
Campaign 1 | 45,000 | 3 |
Campaign 2 | 110,000 | 5 |
Clickthrough Rate Over Time
Plotting CTR on a line graph over the campaign period visualizes the trend and when it peaked or declined. This identifies optimal times to run ads.
Conversion Rates by Audience Segment
A horizontal bar chart comparing conversion rates by audience segment makes it easy to see which segments are most responsive. For example:
Audience | Conversion Rate |
---|---|
IT Managers | 2.5% |
Software Engineers | 1.2% |
Marketing Managers | 4.3% |
ROI by Ad Creative
A bar chart displaying ROI by ad creative quickly highlights top performing creatives.
Engagement by Company Size
A pie chart breaking down engagement metrics by company size reveals which company sizes ads resonate most with.
Conversion Funnel
Use a funnel chart to visualize the path users take from ad views to conversions, highlighting dropoff rates.
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn advertising provides robust tracking and reporting to help optimize campaigns. Key metrics to analyze include reach, clicks, conversions, video engagement, costs, audience demographics, attribution, and performance by ad creative, audience segment, and time period. Visualizing this data through charts and graphs can help extract valuable insights. Thoroughly monitoring LinkedIn campaign analytics is crucial for improving results and return on ad spend. With strong tracking and reporting, brands can gain a data-driven understanding of their ideal audiences and creatives to drive LinkedIn ad success.