Social media platforms have seen tremendous growth in sales with paid advertisements. Being a haven for B2B marketers, over 65% have considered paid marketing an excellent tactic for boosting sales. Marketing experts have witnessed how social media platforms have outgrown their overall advertising aspects. LinkedIn’s second most crucial marketing channel has seen a 22% increase.
LinkedIn allows marketers to expand their community by targeting the most relevant and potential prospects based on job title, industry, and company size. All it needs is a solid strategy and an objective-oriented approach to strengthening your efforts.
Hey B2b marketer, get ready for robust insights and ever-growing quality leads.
LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategy - LinkedIn Analytics.
LinkedIn provides you with an option to converse directly with decision-makers and clients. Implementing a profound strategy that involves all the ideas that will help your profile gain maximum visibility, credibility, and recognition is crucial. Out of many strategic approaches, understanding LinkedIn Analytics is one of the leading tools to scale your leads and their quality.
To scale LinkedIn ads successfully, it’s essential to understand valuable insights into your business performance. It helps you determine the most effective activities to drive engagement and conversions, make better-informed decisions, and plan accordingly.
Now the real game begins!
How to Test LinkedIn Ads Effectively
Firstly, you need to know the best-performing ads for your business and your target audience. That means you have to allow time for testing before you can expect to achieve specific outcomes or target costs per result.
Adding to this, you can easily control budgets at the campaign level. Although LinkedIn recommends using lifetime rather than daily budgets for more efficient ad delivery, for every new test, you need a minimum of $10/day for at least ten days.
What’s the best way to collect data to optimize and scale campaigns? Let’s look at three best practices for testing LinkedIn ads.
Test LinkedIn Bidding Strategies
LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three bidding strategies with different levels of control over your spending for each result. For an effective kick-off, opting for automated bid strategies and shifting to manual bids is smart.
Maximum delivery is the most automated option that skips the need for a manual bid and delivers the most results, given your ad budget.
The Cost cap allows you to set your desired maximum CPR and delivers as many results as possible at or below that amount.
Manual bidding offers to set the preferred bid for each click, and with Enhanced Manual Bidding, LinkedIn can boost your request by up to 45% to maximize results.
As you test LinkedIn ads, I suggest using automated bidding and ad delivery with either minimum or medium control, such as maximum delivery or cost cap, for maximized results. Later, you can use the data you collect to set more realistic cost caps or manual bids as you scale.
Try Various Audience Targeting Options
First, understand the audience because it’s unique. Because LinkedIn has a lot of valuable insights to offer – from job titles and functions to interests and companies – that are vital to building a target audience. But one thing, it may tempt you to target narrowly and zero in on your audience; you should pay attention to the fact that small audiences can lead to inefficient delivery.
Pro-tip, it’s a good idea to uncheck the ‘Enable Audience Expansion’ box at the campaign level to avoid automated audience expansion, target the exact audience you’ve built, and collect more valuable data.
Create Split Tests
LinkedIn Campaign Manager doesn’t come up with a built-in A/B testing tool, but you still need to run LinkedIn advertising campaigns against each other and compare results. We can name it a manual A/B campaign setup.
Initially, let the A and B versions run simultaneously to drive good data. Here, LinkedIn recommends split-testing campaigns for a minimum of two weeks and comparing the results before making definitive decisions. Be sure to stay close to your campaign objective. For a lead generation campaign, focus on the number of leads and the CPL. Added insights can be impressions, clicks, and other engagements but the metric that drives your decisions should align with the end goal of your campaign.
Strategically Plan for the LinkedIn Ads Learning Phase
LinkedIn ads should start driving optimal results as soon as you launch the campaign. But like most advertising platforms, LinkedIn ads also require several stages before efficient delivery. They understand your goal as you test and review results are essential to avoid ongoing optimization issues. Let’s check out more details on LinkedIn’s learning phase for ads.
The Review Time
After successfully passing a 24 hours review period to ensure that the ad adheres to LinkedIn Advertising Policies, LinkedIn ads enter the learning phase. During this time, LinkedIn figured the efficient ad delivery along with optimizing results per the campaign’s objectives, creatives, audiences, and other factors.
Learn & let it learn
Since LinkedIn automates ads’ optimization ad delivery, performance can be unpredictable. On closer campaign results monitoring, you might see a day of meager CTR followed by a day of extraordinarily high CTRs. But here, LinkedIn’s learning phase continues and continues for every active campaign -unlike other advertising platforms.
Although costs and results shouldn’t fluctuate significantly for the campaign’s lifetime, they can be unpredictable for the campaign’s first week. It’s best to sidestep resetting the learning phase to achieve optimal results while avoiding spiky metrics.
LinkedIn recommends allowing ads to run for at least 15 days before editing or optimizing campaigns. Hence it’s better to wait two weeks before scaling or refining.
How to Optimize Ads and Scale LinkedIn Ad Campaigns
After passing LinkedIn ads through a couple of weeks test period, it’s time to study the extracted data to make informed decisions about scaling your campaigns. Understand the campaign to scale and focus on the Key Results, CTR, & CPR columns. Mostly, marketers want to scale campaigns that have generated the most clicks and results with a cost CPR below the goal. However, changing most elements that appear to reset the LinkedIn ads learning phase can be a good idea to batch edits so you can avoid constantly restarting the learning phase. Let’s study options for scaling up, including increasing ad spending and target audience adjusting.
Increase Campaign Budgets
Increasing the budget seems essential when you want more results from a successful campaign, but I recommend you consider any budget changes carefully. Due to its audience
LinkedIn almost always has a higher CPR than other social media and PPC engines. Thus, making mistakes while scaling can take extra cost, time, and effort.
Scale slowly by increasing the budget by 20% or another relatively conservative amount every few weeks. It helps you to monitor results closely and watch for performance issues. Once you’ve closely monitored the results, you can double the budget or grow it up to 10X. Hence, you don’t have to limit yourself to increasing 20% as you would with Meta ads because the LinkedIn learning phase typically restarts anytime you adjust budgets or bids.
Adjust Campaign Bids
As mentioned, you won’t need to change the bid amount using LinkedIn’s maximum delivery bidding strategy. But revisit your bidding technique as you scale if you’ve opted for a cost cap or a manual bid.
You have a better chance of winning more LinkedIn ad auctions while raising the bid. It helps to increase impressions and improve campaign results. But remember that increasing your bid can cause a faster budget spend, which may result in a constant lead ratio at a dramatically higher cost.
You can use your campaign’s historical CTR and conversion rate to ensure the clicks you’ll get match the goals you set and determine the number of clicks you can get for your budget with your proposed bid.
Strategically Plan for the LinkedIn Ads Learning Phase
Launching your campaign with a narrowly defined audience can turn challenging to achieve the desired as you scale. LinkedIn will ultimately run out of affordable opportunities to deliver your ad, even if your initial audience is at least 50,000 members minimum if your ad impressions decrease while the CPR increases, look at your campaign’s frequency metrics. Here you need to understand your account’s benchmarks and the best results frequency for your business. Let LinkedIn have a larger targeting pool by expanding your audience to decrease the frequency. Also, a lookalike audience can bring up to 15x more powerful performances than the original.
Refine Audience Targeting
The longer your LinkedIn ad campaigns run, the more critical it becomes to refine your audience. Thus, identifying and focusing on highly engaged audiences is a good idea. You can use the audience insights for your campaign to identify the top-performing segments for any movement.
To engage high-intent segments, it’s also a good idea to build retargeting audiences and add them to complementary lower-funnel campaigns. For example, you can retarget people who watched 75% of your video ad or opened your lead gen form.
To get the most-exact audience match, I recommend you retarget based on LinkedIn actions, like video views or lead form interactions. Also, excluding remarketing audiences from your primary campaign is super helpful to avoid over-delivering ads to your most engaged audiences.
Tips for Quality LinkedIn Lead Generation
There are several organic techniques to improve lead generation through LinkedIn. Here I’m dropping my all-time favorites for you.
Build the Right Audience
LinkedIn is a pool of millions of professionals who avoid spam and irrelevant content now and then through their followers. Hence it’s essential to avoid cold messages prattling your product that can sabotage your brand reputation. The best way is to connect to the right audience, be informed about who they are, and introduce yourself professionally.
Personalized Outreach Techniques
LinkedIn lead-generation strategies demand uniqueness to grab you the best deal. Dynamic personalization techniques are the best idea to help you go a long way. Curate messages with a greeting, and add value. Your CTA should be clear and compelling.
Repurposing the Top-Performing Content
Lastly, be courteous and offer the leads something beneficial for them. It can be a content checklist template, free social media calendar, blog post, how-to guide, etc.
Boost your LinkedIn B2B lead generation by repurposing top-performing content with an element of usefulness. It can be trending topics and hot news that are most likely to grab attention on every social media channel, or you can track out the best-performing content through the LinkedIn analytics tool.
Lastly,
Testing, monitoring, and executing -that’s all LinkedIn advertising is about. Initially, it needs a lot of testing and monitoring before, and then you can anticipate getting your desired CPR. But once you unlock the performance, you can quickly scale up your campaigns to get more quality leads while delivering your ads to a bigger target audience.