5 Best Practices to Improve LinkedIn Ad Performance

Struggling to meet your performance goals with your LinkedIn ads? Or simply want to improve performance metrics? You're already on the right track with LinkedIn since it offers unmatched opportunities for B2Bs when it comes to getting in front of your target market and driving optimal results.

Move the needle even further with your LinkedIn ads by implementing these best practices to help lower costs, reach the right audience, optimize performance, and track success.

1. Find Your Lowest CPC Bid

Let's start by identifying ways to lower your costs per click (CPC). LinkedIn's Enhanced CPC Bid, the bidding option we recommend marketers begin with, allows you to bid a designated amount to reach people that LinkedIn has identified as likely to click on your ad.

The goal here is to get the most clicks on your ads at the lowest cost possible. So you want to start by bidding low and gradually increasing your bid, as necessary.

How do you know the lowest amount you can bid?

Inside Tip: Once you've selected "Enhanced CPC Bid" under Bid Type, enter a low dollar amount (i.e. $2.00) and LinkedIn will flag an error and showcase the lowest amount you can bid.

Start with this bid amount and gradually increase the bid if you're not seeing results. This will ensure you are paying the lowest cost per click possible to reach your target audience.

2. Leverage CRM Lists To Retarget Prospects (& Don’t Let Them Expire)

Now, let’s look at retargeting audiences. Building a retargeting audience based off a CRM list is a great way to stay top of mind with warm prospects and leads. To do so, you must upload a CRM list to LinkedIn and create what is called a Matched Audience.

When creating an audience off a CRM list, it can take on average 24 hours for the uploaded list to match against LinkedIn profiles to generate a retargeting segment. Once the Matched Audience is created, it must be used in a LinkedIn advertising campaign within 30 days or the audience will expire. Meaning you would have to wait for LinkedIn to re-match your list, possibly delaying the launch of your ads.

3. Properly Track Conversions

As marketers, you know conversion tracking is essential to measuring the success of your advertising campaign. When setting up a conversion in LinkedIn, you must define how you would like to track your conversion. We recommend using your site-wide Insight Tag to track conversions based on when people visit a webpage. While many marketers may lean towards tracking an EXACT URL, some users may enter on an unsecured connection, and therefore their conversion would not be tracked.

To avoid this from happening, choose “contains” and input the later part of the URL, cutting it off before the UTM parameters.

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4. Seamlessly A/B Test Ads

We can’t stress enough the importance of A/B testing, but understand it can be time consuming to create multiple ad variations to carry out A/B tests.

Save time by leveraging the “Duplicate” feature to seamlessly make an exact copy of your original ad, and then change one element at a time, such as the headline, copy, or image.

IMPORTANT: If you use HubSpot -- make sure you add a unique content term to each ad for proper tracking in HubSpot.

5. Check Demographics To Ensure Your Ads Are Reaching The Right Audience

Once you have defined your targeting criteria and you've launched your campaign, you want to ensure your ads are ACTUALLY reaching your target audience. You should be checking the Demographics regularly to see who your ads are reaching.

To do this, navigate to the Campaigns tab, and select your desired campaign. Once there, click the blue “Demographic” button at the top.

This will pull up a window that displays the top impressions share, clicks, click-through-rate, conversions, and conversion rate by all of the targeting parameters you set including:

• • Job Function
  • Job Title
  • Job Seniority
  • Company
  • Company Industry
  • Company Size
  • Location
  • Country/Region
  • County

If you see that impressions/clicks are coming through that are unrelated to your targeting, exclude them from your targeting criteria to ensure your budget is being effectively spent only on the people you want to reach.

If you want to learn more ways to improve your LinkedIn ad performance and leverage LinkedIn fully to support your business goals, check out our 3 part LinkedIn webinar series. In this series, you’ll learn how to conduct targeted outreach, build authority, and fully leverage LinkedIn’s engagement features to build brand, drive traffic, and fill your pipeline.