Ep 140 – LinkedIn Ads Dwell Time – What it is and How to Benchmark Your Campaigns | The LinkedIn Ads Show
Show Resources
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Show Notes: Episode Summary
In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox dives into the newly introduced metric, dwell time, and explores its implications for LinkedIn advertisers. AJ provides an in-depth analysis of what dwell time is, how it’s measured, and shares valuable benchmarks to help you understand and improve your ad performance.
Key Discussion Points:
- Introduction to Dwell Time:
- Explanation of what dwell time is: the average time viewers spend on your ad before scrolling or clicking.
- Importance of dwell time in measuring ad engagement and its role in the “attention economy.”
- New LinkedIn Features:
- Introduction of LinkedIn’s ability to sponsor newsletters.
- Explanation of how to sponsor both company and individual newsletters.
- Introduction of subscription and viral subscription metrics for tracking newsletter performance.
- Connected TV (CTV) Updates:
- Announcement of LinkedIn’s connected TV frequency control.
- Importance of managing ad frequency to avoid viewer fatigue.
- Dwell Time Calculation:
- Detailed explanation of how LinkedIn calculates dwell time based on ad impressions with more than 50% visibility.
- Applicability of dwell time to various ad formats, including newsfeed ads, LinkedIn Audience Network campaigns, and connected TV.
- Benchmarks and Insights:
- Benchmark data on average dwell times for different ad formats and objectives:
- Newsfeed ads: 2.68 seconds
- LinkedIn Audience Network ads: 17.5 seconds
- Connected TV ads: 23.55 seconds
- Single image ads: 4.76 seconds
- Thought Leader Ads: 3-5 seconds
- Highest dwell time for job applicant objectives, followed by video views.
- Lead generation objective with the lowest dwell time at 2.7 seconds.
- Benchmark data on average dwell times for different ad formats and objectives:
- Practical Applications:
- How to find and use dwell time metrics in Campaign Manager.
- AJ’s tips on incorporating dwell time into ad performance analysis alongside other metrics like click-through rates.
- AJ’s thoughts on why LinkedIn may have set different dwell time thresholds for paid and organic videos.
- Community and Resources:
- Invitation to join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to courses, expert advice, and weekly group calls.
- Encouragement for listeners to subscribe, leave reviews, and connect with AJ for further questions and feedback.
Call to Action: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community to deepen your expertise and engage with other LinkedIn Ads professionals. Subscribe to the podcast for weekly insights, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts to show your support.
Review and Connect: Listeners are invited to leave reviews, send questions or feedback via email at podcast@b2linked.com, or message AJ directly on LinkedIn. AJ’s DMs are open for any inquiries and suggestions.
This episode provides understanding into the new dwell time metric and learn how to leverage it for better ad performance on LinkedIn.
Show Transcript
I’ve got a hot new pickup line for you LinkedIn Ads geeks. Are you a LinkedIn Ad? Because my dwell time on you just went through the roof. That’s right. We’re talking about dwell time on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey hey hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I’m AJ Wilcox. I’m the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show, and I’m thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers to evolve through mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status.
As you may know, LinkedIn recently released a new metric for advertisers to better analyze their performance. It’s called dwell time, and honestly, it’s great. Today we’re covering what it is, how it’s measured, and as a bonus here at the end, we’ll also share some benchmarks so you can see how your ads are stacking up.
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.
B2Linked is the ad agency, 100 percent dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been since 2014, you know, back before it was cool. We build custom strategies for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team. You won’t get a cookie cutter approach or standard account templates from us. I’m a car guy. So I like this analogy. We provide Ferrari level results for the price of a Honda. If you’d like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn Ads, schedule your free discovery call at b2Linked.com/discovery.
Alright, first off in the news, LinkedIn is rolling out the ability to sponsor LinkedIn newsletters. In past episodes, I’ve mentioned that I’ve seen the ability to sponsor a LinkedIn article, and I thought that that was actually for this, for sponsoring newsletters. Turns out, you couldn’t actually sponsor a newsletter then. That’s what this release is for. This will be available in three objectives. Brand awareness, engagement, and lead generation. Which, with lead generation, this is cool. You can actually gate these behind a lead gen form. For those of you who have a LinkedIn newsletter, this is actually really cool, because with newsletters, you can see who it is who’s subscribed to your newsletter, but you can’t get their data out, like an email address for subscribing, but when you add a lead generation form, you can.
Currently, it’s only for the ad format, single image ad. If you want to try this out, here’s how it works. If you’re sponsoring a company newsletter, what you do is you set up your campaign, hit next to go to the ad section. Then you want to hit Browse Existing Content, then click Company Page, and then you’ll get to see any of your company page posts that we’re promoting the newsletter, and you can choose that to sponsor. If this is for an individual’s newsletter, though, the process is a little bit different. It acts like a Thought Leader Ad. So you get past the campaign into the ads. Same as before. Click Browse Existing Content. This time you do LinkedIn members. You choose the member who’s hosting the newsletter. And then you can sponsor it once you have their permission. This becomes a Thought Leader Ad.
I’ve really liked LinkedIn newsletters. They seem to perform really well. And I I’d actually love to hear from any of you. If any of you are putting dollars behind sponsoring them, I’d love to hear what the results look like. So reach out to me, my DMs are open.
If you look under columns engagement in campaign manager, you’ll notice that we have two bright shiny new metrics. You’ll see subscription and viral subscription to track the subscriptions that happen because of your paid ad efforts.
Also in the news, we haven’t talked a whole lot about connected TV or LinkedIn’s CTV offering. I’m going to save that all for a future episode. Something that we got that’s really cool is we now have connected TV frequency control.Your frequency is the number of times a member account has been shown a specific ad or a specific campaign. It’s great to have frequency because you want to keep reminding people and stay in their long term memory. But you also don’t want to show something so often that they get sick of it. With CTV, you could imagine if it’s every commercial break, they see your ad. You could see people getting a little fed up and maybe not appreciating you as an advertiser as much.You’ll now be able to select the maximum number of impressions that each user can see within a specific timeframe.
I wanted to shout someone out here, Josh Silverman. He’s a Social Media and Digital Coordinator at Pontoon Solutions. He left us a review here on the podcast and I wanted to share it with you. He said, “As I’ve grown more in my LinkedIn demand general, I followed the newsletter and the podcast more and more closely, such great insights and advice in each episode. Thanks for helping people like me along. It can be such a valuable platform with the right tools and guidance.”Josh, thank you so much for sharing that. I’m so happy to hear that the content that I helped participate in is helping you in your role and you are achieving true pro status. Excited to have you as a listener. All right. So everyone else, do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? You can message me on LinkedIn or email us at podcast@b2linked.com. You can send text or preferably attach a link to a voice recording from you, and I can play them right here on the show, which I’m happy to keep you anonymous as well. I definitely want to feature you.
Alright, with all that being said, let’s hit it. The topic at hand is dwell time. What is it? Put simply, it’s the average amount of time that viewers of your ads have your ad on their screen before scrolling by or clicking. A longer dwell time shows your audience is likely more engaged with your ads. A shorter dwell time may signal that your audience is scrolling right by and it’s not catching their attention.
So why is dwell time important? I’m quoting LinkedIn here. They’ve mentioned how important it is for brands to compete for attention in what they call the attention economy. They calculate attention by using dwell time, this new metric, and it’s an important factor in influencing attitudinal metrics, specifically awareness, recall, and whether you recommend a brand. And then for me, I just have to say, dwell time is one additional metric that we can use to quantify how our ads are doing. If we have something like click through rate, that’s great, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story. This in addition, it opens up a lot more doors.
Alright, so where can you find it? If you have access to it in your campaign manager, you can go to columns and choose either engagement or video. Both of those dropdowns have the new dwell time metric.
At the time of recording, it looks like about half of my accounts have access to dwell time. So you may not have it yet, but chances are it’s rolling out quickly. And by the time you actually hear this, because this is going to be, I don’t know, a week out, chances are you either have it or you’re about to have it.
If you’re like me, your first question here is going to be, all right, how is this calculated? What is the metric that I’m actually looking at? The way it works is for every impression of your ad, LinkedIn measures the total time that a member spent with the ad more than 50 percent on their screen. The platform then averages that number across all paid ad impressions, giving you an average dwell time in number of seconds on your ads, campaigns, and even campaign groups.
All of the newsfeed ad formats have dwell times that are being calculated. This includes all of the ads, as well as LinkedIn audience network campaigns, and connected TV. We don’t actually have published dwell times yet for lead gen forms, but LinkedIn assures us that it’s coming. It might just take a quarter or two.
When I heard that dwell time was coming out, I started thinking about, okay, where does this actually sit in the metrics? How do I think about it? Where do I position it in terms of how do I know what’s working and what’s not? When I share data with clients, I’m going to show impressions, clicks, spend. Then before I show click through rate, I’m also going to have dwell time. Your click through rate shows the people who are actually interested enough to click. But dwell time is going to give us data on how much consideration went into the ads, eand is ven giving us insight onto the consideration that went in by those who didn’t even end up clicking.
Even if an ad has a low click through rate, I would still argue that there is lots of value to advertisers if there is a higher dwell time on an ad.
We also see quite often when someone sees an ad, a lot of times they won’t click it, they’ll go open up another browser tab and navigate to you directly or go and Google your brand and get there organically. And even if they don’t click, there’s still a lot of value in having someone look at that ad, and building that higher level of awareness, and building it into their long term memory, hopefully.
As I’ve been researching for this episode, I also noticed that you can actually see the metrics for dwell time in campaign manager right now. But if you go to export the data to CSV, it’s not available unfortunately. I have no clue when that’s going to be available, but I hope sooner than later. It’s also not available through the API yet. For those of you data geeks who care.
This whole dwell time conversation started something for me in the back of my mind. As an aside, have you ever wondered why LinkedIn chose a two second dwell time on a video ad to call that a view? But for organic video, a view is only when someone has watched for at least three seconds? I’m gonna take a wild guess here that it’s because LinkedIn had access to dwell time long before they thought about giving it to us as a measurable metric here in our LinkedIn Ads.
I would bet that the average video on the platform at the time had about a two second dwell time, and LinkedIn realized that if they weren’t charging advertisers until members watched until three seconds, they wouldn’t make as much money. So they changed the definition of a view for advertisers to be at two seconds. Which would trigger a charge for the average member. If that’s right, personally, I think it’s a little slimy. I do wish that organic and paid were judged the same way with the same metrics.
All right, now to what I think you’ve been waiting for is the benchmarks. I got access to some internal LinkedIn benchmark data, and I wanted to share some of the interesting tidbits. I published all of it inside the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community last week. So if you’re interested and want to see more, definitely go check out the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community.
First off, we have the news feed.
The average news feed ad has a dwell time of 2. 68 seconds. And this actually echoes pretty closely what I see in our own accounts. But if your news feed is on the LinkedIn Audience Network, then it averages 17. 5 seconds. This makes sense, because the majority of the LinkedIn Audience Network ads Show up on content or in apps where people are looking at the page and spending a good deal of time on the page. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking at your ad that whole time.
Probably not. They’re probably trying to avoid it. But we understand why the LinkedIn audience network times are going to be longer. We also have a benchmark on connected TV, and this makes sense that it’s longer than the LinkedIn audience network because it’s non skippable. The average is 23. 55 seconds. And I would imagine that the average length of a connected TV ad is around 23 seconds. I know you can go as short as seven and As long as I actually don’t know the total length.
Then jumping into more specifics of ad formats and objectives. Single image ads have an average of 4. 76 seconds. Now you’ll notice that is longer than the 2. 68 seconds that I mentioned were average across non LAN and non CTV newsfeed. And I think that’s the reason that this is longer. I suspect that all of this benchmark data that I have, if it doesn’t specifically break out LAN, CTV, and just newsfeed, it’s probably averaging LAN together with newsfeed. Which, Newsfeed at 2. 6 seconds, LAN at 17. 5. When you average those, the numbers are going to be quite a bit higher than just Newsfeed. Thought Leader Ads also aren’t mentioned in the benchmarks, but on my account, I’m seeing averages between about 3 to 5 seconds of dwell time. for any thought leader ad. And this makes sense to me. We definitely get more consideration when it’s a human on a post versus a company.
Some other interesting tidbits that I found in the benchmark data. Dwell time is highest for the job applicant objective. This makes sense because if you’re considering a job, You’re probably gonna think about it a little bit harder, read all of the requirements and skills required and all of that.
Next objective is video views, which also makes sense, if someone is watching video and LinkedIn knows that they tend to watch more video, of course their dwell time’s gonna be a little higher.
The lead generation objective currently has the lowest dwell time. And that’s at 2. 7 seconds. So, even if LinkedIn’s not going to give us dwell times for lead gen forms, at least they put it in the benchmark data.
I also thought it was interesting. Document ads have a 2. 74 second average dwell time, which you’ll note is lower than single image ads. But I suspect that’s because single image ads are available for LAN and document ads aren’t.
If it were only measuring ads that were not across the audience network, only on LinkedIn, I would bet that Document Ads would have a higher dwell time than single image ads. I think this is probably a weakness in the benchmark calculations. With Document Ads, there’s just more to see. There’s more reason to keep it on your screen longer. That would make sense.
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