Maximizing Your LinkedIn Ads Performance: A Guide to Measuring Success

The aim of every company that advertises on LinkedIn is to maximize the performance of its ads. Often, businesses run ads and expect instant results. As a B2B platform, LinkedIn ads is a powerful tool but the fact is that without planning, you won’t get too far. This guide will teach you step-by-step how to plan for a successful LinkedIn ad campaign. We will cover all the strategies and benchmarks that will help you along your journey. As well as the tools you’ll need to maximize your LinkedIn ads performance and take it to the next level.

Introduction to LinkedIn Ads performance

Before we begin, let’s define LinkedIn ads performance. It is a measure of the effectiveness and efficiency of advertisements on LinkedIn. The efficiency is measured with the help of essential metrics such as clicks, conversions, click-through rates, and cost per click. Some of the most important business metrics to consider include the number of new customers, return on investment (ROI), and the impact on your sales pipeline. By focusing on these metrics, you can ensure that your LinkedIn Ads are driving real results and contributing to the growth of your business.

The performance of LinkedIn ads is used to evaluate the success of marketing campaigns and to make data-driven decisions for future campaigns. By analyzing LinkedIn ads performance, advertisers can determine which ads are performing well and make adjustments to improve their overall performance on the platform.

There are several factors that can impact your LinkedIn ad performance. Some of them include ad targeting such as targeting specific job titles or an ad format such as a sponsored post or InMail. Your first priority should be identifying key goals. By setting goals, you can determine the most effective tools, strategies and tactics to use in your ads. 

Then you have to get familiar with KPIs such as cost per click, cost per impression, and cost per action. These are essential for businesses to understand how much can be spent for acquiring new users, leads, demo bookings, customers, etc. And it’s crucial to define these KPIs before starting any advertisement. 

By doing so, you can identify the right metrics and benchmarks for your ad campaigns. It’s important to always track their performance, so you can see what is working and what needs improvement. Your goals and key metrics will allow you to maximize your ad performance and fine-tune your campaign for optimal results. 

Why is it important to monitor LinkedIn ads performance?

In the grand scheme of things, measuring your LinkedIn ads performance is important in order to be more efficient with your advertising efforts. For instance, by monitoring your performance, you will be able to identify successful campaigns and replicate the same strategies in the future. Also, you will be able to identify trends in your data that will help you understand seasonality or changes in audience engagement. This will help in making strategic decisions about when to run ads. Also, you will uncover how to properly adjust your targeting so that your ads are reaching the most relevant audience. 

You will gain valuable audience insights that will allow you to fully understand the demographics of your customers. This will bring benefits such as reducing your advertising costs, increased ROI, and brand awareness. 

By monitoring your ads, you will gain an understanding of which ad copies are working and which ones are not. You will also understand how optimizing your goals for different advertising objectives work. Now after understanding why it is important to monitor your LinkedIn ads performance, let’s look at some measurements that will help you in evaluating your ads performance. 

How can I evaluate the performance of LinkedIn Ads

One of the main aspects of a successful campaign is identifying, tracking and evaluating the correct metrics and KPIs. Even though often you’ll see that metrics and KPIs are used interchangeably, there is a difference between them. 

Metrics are general and long-term measures of your performance such as CTR or CPC. Your metrics are important because they help you quantify the results of your ad campaign. 

While key performance indicators or KPIs are targeted measurements that measure the success of your specific goals, for instance, conversion rate or return on advertising spend. For setting up your KPIs you need to understand the goals of your ad campaigns. This will help you understand what KPIs exactly you need to track. 

Since advertising is an ongoing process, day by day you will have more data to crunch. Because of this, consider having a custom dashboard to see a comprehensive and customized view of your ads performance data in one place. With a custom dashboard, you can easily track the metrics that matter most to your business, such as new customers, ROI, and the impact on your sales pipeline. This helps you to make data-driven decisions about your ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or another platform. 

Moreover, a custom dashboard can help you identify trends, patterns, and insights that may not be immediately obvious from looking at the raw data. This can help you to optimize your LinkedIn Ads for better performance, leading to increased return on investment. By having all of your LinkedIn Ads performance data in one place, you can make informed decisions, adjust your strategy as needed, and ultimately drive better results for your business.

You can simply connect it to your LinkedIn ads account and automate the incoming flow of all your data. Then you can organize your data according to your advertising goals. You will be able to easily share your data and reports with your colleagues for easy project collaboration. Now, let’s look at some of the most important metrics you will need to understand your campaign results properly.

Key Metrics

As we already uncovered, metrics are indicators that measure the performance of your LinkedIn ads campaign. Below, you have some of the most important metrics you need to pay attention to when evaluating your LinkedIn Ads performance: 

• Cost per Click (CPC) is the average amount that a business pays each time a user clicks on an ad. CPC, helps businesses understand the cost of driving traffic to their website or their landing page. 
• Conversion Rate is the percentage of users who take a specific action after clicking on an ad, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Through a conversion rate, you can understand how effectively ads are driving conversions and meeting advertising goals. 
• Cost per Conversion is the total ad spend divided by the number of conversions. Cost per conversion allows companies to understand the cost of driving a specific action. 
• Cost per Impression (CPM) is actually measured as cost per 1000 impressions or cost per mille, and it is the total ad spend divided by the number of impressions or the number of people who have viewed your ad. 
• Cost per Lead is the cost of generating a lead or a potential customer. In this instance, the cost per lead is the total ad spend divided by the number of leads generated. 
• Lead Gen Form Fill Completion Rate is the percentage of users who completed a lead generation form after clicking on an ad. 
• Engagement Rate is a measure of the effectiveness of an ad in eliciting a response or interaction from the audience. It is calculated by dividing the number of times members interacted with the ad by the total number of impressions. These interactions can include a variety of social actions, such as reactions, comments, shares, and follows. 

LinkedIn Ads Performance dashboard

Just like with any advertising campaign manager, LinkedIn ads comes with its own dashboard through which you can measure and analyze the performance of your LinkedIn ads. Once you log in to LinkedIn campaign manager, a tool that allows you to manage and track the performance of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns, you can access and view metrics, charts, demographics, and export CSV reports to help you understand how your campaigns are performing. If you are managing more than one company or campaign on LinkedIn, you can also easily switch between different accounts, campaign groups, campaigns, and ads using the dashboard’s navigation bar. Here’s an example of how your LinkedIn ads performance dashboard looks like:

As we’ve already uncovered, a LinkedIn ads performance dashboard is a tool that allows you to track and analyze the performance of your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. Even though the LinkedIn ads performance dashboard may seem sufficient, creating your own custom dashboard gives you significantly more control. For instance, with a custom dashboard, you can combine data about ads performance from multiple advertising platforms including Facebook, Google, and more. A custom dashboard, allows you to analyze and optimize your campaigns more effectively. 

Another important aspect is cost-effectiveness, a custom dashboard enables you to track your return on advertising spend and cost per acquisition. This will help you to determine if your campaigns are delivering value for the investment that you made. 

Collaboration is also an important aspect, because a custom dashboard allows you to share your LinkedIn ads performance campaigns with stakeholders such as the management or clients. Also, because businesses run different ad campaigns on various social media advertising platforms simultaneously, it is more efficient to use a custom dashboard to integrate all your data. It’s important to have a tool that can integrate your data from a number of different sources. 

By having the data from all your marketing tools such as LinkedIn ads, Google ads, or even Mailchimp you can have a more comprehensive and holistic view of your marketing performance. With custom dashboards, you can even choose your preferred destination. Basically, you can view and analyze all your key metrics from various ad campaigns in one central location. You can also automate your data flows, set up alerts and customizable metrics. 

Using the dashboard to monitor and analyze results 

Using a custom dashboard can greatly simplify monitoring your LinkedIn Ads performance. But as always there are many tips that you can utilize to make the most of it. For example, as with any analytical tool make sure to check it regularly. The more often you check your dashboard, the more quickly you can identify any issues or opportunities with your LinkedIn Ads. You can set up alerts or notifications to notify you when there are significant changes in your ad performance. 

Always look for trends and patterns and utilize visual tools such as graphs and charts. The primary role of your LinkedIn dashboard is to identify trends and patterns in your ad performance over time, and visual tools in that aspect are your best friends. With this you can understand what is and isn’t working with your LinkedIn Ads, thus making better-informed future ad strategies. 

Don’t forget to always compare the performance of different ad campaigns. By using the dashboard to compare the performance of different ad campaigns and seeing which ads are the most effective, you can use this information to optimize your current and future campaigns. 

Another important aspect of using the dashboard is to identify areas for improvement. As you already know, maximizing and optimizing your ad performance is an ongoing process. Use the dashboard to identify areas where your LinkedIn Ads could be performing better. As mentioned above this could be anything from an underperforming ad copy to targeting the wrong audience. The key is to always analyze in order to get rid of such hindrances. 

How to build a LinkedIn Ads Performance dashboard

There are two ways to build your own custom dashboard:

1. The first is building it yourself which can be a time-consuming process that requires proper analysis of your advertising goals. 

2. The second is hiring a professional to do it. 

If you know what you’re doing, building your own custom dashboard is definitely a more cost-effective option. It will give you more flexibility in terms of customization and design. Also, you will have more control over the process, however, things can get tricky if you don’t know how to properly build it. 

Since building a quality custom dashboard requires you to have a deep knowledge of data analysis, sometimes it’s better to outsource this job to experts. This way you will have a custom dashboard that will be set up in no time and is built specifically to cater to the needs of your business. Also, there are a number of visual charts and graphs that make it easier to interpret your data, you can dive into different visualization options that enable you to fully understand your data and have full control of your analytics.

Coupler.io provides a number of different analytics and integration solutions, including building custom dashboards. If you outsource this process to professionals like Coupler, building a custom dashboard will definitely take less than a month and you will have guidance so that you can make the most of your data analysis.

Here is an example of a dashboard that combines LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads data designed by data experts from Coupler.io.

Steps to build a custom LinkedIn dashboard with your hands

If you’re interested in creating your own custom dashboard, the process can be broken down into several steps: 

• Select data sources
• Choose a data visualization tool
• Set up the dashboard layout
• Add data to the dashboard

Step 1: Select data sources

The first step is to select the data sources. Identify what and how many sources of data you have. This includes selecting the data sources that will provide the data for your dashboard. If you are advertising on LinkedIn, you are probably advertising on other platforms as well. This could include LinkedIn Ads, Google Analytics, or other third-party data sources. 

If that’s the case, you need to export all the data from your relevant data sources to one data repository. Coupler.io provides an ETL solution to connect LinkedIn Ads to Google Sheets or LinkedIn Ads to BigQuery. It also supports a large variety of other sources, so you’ll be able to combine data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads using one tool. This will save you a lot of time and headaches since you can automate your data integration so that your data is always up to date. 

Step 2: Choose a data visualization tool

After the data sources are defined, choose a tool for building a dashboard. There are many, but the most popular ones are Looker Studio (former Google Data Studio), Microsoft’s Power BI, and Tableau. Always double-check what type of metrics you will use for your custom dashboard. 

Step 3: Set up the dashboard layout

The third step is to set up the dashboard layout. This involves selecting the type of chart or graph you want to use to display the data, as well as the size and position of the chart or graph. 

By now you probably have an idea of what your objectives and metrics will be. Still, remember that you will use data from different sources, so make sure that your goals are aligned. By doing so, you will have a clear and holistic picture of all your advertising performance in one place. 

Step 4: Add data to the dashboard

The final step is to add the data to the dashboard. This involves setting up a connection between your dashboard and data source to make the dashboard self-updating. 

Don’t forget that at this point this won’t be an entry-level data analysis. If your dashboard is not designed properly with the proper metrics that are important to your business, then you will end up losing money because of inaccurate data analysis. Interpretation of data is also important, even though you might have all the right metrics, you need to know how to fully analyze and make decisions based on them. Also, time is of the essence, and designing your own dashboard will take time, I mean at least a month. So if you lack the expertise in building a dashboard, the process might become very time-consuming and instead of having more functionality, you might end up with less. 

How to maximize the performance of LinkedIn Ads 

Maximizing the performance of your ads is an ongoing process and even if your ads are performing well, it is always essential to keep an eye out for improvement. Considering the fact that digital advertising is a must for most businesses these days, it is always better to use some of these strategies in order to cut advertising costs and ensure optimization with regards to advertising performance. Here are some of the most important strategies in order to improve your LinkedIn Ads performance.

Define Your Goals

There are many strategies for improving your LinkedIn Ads performance and many of them start before an ad is even put in place. For example in order to have a successful ad campaign, you must clearly define your goals. Some ads run in order to raise brand awareness, while others are there to generate leads. This is why before launching a LinkedIn Ad campaign, it’s important to clearly define your goals and what you want to achieve with the campaign. By doing so, it will be easier to determine which metrics you need to track and pay attention to. 

Optimize targeting

Another important strategy is to optimize your targeting. What sets LinkedIn Ads apart from other platforms is its targeting options, you can reach specific audience segments based on factors such as location, industry, job title, and more. In today’s advertising environment such targeting greatly helps in identifying the right Leads. In the B2B context, targeting by industry or job titles allows you to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by displaying the ads to only those who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

Test different ad creatives

Testing different ad creatives, or A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of an advertisement in order to determine which one performs better. When A/B testing an ad, you would typically create two versions of the ad that differ in some way, such as the headline, images, or call to action. By regularly testing different ad creatives, you can greatly improve the performance of your LinkedIn Ads.

Conversion tracking 

By using LinkedIn’s conversion tracking feature, you are able to track specific actions that users take after clicking on an ad, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. This can provide valuable insights into the performance of your LinkedIn Ads and help you optimize your campaigns for maximum efficiency. As mentioned above, it is important to choose the right conversion for your campaign and LinkedIn’s conversion tracking helps in achieving this goal.

Monitoring and Analyzing 

Regularly monitoring and analyzing your performance is probably the most important aspect of increasing and maximizing your LinkedIn ads performance. Tracking the metrics mentioned above and analyzing performance may lead to increased efficiency, and customer insights that can be used for the future as well as increasing the return on investment, which is ultimately the goal of any company. By tracking key metrics such as impressions, CPC, and conversion rate, you can understand which campaigns are performing well and which may need optimization. Additionally monitoring and analyzing performance, in the long run, leads to driving the most value out of your advertising budget and allocating that budget accordingly for future campaigns.

Tips for Optimizing LinkedIn Ads for Maximum Results

Find the lowest CPC bid

Finding your lowest CPC bid can be done by using LinkedIn’s manual CPC Bid option. This allows you to bid a designated amount on your ads in order to reach users that LinkedIn has identified as likely to click on your ad. The goal is to get the most clicks on your ads at the lowest cost possible, so it’s a good idea to start by bidding low and gradually increasing your bid. By following this process, you can identify the lowest CPC bid for your LinkedIn Ads and optimize your campaigns for maximum efficiency.

Use Strong Calls To Action 

Calls to action (CTAs) are an important element of LinkedIn Ads. CTAs are used to encourage users to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Calls to action are typically presented as buttons or links within an ad, some examples include phrases such as “Sign up today,” “Buy now,” or “Learn more.” With respect to CTAs, one tip is to make them short and easy to understand, as this helps to clearly communicate the action that you want the user to take. Strong CTAs can be an effective way to drive conversions and improve your performance.

Monitor and optimize LinkedIn ads performance with third-party tools

In many ways, integrating your data can help you uncover new connections that you may have missed. Think about it this way, for more insights Google Ads can always be integrated with Google Analytics, the same applies to the rest of the other platforms. For instance with Coupler not only can you integrate data from different sources and combine them, but you can also use visualization tools that will enable you to more easily represent connections within large data sets.

LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks

LinkedIn ad benchmarks are statistical averages that serve as a starting point for assessing the efficacy of LinkedIn advertising campaigns. These benchmarks will help you evaluate how your campaign compares to other efforts on the platform and suggest areas where you might need to improve.

Understanding LinkedIn ad benchmarks can help you determine the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and make adjustments as needed. Some benchmarks to consider when evaluating the performance of LinkedIn ads include:

LinkedIn InMails: or message ads are paid messages that appear in an inbox of a LinkedIn user. The open rate is the percentage of people that opened an InMail message out of the total number of people who received it. An average open rate, regardless of industry is 55%.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) InMails: applies to InMail messages that have a link embedded in them and is the percentage of people who clicked on that link. An average CTR is just over 3%.

LinkedIn Video Ads: are sponsored videos that companies run on the platform. They can appear on a user’s feed or in inboxes. An average engagement rate is just over 1.5%.

LinkedIn Conversation Ads: are sponsored messages that appear in users’ LinkedIn messaging inboxes. They are very similar to LinkedIn InMails, with the difference that they are usually more casual. The benchmark for open rate for conversation ads is similar to InMails at over 50%, while the CTR is higher at just over 10%.

LinkedIn Live and Virtual Event: is a feature that allows users to stream live videos on the LinkedIn platform. This feature usually is used to host webinars, panel discussions or Q&A sessions. A usual engagement rate benchmark in terms of a live and virtual event is around 10%.

Using LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks to Set and Measure Goals 

Using LinkedIn ad benchmarks can help you set and measure goals for your advertising campaigns. Once you identify your advertising goals, choose the appropriate benchmarks that you think will help you in achieving your objectives. Use those benchmarks as a baseline in monitoring and measuring your performance and as usual don’t forget to constantly evaluate your progress.

Maximizing the impact of your LinkedIn Ads performance

LinkedIn ads performance is important because when you advertise you expect a return on your advertising spend. Rightly so, LinkedIn as an advertising platform isn’t cheap. But what does it take to maximize your performance? As a first step, you need a plan, you need to know the purpose, and to who you are going to advertise. For instance, if you are running a brand awareness campaign, you will be more inclined to get impressions. While, when you are trying to generate website visits, your most important metric will be cost per click. Also, you have to take into account what industry you are in because CPC prices can vary. Historically, Tech has the highest CPC bids, while the education industry has the lowest. Maximizing your performance is an ongoing process, so make a plan and always start small. You can always branch out to different tools and strategies if needed. If you are advertising on more than one platform, then consider integrating your data. This will help you streamline your data analysis and uncover areas of improvement. So remember, the goal of maximizing your performance is to save you money as well as time.

Measuring LinkedIn Ads performance is an ongoing process, where you have to define your goals as well as metrics and constantly measure their performance. Make sure to optimize your targeting, A/B test your ads, set up conversion tracking and monitor your performance. Also, don’t forget to define your bidding strategy and find your most optimal bids, use strong CTAs as well as make use of third-party dashboards in order to have a full and clear picture of all your data. Make sure to integrate your data from all the applications into one place in order to fully utilize the potential of your analysis. Finally, always keep a lookout for relevant benchmarks to ensure that you are effective with your advertising efforts and always try to maximize your ROI. Good Luck!