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Think of some of the greatest pairs in history.
Salt and Pepper.
Coffee break and office gossip.
Disneyland and Kids.
LinkedIn and… Marketers, of course!
LinkedIn is the largest professional network, with over 900 million users worldwide, and it's where your potential prospects hang out day in and day out.
If you want them to visit your website—and eventually sign up for a product or service—you have to be on LinkedIn.
However, with so many marketers vying for attention on the platform—including your competitors—resulting in a cluttered LinkedIn feed for your prospects.
So how do you still stand out in an ever-increasing noisy crowd?
LinkedIn ads!
You can jump the queue and get right into solving your prospects’ pain points.
But the tricky part is running ads is only the first step — anyone with a marketing budget for LinkedIn ads can do that.
Here comes the challenging part. To truly succeed, you need to track the right set of metrics to optimize your ad campaign for better performance.
The good news?
We’ve done the hard work for you and curated a list of top LinkedIn ad metrics that every marketer must track and measure to supercharge LinkedIn ad campaigns.
LinkedIn is one of the popular social media platforms for B2B advertising and a go-to platform for most businesses—to connect with potential prospects.
However, running successful LinkedIn ad campaigns requires a deep understanding of the metrics that matter.
Measuring the right metrics and optimizing your ad campaigns based on analytics data will help you make informed decisions about what's working that results in ensuring your ad campaigns are effective, efficient, and generate a high return on investment (ROI).
Let's discuss the top LinkedIn ad metrics that are essential to track for the success of your ad campaigns.
With, Dataflo, you can directly view your Linkedin, Facebook, Google, and other paid marketing channels in one single place.
Dataflo's paid advertising dashboard lets you analyze how each marketing channel performs and gives you a bird's eye view. You can access metrics such as Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC, and other key performance indicators for multiple ad campaigns, all in one place without juggling into multiple spreadsheets or calculating manually. Get started here for free.
Engagement metrics help you measure how well your ad campaigns are engaging your target audience. By tracking these metrics, you can understand what content resonates with your audience and adjust your ad strategy accordingly.
The metrics include:
Ad clicks is one of the most important Linkedin metrics to measure when running LinkedIn ads. It refers to the number of audience users who clicked on your advertisement.
By measuring this metric data, you can gauge how your ads have performed and tweak your campaigns accordingly.
Click Through Rate (CTR) is a crucial metric for measuring the performance of your LinkedIn ad campaigns. It refers to the percentage of ad clicks in relation to the total impressions.
While ad clicks provide a basic understanding of how many users are interacting with your ad, CTR gives a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Let's consider an example. Suppose your ad received 100 impressions on LinkedIn, and 20 users clicked on it. In this case, the CTR for the ad campaign would be 20%.
It's important to note that analyzing CTRs allows you to compare the performance of different ads with varying impressions.
To better illustrate the significance of CTR, let's say you run two ads on LinkedIn.
Ad 1: Total clicks = 40; Total Impressions = 700
Ad 2: Total clicks = 25; Total Impressions = 450
At first glance, it may seem that Ad 1 is performing better due to its higher number of clicks.
However, when you compare the CTRs, Ad 2 has a better performance with a CTR of 5.71% compared to Ad 1's CTR of 7.14%.
Monitoring CTR metrics will enable you to refine and optimize your campaigns to ensure they are driving the desired results.
Learn more about improving your email CTR and the industry’s best practices from our detailed guide here.
The number of likes metric is a simple measure of how your target audience is perceiving your ad. While likes and reactions on LinkedIn may not directly translate into conversions, they can be a useful metric for measuring the effectiveness and how compelling your ad content is.
Repeat engagement, such as comments and shares, can provide valuable insights into your target audience's level of interest and can help you refine your messaging and targeting to improve overall campaign performance.
Much like post likes, regular engagement in the comment section on sponsored posts is a sign that your content is resonating with the audience.
Tracking comments on LinkedIn ad campaigns is particularly useful when you are running multiple campaigns and you want to experiment with the copy and style to nail down the perfect messaging that gets maximum engagement from your target audience.
The number of shares is a key metric for measuring the reach and engagement of your LinkedIn sponsored content.
When a LinkedIn user shares your content with their own network, it helps to increase your brand's visibility and expand your reach to a broader audience.
The number of shares metric indicates that your content has resonated with your target audience to the point where they want to share it with their own network. This demonstrates that people are engaged with your brand and its content and are willing to endorse it to their connections.
Furthermore, shares can lead to increased organic reach and engagement as more users become exposed to your content through their network of connections. This can help to amplify the reach and impact of your LinkedIn ad campaign.
Campaign Engagement is the collective number of ad clicks, reactions, comments, and shares across campaigns. It gives a complete picture of your ad performance, shedding light on which campaign gets the maximum engagement from your target audience.
Campaign engagement rate refers to the overall engagement for your ad campaign with respect to the total number of impressions. They are also clicked in terms of percentage, just like Click Through Rates.
How is this useful?
Using Campaign Engagement Rate as a benchmark, you can compare it with the number of ad clicks.
For example, if your ad campaigns consistently have great engagement in terms of likes, comments, or shares but have poor click-throughs. It is a sign that you might be targeting the wrong set of audiences—people who enjoy your content but aren't interested in solving whatever problem you're trying to address.
In recent years, videos have become a popular channel for marketers on LinkedIn.
Unlike other types of content, video ads offer a more immersive and engaging experience for viewers, and can help to increase brand awareness and drive conversions.
If you are running LinkedIn video ads, there are two metrics you must track:
Video views refer to the number of times your audience played your video ad. The number of times your video has been viewed is a key metric for understanding the reach of your ad. LinkedIn considers any video as ‘played’ if a user watched for at least 2 seconds.
Video completion is another metric that LinkedIn provides that tells you what portion of your video did the audience watch before closing it.
In other words, the completion rate measures the percentage of viewers who watched your entire video. It is presented in these segments: 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.
This metric gives you insight into how users engage with your video, at what point most of them tend to drop off, etc., using which can help you improve future ads.
Brand awareness is one of the important LinkedIn ad metrics to track, which helps you understand how well your ads resonate with your target audience and how many people are familiar with your brand.
The metrics include the following:
Ad impressions refer to the number of times your ad is shown on your audience’s LinkedIn feed.
Ad impressions directly correlate with how users engage with your ads—after all, the higher the impressions, the higher the chances of someone clicking on your ad.
Here is an example: If your LinkedIn ad campaign shows 50 impressions, it means the ad was shown to your audience 50 times.
When running LinkedIn ad campaigns, it is possible that your ad was shown to the same person more than once, especially if you are running ads for a long period and you have a narrow audience.
Pro tip: If you want more users clicking on your ad, it can mean as simple as increasing your ad budget, which will help increase your ad impressions.
Reach is a crucial metric to track when running a LinkedIn ad campaign. It refers to the total number of unique LinkedIn users who have been served your ad, and can help you understand the overall exposure of your campaign.
While reach is not a direct indicator of engagement or conversions, however, it is an important metric to consider when evaluating the success of the ad campaign.
A high reach indicates that your ad is being viewed by a large audience, which helps directly in increasing brand awareness and generate interest in your product or service.
Optimizing your LinkedIn ad campaign for reach involves targeting the right audience, creating compelling ad content, and using effective ad placement strategies.
New followers metric is an important measure of how people perceive your brand—while you cannot directly attribute your ad campaign to new followers added to your LinkedIn page’s total followers count, there is certainly a correlation.
For example, say a LinkedIn user sees your ad but does not click on it; instead, they search for your company page and end up following it. Even though it was the ad responsible for the new follower, there is no way to track it.
A simple workaround is attributing all new followers to your company page to the LinkedIn ad during your campaign period.
ROI metrics are those which help you calculate the ROI for your LinkedIn ad campaigns and help you make strategic decisions. The metrics include:
Ad spend is the total money you spend for an ad campaign—when you are running multiple ads, it is crucial you keep track of how much you are spending on each ad so you can calculate how much ROI you get from each ad.
In general, if you have a daily budget LinkedIn automatically recognizes the better performing ads and shows more of those ads to the users and likewise less of the poorly performing ones.
Campaign is the total money spent on different ads which usually run at the same time and come as a bundle for a particular campaign.
Campaign spends give you clarity on how similar themed ads perform - for example if you have run campaigns for Thanksgiving and Christmas you can compare how each of them performed and make a decision on how you should allocate your budget for the upcoming season.
Cost Per Click or CPC is the exact $ amount you spend to generate one ad click in your campaigns.
Within LinkedIn, the money you pay on each click varies depending on the campaign objective you choose.
By calculating CPC, you get a sense of how LinkedIn ads a channel is performing - for example, if you are running Google ads, or Facebook ads, or even email marketing campaigns, you can compare the cost of generating a click between those channels and ads run on LinkedIn and allocate your budget accordingly.
Cost Per thousand or Cost Per Mille (CPM) is the total amount of money you spend per thousand ad impressions.
Number of leads refers to calculating how many leads you generate in total from any particular LinkedIn ad campaign.
It is one of the most important Linkedin metrics to track as the fundamental purpose of any marketing channel is to generate as many leads as possible.
Cost Per Lead(CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition(CPA) is the total money you spend for generating a qualified lead - if your campaign has a CTR of 20% only a small portion of those users will eventually sign up for your product.
The Cost Per Lead metric tells you the exact cost for you to generate a qualified lead from LinkedIn ads. Comparing this metric with Customer Lifetime Value gives you insights into your campaign ROI and whether the resources spent on LinkedIn ads is actually worth it.
And that's a wrap! Running a successful LinkedIn ad campaign requires more than just setting up ads and waiting for the conversions to roll in. It requires a careful and strategic approach to targeting, ad content, monitoring, and measuring metrics.
Measuring the right set of metrics—such as click-through rate, number of likes, shares, and video engagement rates—will allow you to gain valuable insights into how your campaign is performing and make data-driven decisions to optimize your results.
However, keeping track of all these metrics can be time-consuming and overwhelming, especially if you're running multiple ad campaigns across different channels like Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, and Facebook Ads simultaneously.
With Dataflo's Paid Campaign Dashboard, you can connect your Linkedin Ads and other Ad channels along with your CRM. This helps you to understand your campaign performance based on deals with metrics like Leads to Deals Ratio, Deals per Campaign, Channel, Cost per Deal, and Lead to Deals Ratio.
Experience our Paid Campaign Dashboard: No code, connect your tools in under 5 minutes. Book a demo now.
Keerthi is passionate about building products. She contributes towards product strategies and is responsible for managing the company’s analytics platform and creating new products that meet the customer’s needs. In her spare time, you can find her enjoying baking, painting and listening to music. She loves capturing and documenting priceless moments of her life.
