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Show Summary:

In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox explores the evolution of LinkedIn Ads, the perception challenges it has faced, and how new advancements in measurement tools are changing the game. AJ takes a deep dive into LinkedIn’s Measurement Insights Tool, detailing its features, functionality, and how it can provide better attribution and campaign insights for B2B marketers.

Key Discussion Points:

1. The Evolution of LinkedIn Ads:
   • LinkedIn Ads historically faced criticism for being expensive and underdeveloped compared to competitors.
   • Recent years have seen exponential growth in platform adoption as B2B marketers recognize the unmatched targeting and traffic quality LinkedIn offers.
   • LinkedIn's investment in advanced measurement tools is a game-changer, aiming to prove the platform's value beyond cost.
2. Introducing the Measurement Insights Tool:
   • Overview: LinkedIn is rolling out a new tool called the Measurement Insights Tool, accessible via the “Measurement” tab in Campaign Manager.
   • Stages: The tool organizes data into funnel stages—Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Revenue—based on campaign objectives and CRM integration.
3. Features and Insights:
   • Performance Chart: Visualizes campaign performance metrics (e.g., impressions, clicks, cost per click, leads) over time.
   • Company Funnel Analysis: Tracks companies through funnel stages based on engagement and CRM data.
   • Top Performing Audiences: Identifies high-performing audience segments by seniority, job function, location, and company size.
   • Top Performing Ads and Campaigns: Highlights ads and campaigns generating the highest results for specific objectives, though efficiency metrics are not prioritized.
4. Advanced Attribution:
   • LinkedIn analyzes the last 50 touchpoints (impressions and clicks) per member, allocating credit for conversions across funnel stages.
   • The tool relies on LinkedIn-specific attribution models but encourages comparison with external attribution systems.
5. Opportunities and Limitations:
   • While the tool offers valuable high-level insights, it lacks the ability to drill down into specific campaigns or ads for deeper analysis.
   • It’s a strong starting point but requires further refinement to become more actionable for advertisers.

Why You Should Listen:

• Learn how to leverage the new Measurement Insights Tool to improve campaign strategy and attribution.
• Discover how LinkedIn’s advancements in AI-driven reporting are shaping the future of B2B advertising.
• Gain practical tips for integrating LinkedIn Ads data with your overall marketing strategy.

Call to Action:

• Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community to connect with top advertisers, access courses, and participate in weekly group calls with AJ.
• Share your feedback on the Measurement Insights Tool with LinkedIn reps to help shape its development.

Connect and Contribute:

• Submit questions, feedback, or reviews via LinkedIn or email at podcast@B2Linked.com. Attach a voice recording to be featured on the show!

This episode is great for those who want to understand LinkedIn’s newest measurement tools and how they can help you maximize your LinkedIn Ads investment. 

Show Transcript:

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. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn Ads and achieving true pro status. As long as LinkedIn Ads have existed, it's had a perception problem. LinkedIn Ads has always been one of the most expensive ad platforms out there. LinkedIn definitely recognized this and internally they knew that their business targeting blows every other channel out of the water when it comes to quality. But it had to wait for advertisers to come around. This has caused very slow growth for the LinkedIn Ads platform. For years, B2B marketers who should have been investing in LinkedIn, heard things like, " LinkedIn Ads are too expensive and they don't work and they have very limited features and are behind all the other platforms." So they continued to hunt for all of their traffic elsewhere. At some point though, since LinkedIn really is the only game in town when you need tight granularity of targeting, marketers would end up giving it another shot and bringing some test budgets to LinkedIn. As marketers have gotten more sophisticated at measuring their traffic and they have better tools at their fingertips, they see the performance from their LinkedIn Ads traffic and they realize that there's value there and they start to bring more investment. Obviously, I don't know the specifics, but I can tell you that over the last 14 years that I've been watching LinkedIn Ads, I've watched this organic growth happen. Very slowly, but moving in the right direction. Then in the last three years, I've seen what appears to be exponential attention and adoption from B2B marketers to the LinkedIn Ads platform. I've given this feedback to anyone at LinkedIn who would listen to me that growth is not going to come from competing on price, but by capitalizing on what LinkedIn Ads does best in the world. And that is targeting and traffic quality. And the traffic quality is exceptionally difficult to quantify. So LinkedIn should be making huge investments into measurement and attribution tools.

Essentially, LinkedIn's job has been to prove to advertisers that the traffic is valuable and they should stop worrying so much about the price. I'm happy to report that LinkedIn has come around on this line of thinking and has been releasing some big advancements in measurement. On today's episode, we're diving into the new measurement insights tool that's being rolled out right now. You might even have access to it as we speak. We'll talk about what the tool can teach you about your campaigns and how to use it. It's exciting stuff.

That's right. B2LINKED is the ad agency, 100% 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 any sort of cookie cutter approach or standard account templates from us. Plus with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads, schedule your free discovery call with me today at B2LINKED.com/discovery. Do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? You can either message me on LinkedIn because my DMS are free and open, or you can email us at podcast@B2LINKED.com. If you attach a link to a voice recording from you, I can include you right here on the show and play it for everyone. And as always, I'm happy to keep you anonymous or share your details as well. Hit me up because I want to feature you. All right, without further ado, let's hit it.

I've mentioned one of my favorite ever LinkedIn reps, Paola Merrick on the show before. And I had some questions about the new measurement insights tool, and she hooked me up with so many insights about it. So Paola, a huge thank you for hooking me up. So starting on October 28th, LinkedIn started to roll out this new tool. I would estimate that about half of the accounts that we have access to it right now. So it's probably on like a two to two and a half month rollout period. If you go log in to your campaign manager, you can tell that whether you have it or not, if you look in your left hand navigation, if it no longer says analyze, and now it says measurement instead, you'll know that you have access underneath measurement, you can click insights. LinkedIn calls it the insights hub, and it says it will provide users with actionable member company campaign and ad level insights to improve overall business impact. When you very first enter your measurement insights, you'll see that you have a time range, it's defaulted to the last 90 days, but you can change that and customize it however you'd like. You'll also see a chart and above the chart, you have three buckets that you can customize everything on the report from. One bucket is awareness, the next is consideration. The third is conversion. There is a fourth bucket called revenue, but we'll get to that one next. So you'll notice that these buckets, they correlate to stages in the objectives in campaign manager, and this is for good reason. LinkedIn is going to attempt to show you your campaign performance by stage of the funnel, but since LinkedIn doesn't actually know which campaigns are assigned to each funnel stage, it decided to bucket them by objective. I guess this is the best they do, but for me the assumption won't ever work. For instance, the only objective under awareness that it calculates is brand awareness, and as many of you may know, I won't touch what I call the most expensive objective brand awareness with a 10-foot pole, unless I'm running CTV because that's the only option. So LinkedIn is never going to show me any performance at the awareness stage, despite the fact that I have lots of cold stage awareness campaigns running. In fact, I have more cold stage campaigns running than any other stage of the funnel. That's why funnels look the way they do where they're bigger on top. So what I recommend is using whichever objective gets you the same or better attention for the price, and for me sometimes that means like using website visits objective to cold audiences or using brand awareness objective on like bottom of funnel, but this is the way that LinkedIn rolled it out. I get it. I'll digress. So that's the awareness bucket. I've come to understand that I'm just never going to have anything in that bucket, and that's okay. The next stage over though is consideration stage, and this includes any campaigns that are using the engagement, video views, or website visits objectives. Then you have your conversion stage. This includes all of your campaigns that are in lead generation, talent leads, website conversions, and job applicants. Now the fourth bucket that's called revenue, this is really smart. It pulls in data from your CRM to show the impact of your LinkedIn ads on your actual revenue or your actual sales process. So now right underneath these funnel stages you'll see a chart. It's called performance, and I think it is the most helpful chart that we've ever gotten from LinkedIn. It plots your ad performance as a line chart over whatever time range you've set, and it allows you to layer up to three metrics on top of each other. It's basically what the campaign manager's performance chart wants to be when it grows up. It's a bit limited in what it can display and how it can display it. You can chart impressions, reach, dwell time, click-through rate, chargeable clicks, website visits, video views, cost per click, number of leads, cost per lead, qualified leads, and cost per qualified lead. And for any of those metrics you can compare them side by side, and the third metric you can always overlay spend on top. But here's the kicker, as helpful as this chart is you can't drill in deeper. It's all data based on the whole account. It would be amazing if I could drill into specific campaigns or ads with this, but we're kind of stuck with an overview, so I'll get used to that. The next chart says companies funnel analysis. This is where you can see the number of companies that are located in each of your specific marketing stages over the past 180 days. So what it does is it takes the total number of companies that are part of your accounts targeting, and it calculates the number in each funnel stage. So this breaks your companies down by the same funnel, but it's a different definition, so pay close attention here. We have the same awareness, consideration, and leads, but now rather than relying on the companies that are being targeted in each of your objectives, now LinkedIn is actually applying some intelligence in understanding which of these companies should fit in your awareness, meaning they haven't really engaged with you yet, which ones are sitting under consideration, meaning they've engaged with you a good bit, and then which one are leads. And you will have the same company oftentimes being targeted in multiple stages of your funnel. LinkedIn understands this, so each company is actually being calculated once across the funnel based on the employee's actions at the lowest step of the funnel. So let's say for instance that you're reaching Sherry in marketing at one company, and then at the same company you're also reaching Debbie. If Sherry hasn't engaged yet, she would still be under awareness, and Debbie has engaged with your ads, so she might be under consideration. So LinkedIn's only going to show us that same company once across the stages, so they're going to put the entire company under consideration because one of their employees has been engaging. Plus it'll also add into the chart here qualified leads, opportunities, and closed one if you've connected your CRM to it. And the definition that LinkedIn uses for awareness here I really like, as opposed to the definition before by objective. It's tallying these companies by the interactions that they're doing that actually make sense. And I'm certain it's using AI to do this, which is great. We don't need humans behind the scenes tallying these up and putting them in different columns. AI can do that just fine. The third chart down, this is called top performing audiences. Right underneath it it says, "Understand which members and companies are engaging with your marketing efforts." It's using AI to find specific segments of your targeting that are performing better than others. And there's a toggle there. You can choose between if you want to see information about individuals or companies. It defaults to individuals and it calls this members attributes. In the account that I'm looking at it suggested two seniorities that were performing particularly well in both phases of the funnel, the consideration and conversion stages. So that's with seniorities toggled. And then there are two other options. You can also flip over to job functions and locations as well. So it'll show you the best performing job functions as well as the best performing locations. If you flip that toggle from members attributes down to companies attributes, then it's going to start showing you the company's names that are performing best at each stage of the funnel. This is only picking a single company name. So I don't find it all that helpful, but it is cool. I think to see one company that's particularly doing well, it's probably going to make you say, "Hey, I should probably pass this company name over to my sales team." So they are giving them extra special attention or whatever. The other two toggles you have here are company size and industry. So you can, again, at each stage of the funnel that you have data for, it'll tell you the top performer in each of those segments. What's interesting to me is you can drill down on a suggestion. So it's telling me that under consideration, the director seniority is doing best. And if I click on that, there's a little explore as I hover over it. It then reloads the report and filters the entire report that I'm looking at by funnel stage. And so if I click the one that was in the consideration stage, the entire report gets filtered for the consideration stage of the funnel, which is interesting. I clicked on director because I want to see more about directors and it didn't. It just showed me the entire report just for this stage of the funnel. Kind of odd. This is the same behavior that if you go to the very top and you click on one of those funnel stages, that's what it's doing is it's redoing the whole report, recalculating based off of which funnel stage you want to look at. So again, you can't drill down to specific campaigns or ads, but you can drill down to the grouping of objectives. Not super helpful to me, but I'd suggest play around with it. See if you find a report or anything that brings you some actionable value. The next chart is called top performing ads. It says these ads received the highest key results at each campaign objective. It shows the top performing ad in each stage of the funnel with some simple metrics. There's number of key results. There's cost per key result, cost per click and click through rate. LinkedIn's definition of top performing is anything that drove the highest number of whatever your objective is. So in the lead gen objective, if there's one ad that drove 15 leads and another one that drove 10 leads, it doesn't matter if the one that drove 10 leads was at a much lower cost per lead and was much more efficient. LinkedIn's only going to show you the one that drove the highest number of leads. This goes a little bit counter to what I teach, which is try to find what is going to generate the most efficiency to get the highest number of leads, highest number of conversions out of your budget. That's okay. As long as you understand what LinkedIn's definition is here, you'll know how to interpret the data. And then the last section here says top performing campaigns. There's a little note that says these campaigns receive the highest key result at each campaign objective. And again, because I don't have anything in the brand awareness objective for this account, I'm only seeing consideration and conversion, but it's going to show me the top campaign for each of those with some simple metrics. So I see number of key results, costs per key result, cost per click, click through rate. And depending on the time range you choose, sometimes you'll get an extra column there called daily delivery. It looks like this is actually what I would consider average daily spend, but watch out because if your ad didn't run for the whole time period that you're analyzing, the daily average is going to be off since LinkedIn is actually dividing the total spend over the number of days in your timeframe. It's not dividing it by the number of days that the campaign actually ran. That's something I wish LinkedIn would adjust. And this also has the same issue with LinkedIn's definition of top performing being different than mine. But I do hope that because this is AI driven, that the AI is going to be smart enough to say, yeah, the campaign that drove the highest number of leads or the most clicks is probably not super important compared to another campaign that is a lot more efficient and seems to be ramping up over time. So this report is cool, but the thing that I geeked out the most on this is how is LinkedIn actually calculating all this? Because there's a lot going on behind the scenes. What's happening here is really cool from a data perspective. During this 180 day look back window, the measurement insights tool is collecting the last 50 touch points. That's impressions and clicks of your campaigns, of your advertiser campaigns with each member of your target audience. And then it's determining the allocation of all of those touch points across the funnel. It's starting this with looking at just the interactions within the LinkedIn ecosystem for all of these touch points, especially those that signal a higher likelihood of conversion. The model is considering all campaigns run by an advertiser and it's learning patterns using the data across advertisers. It also takes those 50 last touches for each member and it allocates the credit for conversions across all of those interactions. It's analyzing by things like your campaign type, your objective, the number of days before conversion actually occurred, your member data, including what company they represent and your advertiser data, including the company. Every advertiser is probably going to have a different attribution model that they care about. So LinkedIn's model is specific just to the data available on LinkedIn. So you can continue to use whatever attribution you are using and modeling on your side. This is just going to show you how LinkedIn sees it. And those are good to compare. I found the report really interesting to look at, but I honestly haven't found it to be exceptionally actionable. LinkedIn is going to keep improving this and providing a ton more insights. This is just the beginning. All of this to say, go check it out, see if you have the reports, play with it and give feedback to your LinkedIn ad reps on what you'd like to see improved and how it can better benefit you. And please reach out to me. Let me know if you love it or don't love it and how you're using it. Now, if you want to become a LinkedIn ads top one percenter, I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do. Go join the LinkedIn ads fanatics community. When you do that, you'll get access obviously to the whole community of the top LinkedIn advertisers who are all sharing what's working for them and what they're testing. But you're also going to get access to all four of our courses that are designed to take you from absolute beginner to total LinkedIn ads pro. There's even an upgrade there to get on weekly group calls with me so you can get direct feedback and ask any question you want to go. Check that out. Go to fanatics dot B two linked dot com. Now, if this is your first time listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Make sure to subscribe so you get to hear us every week. But if you are a loyal listener, I appreciate it when you tell your friends and other LinkedIn ads fanatics about the show. The very best compliment that you can pay us is to go and review the podcast on Apple podcasts. You can rate us from one to five stars. I would sure hope the content is worthy of five stars, but obviously be honest there. And I would love to shout your review out. With any questions, suggestions or corrections for us here on the episode. 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 of your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

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