3 Changes to LinkedIn Advertising That Help You Better Measure ROI

LinkedIn advertising is a great way for B2B companies to reach highly-qualified prospects. The platform's ability to target audiences by location, job title, years of experience, and much more can help businesses that want to market to hard-to-reach executives deliver the right message to the right people. 

Unfortunately, LinkedIn's advertising platform has not delivered the same level of user experience other social media advertising options, such as Facebook, offer. I've often found myself frustrated by LinkedIn's meaningless charts, which force me to calculate relevant information before presenting results to clients.

Fortunately, LinkedIn is listening and trying to catch up. The platform has been releasing updates, and its most recent rollout features some enhanced reporting capabilities that can help marketers understand the effectiveness of their ads and ROI. I'm still using Google's campaign URL builder to fully understand the results of my ads from first impression to last click, but LinkedIn's changes are certainly helpful.

1.) Campaign groups

Earlier this year, LinkedIn rolled out a feature that allows you to create campaign groups. If you engage in a lot of LinkedIn advertising, campaign groups provide you with the ability to reduce the number of ads you have to sift through when looking for the ad you're working with. Beyond aesthetics, creating campaign groups allows you to keep ads of a similar nature together and run reports across ad campaigns, aggregating performance and demographic information. 

2.) URLs for Charts

Although I'm still not thrilled with LinkedIn's charts, the platform is now offering the ability to copy and share the URL for charts. A few cautionary notes: the URLs are ridiculously long, so you'll want to use a URL shortener. Also, the recipient must have access to the ad account, or he/she won't be able to open the link.  

3.) Ability to change views

While not quite up to the customizable columns offered by Facebook ad reporting, LinkedIn is now allowing users to change the view (metrics) shown for reporting purposes. Views include:

• Performance: Impressions, clicks, CTR, Bid, CPM, and conversions (you'll need to install the LinkedIn conversion tracking pixel to get conversion information).
   
• Engagement: Similar to the performance view, but shows comments, shares, follows and other social actions rather than conversion data.
   
• Conversions & Leads: Also similar to performance, but with reduced bid information and enhanced metrics on cost per conversion and value of conversions.
   
• Sponsored InMail: Spend, sends, opens, clicks, open rate, and other data that is pertinent to an email campaign.
   
• Video: Similar to performance data, but rather than measuring clicks, the video view measures views, view rate, and percentage of video viewed. 
   
• Settings: Shows the spend as compared to budget and bid, as well as the campaign's start and end date.

LinkedIn is saying that it will offer the ability to customize columns in its reports later this year, as well as the ability to receive automatic reports by email. Meanwhile, its improved reporting abilities can help you understand the effectives of your campaigns more easily than in the past. 

Photo Credit: Adobe Stock 

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