If you are targeting B2B (business to business) customers and want to optimize the delivery of your ads to decision makers at a specific type of organization, then LinkedIn Ads might be one of the best tools available to you. Although you are targeting B2B, it is really a decision maker or person that you are trying to showcase your value to. It might be a specific job title that has the influence within an organization to make the purchasing decision. For example, if you are looking to sell bookkeeping software to SaaS (computer software) startups that have 11-50 employees, you likely want to target the Chief Financial Officer, VP of Finance or Director of Finance within these organizations.
You can be very specific at creating niche audiences to get your message in front of the right audience with LinkedIn Ads, without wasting a portion of your budget on a larger group in order to reach them. Through LinkedIn Ads, it is super easy to target these specifics. The accuracy of targeting job titles on LinkedIn Ads is much more accurate than other PPC (pay-per-click) advertising platforms.
Since it is self-selecting job titles on social platforms, pretty much everyone on LinkedIn has their current job title selected. In contrast, on other social platforms that are not targeted to professionals, the majority of your target audience likely hasn’t self selected their job title. This is not enough accurate targeting information to waste money trying to reach the right audience by targeting things like “interests”. By targeting this way, you are likely wasting valuable advertising dollars on a decent size group of people that are not in your target market.
LinkedIn Ads are more expensive than other PPC platforms – so knowing how many conversions you get is of the utmost importance to track your ROI.
Getting “clicks” on LinkedIn Ads can be a lot more expensive than other platforms. But by adding conversion tracking to your LinkedIn Ads, you can accurately compare your ad performance to your other advertising channels. It will also help to create a more predictive revenue model for your marketing efforts and optimize your cost-per-acquisition (i.e. for every webinar registration, the value to your business is $100, based on margins you might know you can only spend a maximum of $30 to attract a new webinar registrants).
Conversion tracking for your LinkedIn Ads will help you to determine how many people in your target audience took a specific action after clicking on your ads. These actions could be submitting a form for a product demo, registering for a webinar, downloading a how-to-guide, etc.
By focusing on the actions that drive real results and revenue to your business, you can understand your ROI and how it compares to other advertising channels.
How to add conversion tracking to your LinkedIn Ad Campaigns
Before you begin, you need to add a line of code called the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website. Once the code is installed, you can create as many conversions as you’d like for all of your campaigns.
In your LinkedIn Ads Campaign Manager you can view your LinkedIn Insight Tag and install it on your own by copy and pasting it, sending it to a developer if you have someone managing your website for you, or by using a Tag Manager (Google Tag Manager).
Optimizing your data for conversion tracking for your LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads gives you the capability to create new conversions for each of your campaigns to ensure your conversions are optimized for the core objective of your campaign. It also gives you the capability to assign a specific dollar amount for each type of conversion in your campaigns. This will aid you in understanding the ROI of your LinkedIn Ad campaigns.
It is important however, to ensure you already understand the value of each conversion to your overall marketing performance. You should have enough data in place to know that every time you get a visitor on your website, it is worth $5, or every time you have a product demo request, it is worth $300, etc. Without this data, you will not be able to identify the true ROI of your conversions unless you know how much those conversions are worth to you. Do not simply put a random number in – or else it will mislead you and your data that you are using to make marketing decisions will not be accurate.
LinkedIn Ads also allows you to enable a feature called “Automated Bid” which then allows you to optimize how much you spend to get the most conversions from your campaigns. If you are new to conversion tracking for LinkedIn Ads, this is a great option. If you are more seasoned with conversion tracking for LinkedIn Ads, we’ve still found the best results using “Manual Maximum Cost bid”. There is less control on the total amount spent per conversion, but if you have done a number of these campaigns, you’ll have enough data to know what the cost per bid should be for conversions. By choosing manual, you’ll have more control over the cost per click (or first action).
Optimize the content in your LinkedIn Ads
Once you are familiar with the process of conversion tracking for LinkedIn Ads, focus on your metrics and how well your ads are performing. At a minimum, you should be testing three different visuals with three differently worded messages. Through this data, you’ll be able to see which types of images and messaging are converting the most, so that you can focus your budget on optimizing the performance of your LinkedIn Ads. You can also use this data to uncover what resonates best with your audiences, so that you can use what you learned in your other marketing efforts.