When I first launched into marketing more than a decade ago, LinkedIn Ads was new territory not only for me, but also my peers. When planning multi-channel ad campaigns for B2B clients, we would always consider LinkedIn Ads, but always with caution: “We must be careful, they can get really expensive. There’s a minimum bid of 2$ per click and that’s significantly more expensive than our other channels.”
While this still holds true to this day, some things have changed in the last decade. The total number of users has gone up from 300 million to 1 billion in 2024. In LinkedIn, this also means that the average user has more things to do inside the platform: more people to connect with, more content to follow, more reasons to create content. Combine this increase in numbers with LinkedIn Ads’ “secret sauce” and the result is a channel that you just can’t keep off your media plan as a B2B marketer.
What makes LinkedIn Ads stand out from other Ad platforms?
Before we dive into metrics, let’s provide some extra details on LinkedIn’s “secret sauce” and why it makes such a good channel for B2B advertising. There are 2 main ingredients in the secret sauce: Audience Targeting and Professional Intent.
- Audience Targeting – LinkedIn is the network for professionals all across the world. Whether a user is on LinkedIn to get a job, connect with like-minded professionals, hire, sell, buy, etc. it’s important that their profile accurately depicts their professional experience. Having a well-rounded, detailed, up-to-date profile will increase a user’s chances of succeeding in their individual LinkedIn objectives. What this means for advertisers is that they have very precise targeting options in their campaigns regarding the users’ professional activity, including (but not limited to) Job Title / Seniority / Years of Experience / Years in Role / Company Headcount / Company Growth Rate / Industry / Company Type / Skills / Professional Interests and many, many others. While other platforms such as Meta include some of these criteria, in my experience, they are nowhere near as detailed or accurate as LinkedIn data.
- Professional Intent – this is more subtle, but a very important factor when considering LinkedIn Ads. Think about it this way – why do you use a certain social media platform and what content do you expect to see on it? If you’re a B2B business, you can broadcast your message on various social media channels to the exact same individuals, but most likely, the way they respond to it will be different. That happens because when people open up TikTok, for example, they want to be entertained. When they open up Instagram, they want to be inspired and see what their friends are up to. When they open up LinkedIn, they want to grow as professionals and that’s the content they will most likely react to, including when it comes to ads. What this means for advertisers is that, even if the cost to run ads might be higher on LinkedIn when comparing directly to other platforms, the mindset of the person seeing the ad is different – much more likely to be open to a professional-related proposal, whether it’s a job opening or new tool to try out.
That being said, let’s take a look at how LinkedIn Ads are structured and start talking about the metrics that B2B marketers should be tracking in their advertising campaigns. We will contextualize the metrics within LinkedIn ads as they might require different types of optimization actions than other platforms.
Campaign Structure & Objectives in LinkedIn Ads
One of the first things you configure when creating a new LinkedIn Ads campaign is your campaign objective. This also impacts specific criteria in the campaign configuration flow and once the objective is set, it cannot be changed. As of 2024, LinkedIn splits its campaign objectives into 3 categories:
- Awareness
- Consideration, including 4 sub-types to choose from: Website Visits, Engagement, Video Views, Messaging
- Conversion, with 3 sub-types: Lead Generation, Website Conversions, Job Applications
In order to keep this article as relevant as possible, we will focus on Customer Acquisition Campaigns as the metrics structure touches on all 3 categories and is highly relevant for any other campaign a B2B marketer may go into. In future materials, we will tackle topics such as Recruiting (Job Applications) and Engagement separately, but there are some things worth mentioning at this point: Job Applications are very similar in nature (and metrics) to Lead Generation campaigns, but they can also include a landing page, thus becoming Website Conversion campaigns. Engagement campaigns are more complicated as LinkedIn has stuffed together multiple engagement types, with different objectives (and subsequent key metrics) under this sub-category. For example, Engagement includes Post Engagement, Messaging, Page Followers, Event Attendance and others. We will need a separate article to properly navigate the maze of LinkedIn engagement terminology. For now, we’ll focus on Customer Acquisition objectives for B2B companies.
Awareness Metrics
When it comes to awareness, LinkedIn Ads follows a similar metrics structure to all other social media platforms, but we will contextualize each metric and try to reveal nuances that are specific to LinkedIn and LinkedIn Ads.
A.1. Impressions: an impression is generated when a user sees an ad. This is the main quantitative metric to assess the impact of your awareness efforts.
A.2. Reach: the total number of unique people that get to see your ad. In theory, this number could go as high as your Audience size on each ad group, but in practice, we have found that, depending on the audience, it will cap out somewhere at 60-90% of the audience size. For example, people working in Government, who are usually less active on LinkedIn, will have a smaller Reach cap than someone working in Recruiting. LinkedIn recently introduced a metric for this called Audience Penetration.
A.3. Frequency (or Average Frequency): the number of times a unique person has seen your ad. This provides an extra qualitative measure to your campaigns. In traditional media, it’s said that a person might have to be exposed to your message up to 30 times before it sticks. Every campaign strategy is different, but you should definitely take frequency into consideration when running LinkedIn Ads, especially as you will have some small audiences and any extra budgets you put in them will mean new impressions to people that have already seen your ads. At some point, the conversion rate on your impressions will start to decline. For more advanced users, we have recently seen more and more third-party tools that enable frequency capping for LinkedIn Ads. Natively, this is only available in Connected TV campaigns.
One more important note on Frequency and Reach. These metrics will mean different things at the Ad versus Campaign level. While you can easily add up Impressions amongst all ads to result in the total impressions at a campaign level, Reach and Frequency have different mechanics, so be mindful of this when doing campaign analysis.
A.4. CPM – Cost per thousand impressions. This is the metric that will help you perform qualitative comparisons on your LinkedIn Ads, at an awareness level. Ads that have narrow targeting or that target high-profile individuals (eg: CXO, VP in high-potential geographies such as the US) will have a naturally higher CPM than broader ads. We recommend analyzing CPM in conjunction to conversion metrics in order to get a clear idea of campaign performance.
A.5. Audience Penetration – the percentage number of people that saw your ad within your total audience size. We have mentioned this metric when talking about Reach. Even if it does cap out at some point, keeping a close eye on it (especially in campaigns with short lifespans) can aid advertisers into gaining a new level of insight.
A special note on Audience size: while not a metric per se, it’s extremely important to be aware of audience size in LinkedIn Ads – more than other platforms. As you have the option for very precise targeting with professional criteria, advertisers have the option to create highly-segmented ad groups and ads. This also means that these audiences might be very narrow. We recommend that at least 80% of your LinkedIn campaign groups have audiences of 10,000+ members to make the most of LinkedIn Ads.
Consideration metrics
For this funnel stage, we will mostly focus on the metrics that impact content consumption. In the case of our Acquisition-focused approach, where we look to new leads as a main objective for a B2B advertising campaign, these metrics will mostly be tied to website visits. There is the special case of LinkedIn LeadGen Ads where a landing page is not necessary, but the concept of clicks & cost per click still apply.
B1. Clicks – as many other advertising platforms, LinkedIn has the concept of chargeable clicks and non-chargable clicks. One important facet of LinkedIn is that clicks such as Social Engagement (Likes, shares, etc.) and caption text clicks (“show more” button) are defined as non-chargeable. One thing to note is that in carousel ads if you have different landing pages on the ads, every click will be charged separately. Of course, we are discussing chargeable clicks only in the context of campaigns that have been defined on a pay-per-click basis. There is also the option to be charged by impressions.
B2. Cost per Click – the average cost per click of your campaign. It can be easily calculated by dividing the budget by the number of clicks, but why it’s important as a metric is that it can also be capped and controlled from the campaign bidding settings. It can also be used as a qualitative comparison indicator, to judge which campaigns perform better than others.
Besides the metrics you track in LinkedIn Ads, it is highly recommended that you track what is happening on your website and/or landing pages. The metrics that first come to mind here are.
B3. Landing Page Visits – yes, this number will most likely be different from the number of Clicks you see in LinkedIn Ads. And more than just likely, it will be lower. It’s your duty to be aware of how many of the clicks reported in LinkedIn are actually converting to visitors. A common mistake is assessing the conversion rate with the LinkedIn Clicks and comparing it to the conversion rate of other website channels from Google Analytics (GA4) data.
B4. Engaged Sessions / Bounce Rate – not a critical metric by any means, but if your conversion rate is low and cannot do proper comparison of various ads / ad groups based on it, then this is the next best metric to compare the quality of traffic by. Just make sure that you have proper UTM tracking set up on your ads and ad groups so you can easily separate them in GA4.
Conversion metrics
Finally, we get to the juicy part. All B2B campaigns, even those focused on awareness, have an end goal related to conversion in mind. Whether it be generating a lead, or a sale, or a meeting, it’s every marketer’s mission to maximize the number of qualified conversions originating from advertising campaigns.
Besides the users converting on your own website, LinkedIn Ads can also make use of a proprietary component that can collect lead data without requiring a website visit. This is the LinkedIn LeadGen Form and for this type of campaign, whenever a user clicks on an ad, it opens up a simple form directly in LinkedIn. The user can fill out their data in the form and the data is stored and accessible in the LinkedIn Ads platform. In order to correctly capture the nuances of conversion, we will mention how various metrics differ from Website Click-focused campaigns to LeadGen form campaigns.
C1. Conversions – of course, the number of conversions is the #1 thing to look at in this stage. On website click ads, conversions will be tracked with the LinkedIn Insights Tag, while on the LeadGen form, they will be the ones filling out the form. If you do not have conversion tracking set up on your website, you can still measure conversions by the number of people filling out your form or signing up directly in your CRM / Website Back-end / etc.
C2. Conversion Rate – calculated by the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. As we mentioned at B3, it is essential that you are mindful of how you calculate your conversion rate, especially when comparing conversion rates of various channels. To ensure a consistent comparison, conversion rates should be judged by the number of website visitors, as a default. In most cases, the Conversion Rate is the main indicator of the quality of your funnel (Targeting / Ad / Landing Page / Conversion Touchpoint).
In the case of LinkedIn LeadGen Forms, the Conversion Rate will be calculated directly in LinkedIn, and is named “Lead Form Completion Rate” (while Visits are named “Lead form Opens”).
Conversion rates will vary a lot. When comparing & evaluating ads/campaigns, it’s important to judge them with conversion volumes and metrics that encompass budget spend (eg: CPA)
C3. Cost per Conversion – also named Cost per Result or Cost per Action (CPA) is calculated by dividing the total budget to the number of Conversions. It’s pretty simple, but probably the most important indicator to benchmark and evaluate the success of a campaign. When you have sufficient conversion volume, then CPA should be compared at all possible levels (Campaign / Ad Group / Ads ).
These are the obvious metrics, but most B2B marketers know that a person filling out a form is not necessarily a healthy result. In a lot of companies, there is even a tension between marketing that’s bringing in as many leads as possible and sales, which need as many qualified leads as possible. We believe this tension to be healthy, but still, it’s in Marketing’s role to ensure that the leads coming in are aligned with the business customer profile. Modern marketers take it upon themselves to also do the qualification process (to a degree) for the leads coming in from marketing channels, especially when the conversion does not have a purchase value (in that case, things are simpler, as most purchases are considered qualified conversions).
C4. Qualified Conversions – the number of conversions that meet certain qualification criteria set out by the business. In the case of Lead Generation campaigns, the generally accepted term is Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). In the case of a product sign-up, we might consider them the Activated users (depending on the product, these could be users that finished onboarding / started a trial / finished completing their account / performed a certain action or set of actions / etc.).
C5. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). Each company can employ even more advanced metrics to evaluate the performance of their LinkedIn Ads. Ideally, any advertising channel would have an associated ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), but depending on business model, this can be easy or complex to calculate. For example, for single-purchase products or services, ROAS can be simply calculated by dividing Total Revenue Generated to Total Ad Spend. In the case of a subscription business, it can be a bit more complicated, as you would need to define CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), which, in turn, requires historical or predicted data on Average Lifespan. It is possible to define ROAS (actually, potential ROAS) on lead generation campaigns, too, by evaluating, on the long-term, the entire sales cycle, the potential CLTV, factoring in complex aspects such as business engagement model, churn probability, and others.
Putting it all together
There are no metrics without a proper framework to track and evaluate everything. While LinkedIn ads does provide a good degree of reporting, we know that most B2B marketers will have more on their plate than just this channel. Thus, it’s important to create structures that are easy to track and compare.
The best solution would be to employ an analytics or BI (Business Intelligence) system such as Looker Studio to tailor dashboards and reports. If you don’t have that capability, it’s still fairly simple to define a simple spreadsheet and fill in the metrics from your campaigns every week. Ideally, B2B marketing analysis should include 3 levels of reporting:
Global Reporting – which measures the ongoing (weekly/monthly) performance of various channels and strategic initiatives. The global reporting should include all key metrics of the Marketing Funnel.
Campaign Reporting – analyzing the performance of a given campaign, with all the channels and tactics involved. This analysis should have both a top level perspective, but also breakdown details about the campaign. Campaign-level reporting can also bring in details about non-core metrics, such as new partnerships defined as a result of a campaign or maybe even follower growth.
Experiments Reporting – marketing experiments are a staple in any growth-focused organization. An experienced B2B Marketer will define and run multiple experiments within any given campaign. These include Audience A/B testing and discovery, Visual & Copy variations, and even landing page experiments. These experiments must also be documented with focus only on specific metrics that stand as success factors (eg: focus on a benchmark Conversion rate / CTR). Experiments are documented in learnings that can be employed in future campaigns by the Marketing & Growth teams.
To wrap up, LinkedIn Ads is a fairly simple territory in terms of metrics, but what makes it complex is the nature of marketing activities being done. If we were to launch eCommerce shopping ads on LinkedIn, reporting would be simple. However, LinkedIn is not built for that. It is built to favor those marketing initiatives that promise to help professionals grow to the next level in their careers or business. And measuring how you can deliver on that promise can get fairly complex.
About the Author
Alex Gavril is the CEO of ▲promocrat, a growth marketing partner with a decade of experience in the B2B sector. Beyond LinkedIn Ads, Alex and ▲promocrat help companies of all stages (startup to enterprise) define their growth function and scale up through marketing-led, sales-led, product-led and community-led initiatives. Alex is a Forbes 30u30 and 500 Startups SF Alumni and alongside ▲promocrat, is actively supporting the startup ecosystem with mentoring and knowledge sharing related to Growth as a business function.
