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Show Notes: Episode Summary

In this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, AJ Wilcox explores the concept of the Measurement Maturity Index (MMI) introduced by LinkedIn. Here are the main discussion points:

1. Introduction to MMI:
   • Explanation of the Measurement Maturity Index (MMI) as a tool to assess and enhance LinkedIn Ads measurement strategies.
   • The process involves a survey facilitated by a LinkedIn rep, resulting in a score from 1 to 100.
2. MMI Survey Breakdown:
   • Overview of the survey questions covering topics such as sales cycle length, key metrics, attribution windows, decision-making processes, lead scoring, CRM data sharing, attribution methodologies, partnerships, and privacy practices.
   • The survey results in a comprehensive PDF deck highlighting strengths and areas for improvement.
3. MMI Score and Pillars:
   • Detailed explanation of the five pillars that contribute to the MMI score:
     • Signals: Data passed back to the ad platform.
     • Reporting and ROI: Understanding ad performance and effectiveness.
     • Insights: Utilizing audience and content insights.
     • Verification: Ensuring ads are viewed in a safe environment.
     • Experimentation: Running A/B tests and learning from performance impacts.
4. Recommendations and Insights:
   • Insights on how to improve in each pillar, such as using the LinkedIn Insight Tag, offline conversions, clean room data collaboration platforms, A/B testing tools, and verification partners like Integral Ad Sciences and DoubleVerify.
   • Importance of being honest in the survey to receive useful feedback and recommendations.
5. Practical Tips and Personal Experience:
   • AJ’s experience with the MMI process and the benefits of obtaining a score and tailored recommendations.
   • Encouragement to leverage third-party providers for advanced tracking and verification, despite the additional cost.
6. Community and Listener Engagement:
   • Highlighting the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for deeper learning and networking with top LinkedIn Ads professionals.
   • Invitation to join the community, leave reviews, and engage with the podcast through 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.

Listeners interested in optimizing their LinkedIn Ads measurement strategies and gaining actionable insights from industry experts will find this episode particularly valuable.

Show Transcript

Let’s talk about your ad maturity on LinkedIn. No permission slips from a parent necessary. We’re keeping it clean. We’re talking about your measurement maturity index on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey, there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I’m AJ Wilcox. I’m the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show. I’m thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers who want to evolve and master LinkedIn Ads and achieve true pro status. Back in episode 129, it was a recap of the B2Believe event. I mentioned that LinkedIn announced a new study that you could run with your LinkedIn rep. They called it an MMI, or Measurement Maturity Index. I got a chance to go through that process, and I wanted to share with you what it was like, what goes into it, and what the output is, so you can see if it’s worth running for your company.

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 a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team, and you won’t get a cookie cutter approach or some sort of standard account template from us. Since I’m a car guy, I like this analogy. We give Ferrari level results for the price of a Honda. If that sounds interesting and you’d like to explore partnering with us for managing your LinkedIn Ads, schedule your free discovery call today at b2linked.com/discovery.

All right, first off in the news, there’s an update coming to conversation ads that I’m actually kind of excited about. In your conversation ads. LinkedIn is going to start including an extra call to action called Not Interested by default into all the ads. This is gonna happen for all new conversation ads you create or anytime you go and edit an existing one. When a member clicks on the button that says not interested, they can delete or archive the message. And I think what this means for us advertisers, is we are going to keep sending one of these sponsored messages every time someone is eligible. And that could be as soon as every 21 days. So, as soon as someone hits not interested, I think that that means that they won’t be eligible to receive any in the future, which is great, I would much rather not keep sending people messages who don’t want them, because of course, we pay for all of those. What I don’t know is, if LinkedIn is going to count a not interested as a form of negative feedback that will hurt our relevancy score as a brand. That I definitely wouldn’t want to happen. I want people just to opt out and have it not hurt our relevancy scores.

There’s also a new metric that LinkedIn is ramping up right now. I’ve seen it in quite a few accounts, so it’s probably almost fully rolled out. And this is called clicks to member profile. It’s only for thought leader ads because when you’re promoting a thought leader post. There is a member there that someone can click and visit their profile. And this is a column that’s going to be added to the engagement view inside of campaign manager. And it’s going to count anytime someone clicks on the thought leader’s profile or their image or their name from a sponsored ad. LinkedIn Ads expert, Anthony Blattner, who’s in our LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. He shared something that I thought was really cool. It’s news from LinkedIn that we’re going to be able to start adding custom images into the background of our lead gen forms. I think this is a cool update, and Anthony, a huge shout out. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

And this is a great reminder to all of you, if you’re not already a member of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, make sure you come join. This is the kind of insights that you’ll get, weeks before I can even share publicly. You can access the community by going to fanatics.b2linked.com.

And then if you’ve been inside of LinkedIn Campaign Manager in the last week, you’ve probably seen this big black pop up that’s telling you about how the definitions of two metrics are going to start changing. They’re switching this over at the end of July of 2024, and so by the time you hear this, it will already be at least August. So take this as your reminder to go and change any sort of metric definitions that you might keep on hand.

The first definition here that’s changing is your in feed video impressions and clicks will only be reported if they were generated from a video ad that began to play. So the way I understand this, if, for instance, someone ended up seeing your video ad, maybe even clicking on it, but it was before the video started to play, they actually would not count that as an impression or a click on that campaign. Which I think is absolutely great. Those are now interactions that we should presumably get for free, and I don’t want to count metrics unless my video ad was actually playing.

Second metric update is actually something that I’ve been suggesting for a long time, and I’m really excited that LinkedIn rolled this out. When you used to run sponsored messaging campaigns, you would get impressions and clicks. But they lined up with a metric that I don’t think was a good fit. They called impressions the same thing as sends, and they called clicks opens. Well, what’s happening now is those are going to stop coming through as impressions and clicks. They are going to keep coming through what they always have, which is your sends, and your opens, and your clicks are called sponsored messaging clicks. I used to have to do a really complex formula to try to compare, across all ad formats, and for sponsored messaging, I had to remove clicks from sponsored messaging clicks so I could tell actually what a real click was. We don’t have to do that anymore. And I’m actually really excited about this.

All right. Do you have a question, feedback for the show, or even a review? Message me on LinkedIn, my DMs are free and open, and you can also email us at podcast@b2linked.com. If you attach a link to a voice recording from you, I’ll even play them right here on the show, and let me know if you want me to keep you anonymous, or shout you out and share your details. I hope you know by now, I really do want to feature you. Alright, down to the topic at hand, let’s hit it.

Alright, what is the Measurement Maturity Index, or MMI as we’ll call it from here on out? Essentially, it’s a survey that your LinkedIn rep can help you go through. to determine the sophistication of your LinkedIn Ads measurement strategy and capabilities. It results in a score from 1 to 100. As you probably know, I’m a big fan of benchmarking to see how advertisers are doing. Being able to compare yourself against an average tells you whether you’re doing a really good job, a really bad job, or somewhere average. And I think the MMI score is a pretty good way to benchmark your ads data collection strategies to see if there are any big opportunities you might be missing, or if you should be patting yourself on the back because you’re already at the top of your industry.

It starts with a survey that’s inside of a Google Sheet where each column is a different question that they want to ask with various answers down below. You’ll go through and highlight either one or multiples of the options right within the Google Sheet. And what you’re highlighting is the answer that best describes your company or your company’s approach to that kind of data collection. Here’s just a quick run through of what the questions are. So you can get in your mind, like what I should be prepared to answer. The first asks how long your traditional sales cycle is. The second is the top three metrics that matter most. They’re kind of your North Star. It’ll ask about what your attribution window that you care about inside of Campaign Manager for both clicks and views. The default click attribution window is 30. The default view through window is 7 days. So if you’re just using the defaults, that’s nice and easy for you.

There’s a question on how you do your decision making. If it’s all inside of LinkedIn’s campaign manager or with partner tools, integrations, or completely outside. There’s whether you’re using a lead scoring system of some sort or not.

It asks about your comfort level of sharing CRM data with LinkedIn, how you might do that. There’s also a question about your attribution methodology, Are you first click attribution, last click, multi touch, somewhere in between? It’ll ask you about what partnerships are you leveraging with LinkedIn? Are you leveraging any partners for tracking, for verification, for attribution, anything like that? And then the last question is how proactively you are, giving attention to, privacy and privacy changes and that kind of thing.

Then your LinkedIn rep will take the sheet, they’ll pass it to their data team, who will go, collect your responses, and they’ll compile the output for you. In our case, it took less than a week. , the output was a PDF deck. obviously, it was meant for PowerPoint and just plain text. Output as a PDF, and it had more than 25 pages.

It first covered the five pillars that LinkedIn was really saying these are important to your data collection strategy. The first pillar is signals. These are signals that you’re passing back to the ad platform about how people interact with your brand. This was worth 24 percent of the total.

The second pillar is reporting and ROI. It’s how you understand the performance and the effectiveness of your ads. That was worth 47 percent of your final score.

The third pillar is insights. This is how effectively you’re using the, general audience insights, content intelligence. And integrating that with your LinkedIn ads. That was only worth 10 percent of the total. Fourth pillar is verification. This is understanding if a person saw your ad in a safe environment and having confidence in that. That was worth 14 percent of the total. And then finally, experimentation. This is only worth 5 percent of the total, but it’s all about how you run AB tests and learn about what impacts your performance on LinkedIn. Then it’ll give you your MMI score, like I said, this is a range between 0 and 100. If you’re doing a really good job at all of these things, you might be closer to a hundred. If you have a lot of gaining ground to do, you’ll be closer to the zero, but then they give you a name for how your, your performance is. The one I was looking at, the MMI score came in a little over 80, and it said that we were advanced. It also goes into each of the pillars and offers suggestions for improvement.

Obviously, the goal of this is just not to get a number and go, Yay, that was it. The goal is to show you that you have some improvement so that you can go and actually make some changes and implement new processes.

Under the signals section, This is the data that we send back to the platform. The recommendations revolved around, are you using the insight tag properly? Has it been switched to first party data collection rather than third party? Are you using offline conversions upload? Are you tracking performance with website actions? Are you using the conversions API or the revenue attribution reporting? And obviously the more of those you are using in a more sophisticated way, the higher it’s going to push your score. Moving on to the insight section. I don’t know if this client just didn’t have a whole lot of feedback that they needed on insights. Most of this section pushed people towards using a, a data collaboration platform called Cleanroom by a company called Haboo. I haven’t had a chance to use anything like a Cleanroom. We keep our own data on a data warehouse. And get to pull it that way. Combine it from different sources. I’m guessing this might be similar. But I think what might be cool about a clean room is you might be able to share certain aspects of your data with your LinkedIn rep to help them, get access to your data and do some analysis that is outside of Campaign Manager.

This section also showed an idea of the kinds of reports that you LinkedIn rep. And it mentioned that these can be generated for all advertisers. I don’t know if it actually means all advertisers, because every so often, if one of our accounts that we manage doesn’t have a rep, I’ll reach out to general LinkedIn support, and they act like they have no idea what I’m talking about.

Under the experimentation section, it’s pushing advertisers to use the AB testing tool inside of Campaign Manager, which I don’t recommend. And the brand lift studies, which I do recommend. And then in the verification section, it’s pushing advertisers to invest in partners like Integral Ad Sciences, DoubleVerify, Pixelate. Those kinds of partners that can essentially look at your LinkedIn Ads traffic and say, yep, it’s good.

All right. So here’s my opinion of the whole process going through it. I think it is possible to claim in the survey that you’re more advanced than you really are. Especially because it’s asking you ranges on some things like how sophisticated do you think you are here? And just because you use a certain kind of a partner or solution, it doesn’t mean that you’re using it well, or following up and caring about the insights that it generates.

So my suggestion to you if you go through this process, Answer the questionnaire very openly and honestly. Don’t be trying to get the highest score you can. Go ahead and answer in a way that shows a little bit more conservative so you can get more tips from LinkedIn on what they would suggest to improve. I also noticed that this heavily pushes advertisers to use third party providers and partners. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing because we are a partner with LinkedIn, but I will admit it does feel a little bit salesy. It also left me wondering a little bit like, huh, all these recommendations for using partners, why isn’t LinkedIn providing this stuff inside their platform? Why do I have to go and pay third party providers for some of these services? But all in all, I do think it was worth going through this process. So talk to your LinkedIn rep if you want to grab your MMI score, the process probably takes two or three weeks until you get the final deck and can review it. But I think it’s definitely worth doing.

If you want to be a top LinkedIn Ads, one percenter, you need to come and join the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. Not only do you get access to all four of our courses that take you from beginner to expert, but you also get to interact with all the other top minds in LinkedIn Ads who are sharing what’s working for them, and giving you ideas on what to improve in your own ads. There’s even an upgraded level where you get to join weekly group calls with me and get to ask me anything you want. You get access for a super low monthly cost, and it’s a fraction of what it would cost to grab time with me individually.

If this is your first time listening, welcome. We’re excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button. So you don’t miss a future episode. But if this is not your first time listening, you are a loyal listener. Thank you. I’m excited to have you back. The biggest favor you can pay me is to go and leave a review on Apple podcasts. And of course, I’ll shout you out if I can tell who it is you are. So if you do leave a review, please do reach out to me and let me know who you are so I can shout you out. Then with any questions, suggestions, or corrections for our episodes, reach out to us at podcast@b2linked.com. With that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. And as always, I’m cheering you on in all your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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