How To Know If Your LinkedIn Ads Campaigns Will Deliver Results

LinkedIn Ads is the reference channel for both B2B companies in general and B2C companies looking to attract talent or promote themselves in the professional sphere. But in order to get the most out of them, you have to be able to correctly analyze the results of your campaigns.

To help you, in this article, we explain step by step the recommendations of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to measure the performance of your campaigns and make them more and more effective.

How To Analyze The Performance Of Your LinkedIn Ads Campaign

Choose Your Goal

Campaign Manager is the advertising platform used to create LinkedIn Ads. Within it, you can choose three different objectives for your campaigns:

• Brand Awareness – Campaigns that increase your online presence through impressions.
• Insight – Campaigns that encourage customers to take action to learn about your business, such as clicking the ad to get to a specific page on your site.
• Conversion – Campaigns focused on generating leads and conversions.

Choose Your KPIs

In order to measure the performance of the campaign, we first have to decide on which indicators we are going to focus on based on our objective.

If your campaign is focused on generating visibility for your brand, the LinkedIn Ads results that interest you the most are the following:

• Clicks: The number of clicks on the links in your ad.
• Impressions: The number of times your ad has been seen.
• Click-through rate: The total number of clicks divided by impressions.
• Average engagement rate: The total number of engagements (including paid and free clicks, recommendations, comments, and shares) divided by impressions.

On the other hand, if what you want is to generate leads and conversions, the most relevant metrics are the following:

• Conversions: The number of times someone took action after seeing or clicking your ad.
• Conversion rate: The number of conversions divided by impressions.
• Cost per conversion(CPC): Total ad spend divided by conversions.
• Leads: The number of leads generated through your ads.
• Cost per lead: the total cost of the ad divided by the leads.

Depending on your chosen KPIs, you may need to enable conversion tracking functionality  (to measure conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion) or lead generation forms  (to measure leads and cost per conversion). Per lead).

Evaluate The Performance Of Your Ads

Once you’ve launched your LinkedIn Ads campaign, the system will begin collecting data on its performance. After a reasonable amount of time has passed, you can access Campaign Manager to download performance reports.

Focus on the key metrics for your goal and compare the numbers over time to see how they evolve. It is recommended to define a comparative reference with your first LinkedIn Ads campaigns to be able to measure growth later. You can also use these early numbers to set more realistic goals.

Optimize Results

Finally, take note of these tips to optimize your campaigns  based on results:

• Analyze who interacts with your ads the most and order the results based on the key metrics you defined above. This way, you can see which audiences your ads work best with and adjust your targeting accordingly.
• Access campaign insights for recommendations on how to improve your bids and budgets.
• Test different variants of your ads using A/B tests and compare key metrics against each other to make any necessary adjustments.

What If My Ads Don’t Show?

One of the common problems that can affect the performance of your ads the most is that your campaigns are simply not showing. If you detect that this is the case, you will have to identify the cause and solve it. Here are some possible reasons:

• LinkedIn Ads has disapproved your ad. LinkedIn does not publish new campaigns or changes to existing campaigns without first checking that the ads comply with its advertising policy. To avoid this, review the prohibited and restricted content in LinkedIn ads.

• Your bid is too low. It’s possible that your ad has been approved but isn’t getting impressions. If that’s the case, the first thing you should check is the maximum bid you’ve set. If it’s too low, your ad will consistently lose out in auctions against your competition and won’t show. To guide you on the right bid, LinkedIn offers a range of suggested bids based on your campaign’s competition.

• You have segmented your audience too much. LinkedIn Ads’ ultra-precise targeting options are a big plus for advertisers, but keep in mind that you need a minimum reach for your campaigns to be profitable. To fix this issue, review your targeting criteria and try to remove non-essential ones.

• Your budget is not enough. The minimum spending on LinkedIn Ads is $10 per day, which is higher than other platforms. Still, it’s possible that your budget is running low in a few hours, and ads stop showing for the rest of the day. If you have several campaigns running at the same time and you don’t want to increase your budget, you can solve this problem by launching only one campaign at a time.

• Your creatives are failing. Ads that perform best are those that are highly relevant to their target audience, have engaging images, and have a clear, engaging copy. If your campaigns are not giving you the results you are looking for, do a thorough review of the texts and images of your ads and try different options until you find the key.

• You are not taking advantage of all locations. LinkedIn Ads has four main ad placements based on format: Text Ads, Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, and Dynamic Ads. Try to create campaigns that use several of them at once to achieve the best results.