[Masterclass] 7 - Optimizing Your Campaigns Analytics and Performance Tracking

You're listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio, the podcast dedicated to exploring and mastering LinkedIn advertising, with your host, Anthony Blatner from Speedwork.

Hello. Hello and welcome to episode seven of the LinkedIn ads masterclass. So far in this masterclass, we've discussed many of the getting started topics, from strategy to planning and launching your campaigns. So today we're going to be taking all that good hard work you've done and then work on optimizing your campaigns and so you can squeeze the best performance out of them. So today we'll be covering optimizations, including analytics and performance tracking. Now, campaigns can create a lot of data. It can be difficult to sort through and figure out what you should be focusing on and what you don't need to focus on. For example, you might be asking yourself, is my CPM or my CPC more important? Or what's a good ctr or what's the best way to bid? We'll be covering all that and more in today's episode, so let's go ahead and dive in. First, let's start by talking about analytics and performance tracking. As you plan and analyze your campaigns, you need to be able to visualize your funnel to identify the weak points that you need to focus on. And it starts with getting those stats out there that you can see the different metrics at different stages in your funnel to know how people are progressing. This starts with asking questions like, are you getting traffic or are you getting the right traffic? Asking, is that traffic engaging? Is that traffic? Clicking and moving on to the next step on your website, is that traffic converting? After that, are these conversions or these opportunities progressing into sales? How much revenue are these sales creating? And then being able to trace back the top and bottom performers and identify trends from all that data so that you can make the right optimizations and improve the overall performance of your account. All right, so that's some ways to think about it. Now, how do you do it? First is inside LinkedIn Campaign Manager. To start, I recommend having custom columns set up so you can analyze your campaigns based on the different objectives that your different campaigns might have. First, I recommend breaking your funnel into a couple different segments. Usually you want to have your top of funnel campaigns or your cold campaigns that are working on prospecting and bringing in new traffic. And then you want to have your retargeting or your bottom funnel campaigns that are focused on getting people to take a conversion action and then maybe even next steps after that conversion action. So you might break up your funnel in many different ways. Your campaigns can have different objectives. You might even go to top of funnel and middle of funnel and bottom of funnel groupings. But consider how you're segmenting your different campaigns and what stats you want to analyze in each of them. So when I think about a top of funnel campaign, I'm focused on engagement stats. Those campaigns should be prospecting and bringing in new quality traffic. I'm looking at things like CPM CPC cost per view. I want to know the efficiency in the reach and the engagement that I'm getting that I can then go retarget those engagements later. So I want to get the cheapest engagements that I can then retarget later. For middle funnel, that's getting people to drive to a demo or a trial type of action there. I'm looking at my cost per lead or cost per conversion stats around those conversion points. So I want to optimize and choose the best ads and campaigns that are driving the cheapest cost per lead and cost per conversion. For the bottom funnel campaigns, that's then taking people from this demo or trial step and nurturing them into a sales action. I want to focus on consumption metrics to make sure that these bottom of funnel opportunities are watching or reading or clicking on the content that I'm presenting them. And then I also want to be integrating my CRM and offline conversions or the conversion API to monitor conversions and sales data getting pushed back to see if these opportunities that I'm retargeting are actually closing and how much they're closing. For now, my disclaimer on analyzing LinkedIn performance data is to keep in mind the date range that you're looking at and the sample set size that you're analyzing, because LinkedIn performance data can fluctuate a lot day to day. For example, Tuesday to Thursday are the most active days in the platform, while Mondays and Fridays are a little bit less active because Mondays people are busy digging out from email from over the weekend and then Friday people are leaving the office early. So if you're comparing a hundred dollars spent on a Saturday versus a hundred dollars spent on a Wednesday, you'll likely have very different performance stats. And also when comparing to Facebook and Google, those platforms tend to have smoother delivery and performance over time. LinkedIn, since it has less traffic in comparison and higher CPCs and CPMs, we tend to see a lot more pronounced fluctuations on LinkedIn. So takeaway here is to be careful not to read too much into a small sample set. And when you're analyzing data, make sure you're looking at a large Enough sample set so you're not making the wrong decisions. Now, outside of LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you're going to want a way to associate your traffic with your sales data so that you can ask questions like how much have you spent? And how much revenue has that created? You want to be able to build a custom dashboard or report that associates your LinkedIn campaign data to your sales. Sales or CRM data. Systems like HubSpot do this very well out of the box for you. Otherwise, if you don't have HubSpot, I recommend looking into a custom solution like Google's Looker Studio or one of the many reporting solutions out there. With these you can pull in your LinkedIn data and you can pull in your CRM data to make associations and calculate stats like cost per meeting, cost per opportunity and cost per acquisition and therefore calculating your overall ROI. Finally, LinkedIn has a relatively new report called the revenue attribution report, aka the RAR. This is set up and run through LinkedIn Business Manager and connects your Salesforce CRM. And using this you can associate LinkedIn spend data to sales data in Salesforce. Tracking and attribution can definitely be a tricky topic in B2B Sals because while your campaigns might have brought in person A at a company, that person may have then pass the opportunity over to their VP or somebody else at the company who then continue the discussion and then finally close the deal at the end. So tracking an attribution can be difficult because it might involve multiple stakeholders and it might not be a linear tracking from start to finish. So this is a handy report because it takes the very high level of what sales have closed in Salesforce and relate that to impact that LinkedIn could have had to those opportunities in those sales. So this will output the pipeline amounts and amounts and then calculate your ROI of your LinkedIn advertising. Currently, the RAR only supports Salesforce at the moment, but LinkedIn has hinted at other CRMs that will be supported in the future. All right, so that's tracking and analytics. Next, let's start talking about optimizations. First, let's talk about understanding bidding strategies. The first part about bidding is bid type and that's either going to be maximum delivery, cost cap or manual bidding. Max delivery is the default but usually the most expensive option on your campaigns. It does what it says it'll do and it'll make sure that it spends your full budget, but it will bid whatever it has to to spend that budget. So we'll discuss shortly the scenarios when max delivery can be advantageous, but Very often you might end up spending more than you intend to or bidding more than you intend to. So instead of max delivery, I usually recommend starting your campaigns with manual bidding. When launching a new campaign, I like to set my initial bid at about 10 to 20% below the lowest suggested bid range to see if we can beat that range out of the gates. If the campaign doesn't fully spend its budget within the first couple days, then I'll step that up by 10 to 20% after a day or two and continue that process until I really find the sweet spot for that campaign. Now, manual bidding is a CPC or cost per click or CPV cost per view bidding system. And in essence you're buying a click or you're buying a view. Now jump back to max delivery. That is actually a CPM bid under the hood where you're actually buying a group of impressions. So the times when max delivery can be advantageous is when you have a very high CTR or view rate. If your CTR is high enough, it's better to buy a group of impressions and then get all the clicks you possibly can from that group of impressions. For a very simple example, let's say I have an audience that costs either $10 CPC or a hundred dollars CPM. Say I have a hundred dollars budget and one campaign is getting a 0.5 CTR and the other campaign is getting a 2% CTR. So take Campaign A with the 5% CTR. If I'm using manual bidding with a $100 budget and I'm bidding $10 CPC, I'm going to get 10 clicks, $100 budget, $10 CPC, I get 10 clicks and it took about 2,000 impressions to get that. Based on that CTR, which produces a $50 CPM cost per thousand. Again, a hundred dollar budget, 2,000 impressions and I got 10 clicks. So in this case it's better to bid by CP CPC. Now say my CTR is 2%. With manual bidding, I'm still going to get my 10 clicks for $10 if I'm if that's what I'm bidding for $100. But it'll spend it over 500 impressions because people are clicking more and aka 200 CPM. So now I'm getting less impressions for the same amount of clicks for my CPC bidding. Now with max delivery on that campaign, I would be spending a hundred dollars. And with a hundred dollars CPM, 100 would get me a thousand impressions. And with a 2% CTR I then get 20 clicks. So I get twice as many Clicks for the same amount of budget. All right, that's a pretty simple example, but it illustrates the point of when max delivery can be advantageous. So the point that you usually see that happen is usually around 1% CTR and that if you're getting a 1% or higher CTR, you can then switch to max delivery and achieve better performance results. That said, do watch your campaigns, because part of max delivery is that it forces your campaigns to spend evenly throughout the day. So often you'll see CTRs decrease at night, and on weekends your overall CTR will decrease. So make sure that your overall CTR does stay above 1% to make sure you're actually achieving that performance advantage. So a lot of times when you switch to max delivery, you might see your overall CTR drop, but make sure that overall CTR stays above that 1%. All right, so that's manual bidding and maximum delivery bidding. Last but not least is cost cap bidding. Cost cap doesn't get much love and I hear very few people using it. But cost cap is also a CPM bid under the hood, but it does come with bidding controls on top of it. Back to max delivery, there is no bidding control, so you're telling LinkedIn to bid as much as it possibly needs to fully spend your budget, which can get quite high. So with cost cap, you're saying bid by cpm, but try to stay within this target. Cost caveats here is that cost cap does require more spend so that I could have that data to make those optimizations for you. And also it's not a strict bid where I often see the effective CPC or CPM be higher than my target, but it does do a better job of staying within my guidelines than a pure max delivery does. On the whole, for higher spending campaigns, I have seen it to be an effective option in between max delivery and manual bidding for high CTR and high spending campaigns. The second part here is bid amount when you're using manual bidding or cost cap bidding. So bidding is usually a balance between spend and efficiency because if you bid too low, your campaign won't spend and if you bid too high, you may be overpaying for your results. Ideally, you want to bid the least amount possible that still fully spends your budget to drive as many results within that budget as possible. So optimizing based on spend is usually the first thing that you do if your campaign is overspending. Decrease your bid and test it. Then again the next day. Do you get more results for the same amount of budget if your campaigns are underspending then increase your bid and test the next day and see if you then do fully spend. Now I've seen a lot of advice out there that says don't be afraid to bid high because LinkedIn is an auction system and you'll only pay $0.01 higher than the next closest bid. While that's correct, it's usually given in the wrong context. When you bid high, you're allowing your bid to compete with the other high bidders that are out there. Those high bidders may not be targeting everyone in your audience. You may have gaps of opportunities. Those high bidders may have low quality scores and you don't need to bid high to beat them. And those high bidders may run out of their budget as the day progresses. So it is possible to beat them on many different fronts to achieve better costs. Back to Bidding the next thing to look at is your CTR for sponsored content ads. The LinkedIn average CTR for sponsored content is 0.4%, so if your CTR is below that, you usually have to bid in and above the recommended amount for your ads to be seen. If your ctr is between 0.4 and 0.8 or so, you can usually bid in the lower end of that suggested range. If your CTR is above 0.8%, then you can usually start to bid under that lowest suggested range. And for the higher and higher CTR goes, usually the lower and lower you can bid. But again, if you are over 1%, consider switching to max delivery bidding to see if that helps achieve better costs. All right, Cost controls are the controls on your money in Next, let's look at targeting optimizations as to who you're reaching. So part three here is Demographic optimizations. When your campaign runs, you're serving ads to an audience pool of people. In that pool there may be lots of different types of people. For example, you may have combined multiple job titles and industries and company sizes when you're forming your Personas into one campaign, but it's not likely that 100% of those people are going to perform exactly the same. Some segments may perform better than others, so as your campaign runs, it's helpful to know which are the top performing and which are the bottom performing of those segments. So you can choose to adjust your targeting towards the best performing segment. The easiest way to see this is by selecting a campaign and then selecting the demographic button in Campaign Manager where you can then choose to display options like job function, job title, industry seniority, company size, and country. This view is okay, but I prefer to pull the data out of the LinkedIn API, where I can then analyze CTRs, CPCs, and cost per conversions for those different facets. Then you can identify any underperforming segments. For example which ones have the highest cost per conversion? Maybe those ones I want to knock out and remove from my targeting or even exclude in the future. On the flip side, this also may help you identify new opportunities by identifying a specific segment that might be performing over and above all the others. I like to analyze these facets for both an account on a whole and then for related campaigns. Be careful not to analyze too many different types of campaigns together, as certain audiences may be more or less interested in certain content. So identify which content they're most interested in, but don't let disinterest in one offer throughout the whole audience. Next, let's jump over to ad optimizations. The first thing we'll look at is ctrs and ad spend distribution. It's common that one ad may receive most of the ad spend and impressions from the LinkedIn algorithm, so keep an eye on your ad spend distribution. This can happen if one ad has a much higher CTR than all the others. So if your campaign is underperforming, be careful that it's not just one ad that's not working. Make sure that you're testing the different ads that you've created. If the campaign is only focusing on one ad, you can either pause that ad if it's already received enough spend to test it out, or you can change your ad rotation to rotate evenly. You can do this by clicking on the gear icon in the ads management page. Now, as you analyze your ads, the first thing I look at is ctrs. If ctrs are too low, that's an indication that the audience is not interested in that ads. You may need to make your ads more appealing or better align your audience targeting with your ads. The second thing I look at is conversions, conversion rate and cost per conversion. Once I'm getting engagements in the form of views or clicks, are those people then moving on to the next step, whether that's visit my website or submit a form. If I have a good engagement rate, that means my ad creative is appealing. But if I'm not getting conversions, then they may not be interested in the offer or CTA or maybe misaligned with my audience targeting again. Another indicator I look at is frequency, which is the number of impressions per user or how many ads has this person seen. There tends to be a sweet spot for frequency the first time a person sees an ad from a company, they don't know anything about that company and they're unlikely to engage. After a few more impressions, that person may stop to read the ad or click through to the website. After a couple of engagements or clicks, the person may decide to submit a form. But watch out because after a lot of impressions, ad blindness can set in where a person assumes that they've seen or read an ad before and they don't even stop to investigate it. So that can really hurt your CTRs if people are just scrolling by your ads without reading them. So given that ad frequency has a sweet spot, usually I find that sweet spot is about 3 to 5 frequency for conversion objectives. But just keep an eye on your ccrs and cost per conversion as well. For brand awareness and nurturing objectives, that frequency can be a lot higher because you want to make sure you're delivering that message and make sure it's being read. The last topic to cover here are LinkedIn's quality scores. Now, LinkedIn Campaign Manager has a few internal quality and relevant scores that we can't see, but there is a campaign quality score statistic that we can see by exporting your campaigns from Campaign Manager. And when you do select the report type campaign performance in that exported spreadsheet, there'll be a quality score column with a value from 0 to 10. The higher your campaign's quality score, the lower your costs you'll receive from LinkedIn, and the lower your score, the higher the cost you'll have to pay. Just like all the ads platforms, these social networks want to show ads that their members want to see, and they don't want to show ads that their members dislike. And this is primarily calculated through engagement rates. The LinkedIn docs say that this is based on CTR, but I've had internal reps tell me it's based on more engagement rate stats, not just CTR by itself, and I do find this to be true in my own experience. So ads that are getting a lot of comments and likes will boost your quality score, and ads that are not getting engagements will lower your quality score. Also, if your ads are getting reported, that can hurt your performance. So just use this as another indicator to analyze your campaigns. All right, so we covered a lot of optimizations today. I hope you're able to squeeze even more performance out of your campaigns using these tips. Here's a quick recap of everything that we covered today. Number one, visualize your funnel using a reporting tool like HubSpot or Google's Looker Studio so that you know what optimizations you have to make where number two, use manual bidding for low CTRs under 1% and then use maximum delivery or cost cap bidding for high CTRs above 1%. Number three is to optimize your targeting by analyzing your campaign's demographic performance stats to identify the top and bottom performing segments. Number four is to optimize your ads for engagement rate and conversion rate so that you're focusing on the top performing ads. Number five is monitor your campaign and ad frequency to avoid ad blindness and saturation setting in. And then number six is to keep an eye on your campaign's quality scores as they run. All right, so that's what we got for you today. The next episode will be the final of the masterclass, so be sure to tune in for the most advanced strategies. Take your campaigns to the next level. My name is Anthony Blattner from Speedwork. I hope you're crushing it on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.

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