The Campainless Blog
When it comes to running an effective LinkedIn ads campaign, understanding how to read, interpret and derive insights from your data is instrumental.
You need to know exactly what to look for, where to look for it, what to infer, which conclusions to derive and how to make data-backed decisions accordingly.
In this helpful article, we run through our top tips, tricks and tools for getting the most out of your LinkedIn Ads analytics. And in turn, show you how to start running LinkedIn Ads campaigns like a boss.
There are a bunch of analytics tools embedded within the LinkedIn platform. If you’re wanting to nail you LinkedIn ads analysis, you need to be constantly consulting these features for insight.
All of these views can be accessed from your dashboard. Just log into your account, head to the right hand corner for “Performance” and “Demographics.” For the “Website Demographics” head to “Analyse” on the sidebar to find the relevant drop down. Easy!
While each of these tools can help you monitor and analyze your data, it’s ultimately up to you to translate this data into action, so you need to make sure your own analytics skills are honed and sharp. Luckily you have our trusty 3 steps to consult.
The backbone of any solid analysis is your LinkedIn ads metrics. In order to smash this foundational component out of the park, you need to pick the right metrics for your campaign objective and goals.
For example, if your campaign is for lead gen, there are two obvious metrics you want to be honing your efforts on: Volume of leads and Cost per Lead (CPL). By funneling your attention to these primary data points, and concentrating your efforts here, you can set yourself up to achieve your goals. It’s important to note, you’ll also likely have a bunch of supplementary metrics to keep an eye on e.g. lead completion rate, spend and clicks.
Regardless of what you’re trying to achieve, knowing your primary and secondary metrics and being able to monitor them effectively will set you up for a successful analysis.
On top of making decisions about your performance metrics, in order to become a pro analyst you need to have a firm grasp on your key demographics.
This is an additional layer of insight that LinkedIn offers, and in order to have the most powerful, nuanced analysis in the palm, you need to be on top of it.
Is it seniority that is very important to you? Do you want to see which international markets are performing better? Does your boss want you to pay close attention to company size?
Just like choosing your metrics, you want to make a list of all the important demographics that will become a focus in your reporting & analysis. This will help you narrow down your efforts when it comes time to analyze.
On top of knowing what you’re looking for i.e. metrics and demographics, you need to make sure you’re looking in the right places. When it comes to in-platform sweet spots, the 3 places we identified earlier are the ones you should be dipping your beak in and out of.
Each of these dashboards allows you to get a quick sense check on performance and audience insights. However, there are also a bunch of other reporting tools you can utilise to get more detailed, customized reporting or comparison to other platforms that can add another level of ease or sophistication to your analysis.
Depending on your specific needs, investing in an external platform might be a smart move. Examples of powerful LinkedIn ads analytics tools include Agency Analytics, Funnel, and Reporting Ninja.
Now that you have a handle on the what and where – you need to be able to get analyzing. From our perspective, the best starting point here is to look for any notable outliers, fluctuations or changes in your data.
It’s worth providing the caveat that it’s typically better to look at a 30 day, 3 month or longer view of performance, rather than day to day, when you’re in analyst mode. This just ensures that any insights you’re deriving aren’t reactive or based on minimal data and you’re not thrown off by daily spikes.
Once you have a decent portion of data, you want to look for areas of disparity or fluctuation. Make a note of the anomalies you’ve flagged and then consider the reasons why that particular phenomenon may be occurring.
A decision tree can be a super helpful resource for analyzing this anomaly and help you diagnose what’s happening / is at the root of it, whether it’s positive or negative. To make an effective tree, you’ll want to have a bunch of scenarios “if this” then check “this” and that means or might mean “this.” The branch visualization makes it an easy process to follow.
Scenario 1
For example, if you aren’t hitting your media spend targets and haven’t hit the budget for three days, it’s probable that your ads are not winning at the auction. This is a likely inference you can draw from the data.
Scenario 2
From a demographic perspective, you might see in your campaign that one job function is responsible for the majority of clicks, and your other target personas are not clicking at all. This suggests that your content / offer / ads are resonating with one segment, and there’s something that isn’t with the others. Again, this is a key insight you might observe.
Now that you have a bunch of insights derived from your analysis, it’s time to make some informed decisions based on your findings.
For example in Scenario 1, you might decide based on your analysis that it would make sense to increase your CPCs by 10% to see if this has an impact on your daily spend. This would be a considered, data-backed decision. While it may not necessarily fix everything, you can tick it off as one optimization action, then go down the list of other options down the line.
In scenario 2, you might decide that while that job function is important you don’t want to alienate other markets. So, you segment and break out the rest of the demographic groups into a separate campaign with targeted messaging.
These are two examples of how effective analysis can be translated into practical actions that have a considerable impact on your campaign performance.
Campainless is a LinkedIn tool that can streamline your LinkedIn analysis. How? It does a lot of the legwork for you by scanning your campaign data, delivering AI-generated insights and recommending actions based off the back of them.
This powerful technology saves you time scouring data and provides a shortcut to ensuring well-optimized, efficient and high-performing campaigns. Register now for early access to see what our LinkedIn Ads optimization platform can do for you.
