SHOW RESOURCES

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Lead Gen Form Ads

Reporting

UTM live builder

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

I think B2B marketing and CRMs go together like chocolate and caramel. Today, we’re diving into CRM reporting on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you listened to the last episode about the cookiepocalypse, you know that conversion tracking as we know, it probably isn’t going to be reliable in the future. Luckily, B2B and E commerce have something in common here. In E commerce, marketers will always have purchase data, whether or not it occurred, what the sale value was, etc. And no cookie can affect that. There’s a very clear line all the way from ad impression to a purchase. In business to business. When someone fills out a form it goes into your CRM. So if you’re doing it right, there’s never a challenge in figuring out how many leads came from a specific effort. If someone filled out a form and submitted it, it’s in the database, it’s become increasingly important in business to business to make sure that we’ve got data available to us as marketers, so we can close the loop on reporting. That way, when a platforms conversion tracking is way under reporting, because cookie data is limited, or when a platform may be way over reporting because it’s using some algorithm to calculate the estimated number of conversions, you can be totally carefree. On this episode, we’re gonna dive into the connection between your ads efforts, and your CRM platform and show you what you can do with the day that to close that reporting. Another hat tip to Mark Bissoni for requesting this topic. And any of you out there who have a topic you’d like us to cover, please do reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. We are always looking forward to helping you become more super powered and hear about the topics that you’re interested in. In the news, for you listeners who are attending HubSpot Inbound conference in Boston, I’m going to be speaking on Thursday there. So I’d love to get to connect if you’re going to be in town. I heard a couple of weeks back that my session was totally filled up. So I hope you got registered early. But if not get there early to stand in the standby line, I speak at quite a few digital marketing conferences every year. And Inbound is by far the largest one that I speak at. And it’s one of the ones I most look forward to every year. Okay, for the topic at hand, let’s hit it.

2:27
What is a CRM?
What is a CRM? First of all, we talk about it a lot in business to business, we may use the acronym, or we may say customer relationship management platform. But realistically, we’re gonna say CRM, because the other one just hardly makes any sense. It’s basically a database of your customers, your prospects, really anyone you’d want to keep track of. There are so many different types of CRMs out there. Really, anything can qualify as a CRM. If you just keep an Excel sheet, or a Google sheet of all of your current customers with some data about them, that is a really basic CRM. So don’t be daunted when you hear the term if you haven’t heard of it before. Some of the major CRMs that you’ve probably heard of before, are like Salesforce, HubSpot, Constant Contact. There’s way, way, way too many to list all here. And all of them have their own personalities. Some are very tailored to sales, some are tailored more to marketing, some are better for email versus reps who are making calls. We B2Linked we actually went through several CRMs testing this, and we would have one that worked really, really well when we were doing outbound. And another that was much better with handling inbound. One connected to email really well and made it easier to do newsletters. And ultimately, you’re gonna have to study all of the different capabilities based off of what you need your CRM to do. I would say most of our larger clients use Salesforce. And what’s so cool about Salesforce is it’s infinitely customizable. You can literally make it do whatever you want. But along with that customizability it means it’s incredibly complex. Most of our clients who use salesforce.com have an internal Salesforce admin whose job it is just to keep the platform up and running. So if you don’t want to hire a full time admin, there are certainly simpler CRMs. But it’s great because you can make it do whatever you want. HubSpot has recently become a pretty great contender in the enterprise space. It offers the CRM functionality for free, but then the fees really start to kick in when you add on different marketing or different sales packages. I should say that HubSpot relationship with LinkedIn really makes it special. Because HubSpot and LinkedIn communicate really well. A lot of these integrations that we’re going to talk about are done pretty much automatically. So as a marketer, why would you want to do this? Why should you care about a CRM? The simple fact is that your CRM extends your data, your ability to analyze, and your optimizations, beyond just those front end metrics. If all you do is rely on just LinkedIn’s campaign manager, the deepest insights that you can get are things like a cost per lead, or a conversion rate, which as you’ll remember from the last episode, those metrics are even getting muddy. So that means you can’t actually get accurate lead counts, or number of qualified leads, or figure out your lead quality by campaign, or even solve the Holy Grail, which is calculating your ROI. You can’t do any of this without involving your CRM.

5:26
Getting the advertising data into the CRM
In order to connect your advertising data in with your CRM, you have to get the advertising data into the CRM. And there are two different ways to do that. The first is if you’re using LinkedIn lead generation forms. If you want to know more about this, go back to Episode 17, where we did a deep dive on them. And these are really, really great, they tend to have super high conversion rates. But because that data actually lives on LinkedIn, you then have to get that data out. Of course, you could log into LinkedIn every day, and download the leads that have occurred in the past 24 hours, and then manually process them. But good heavens, if you are listening to this podcast, you are paid way too much for doing that activity.

6:07
Automation
Okay, so let’s figure out how to automate that. LinkedIn has partnered with several of these CRMs to allow you to just send that data directly into the CRM without any sort of human contact, Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, and quite a few others, I’ve included a link down below in the show notes so you can see all of the different integration partners with your LinkedIn Ads. But if you’re not using one of the CRMs, that LinkedIn fully integrates with, don’t worry about that, because you have a pretty cheap solution. Zapier.com, last time I checked, their $20 per month plan could get all of your LinkedIn lead gen formatted data directly into about any CRM or any workflow that you want. And $20 a month is definitely a cheap price to pay, compared to having to do that all manually. So that’s LinkedIn lead gen forms. What if you’re driving traffic to your website and you want the form on your website to pass into your CRM? That’s definitely possible. We’ve all been doing that for years. And here’s how that process works. First of all, when someone clicks on your ad and visits your landing page, the link that they visit, can and should have tracking information in it. We call these tracking parameters. So those tracking parameters are just sitting in the address bar when someone is there on your page. And then when they decide to fill out the form, the info that it asks for might be things like your name, your email, etc. And then they hit submit. But what they don’t know is that before the form is submitted, the JavaScript of the page made note of the whole URL that was up in the address bar, and all of its tracking parameters that could have in it, and it sent them along into the CRM, along with those visible form fields. So the CRM now has data about who someone was, as well as a little bit of information about where that traffic came from, which is incredibly helpful to you as a marketer. So then your CRM needs to be configured to actually look for those parameters and how to recognize them. And it’ll store them inside that lead record that was just created through that form submission. Since the vast majority of marketers out there are using Google Analytics, we should take some time to talk about UTM parameters. Now don’t get confused by the acronym UTM. Hardly anyone knows what it means it doesn’t really mean anything. It stands for urchin tracking module. Urchin was the company that Google acquired to actually turn it into Google Analytics. So it’s just a brand name, you don’t have to worry about it. But now we as marketers talk a lot about UTM parameters, because Google Analytics has a set of five standard parameters that it accepts natively. And those are source, medium, campaign, content, and term. The first three are required, you need to provide a source, a medium and a campaign, but content and term and then a whole bunch of other custom ones, they’re optional. So I’ll give you an example. If I was sending traffic from LinkedIn Ads into my website, my UTM parameter for source would probably be LinkedIn. It’s the website or the channel that I’m using. For my medium, I like to identify the different ad formats I’m using. So if I’m sending sponsored content ads to my website, I would probably put SC for sponsored content in media. Then for campaign I like to actually include information about either the actual campaign within LinkedIn, or a description of the audience. And that way, if I go into Google Analytics, I can see all of my reporting by audience segment, which is really cool. Then we have content. And Google originally designed this to be a way that you could tell the difference between your AB tests that you’re running. So when we create ads, every single ad has its own unique UTM content parameter. And because it absolutely has to be unique. By far the easiest way I’ve found to make something unique is to stick today’s date in it because obviously today’s dates not going to repeat itself. So one of our content parameters might look really daunting to someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at. But it may say something like LI, short for LinkedIn, SC, short for sponsored content, and then a six digit number representing today’s date. And then like 0102, an incremental digit for which ad this was that we were publishing. And what’s so cool is because that content parameter includes all of that information, it allows us to go back and figure out the exact image, the exact everything that was associated with that ad later on. And we track that all internally with proprietary tools. So this is obviously a very proprietary way that we handle the UTM content parameter. But I hope just as an example, this was helpful or interesting to you. The last standard UTM parameter is term. And that was used to track the individual keyword from different search campaigns. But obviously, because we’re dealing with paid social here with LinkedIn, we don’t really bid by keyword. So term is just one of those ones that’s leftover. You could use it for something if you want, but you don’t have to. So whether you’re using Google Analytics or not, you can still use Google’s UTM parameters. Or you could really use anything else. For instance, if you use Adobe Analytics, which is very much used by those enterprise companies, they have a parameter called a CID parameter. And of course, it can be very customized. But this is oftentimes one parameter that represents everything that Google asked for five parameters to represent. When you’re advertising on Google, on Google Ads, Google will automatically put something called a gclid, or a Google Click ID inside the URL. And a lot of people are able to grab that parameter and make it useful and identifying an individual click. Facebook has something similar, they call it the FBclid, or Facebook click identifier. And if you don’t want to use any of these, you don’t have to, you could do your own custom URL parameters. If you look at a URL, anything after the question mark doesn’t usually change the content of the page or change the address of the page at all. It’s just extra information for some system about that traffic. There are a few very technical exceptions here. But usually, when you look at a URL, the address of the page ends, right as soon as you hit the question mark, and then everything after that, you can change and make whatever you want. So the question mark becomes your first query parameter. And then if you have multiples, they are separated by the ampersand or the and sign. So you can have as many query parameters as you want, it’s just the first one is going to start with a question mark. All the other ones after are ampersands. And there’s absolutely nothing magic about the parameters that you choose, it just means that you’re going to have to configure some system to recognize and identify them, and store them if you want to use them. So if you haven’t built parameters before, especially if you’re using Google Analytics, there are a whole bunch of free tools out there to build your UTM parameters and your URLs for you. We’ve linked to one down in the show notes called utmbuilder.com. But it’s a very, very simple type of function. And so a whole bunch of different companies have evolved to do this for free. We actually do this all within Excel. We have an automatic URL builder that grabs things from all the different columns that we’re building our ads inside of Excel with, and just concatenates them together in the right format. So there are a lot of options, you can really do this any way you want. And we’re going to talk a lot about how this information makes it into your forms. But it’s helpful to know that UTM parameters were originally designed just to tell your analytic solution, how to categorize the traffic that you’re bringing in. So for instance, if you click on a post inside of LinkedIn, that takes you to someone’s website, Google Analytics is going to see the referring URL as LinkedIn. And that’s pretty much all it knows. And it knows that LinkedIn is a social platform. It’s going to categorize that as an organic social referral, which is actually correct in this case. But what if you were running ads on LinkedIn, and you didn’t put any sort of parameters in the URL, someone clicks from one of your ads and lands on your website. And now Google Analytics is categorizing it exactly the same, it thinks it was an organic referral from social. But if you put UTM parameters in your URLs, you’re telling Google Analytics, this is how I need you to classify this traffic. This is not an organic referral. This is an ad click. And here’s the audience that was targeting. And here’s what ad type we were using all kinds of different information that you can pass to them be able to properly analyze your marketing efforts. They enable you to look inside of analytics and see website traffic behavior, broken down by any of the UTM parameters you set up. You can see things like average session duration, or pages viewed by campaign or audience or individual ad or ad type. Really, possibilities are nearly endless. Alright, here’s a quick sponsor break and then we’ll dive into the weaknesses of URL track.

14:52
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

15:01
If you’re a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn’t easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end, at B2Linked, we’ve cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B companies buy today. Over the last 11 years, we’ve worked with some of LinkedIn largest advertisers in the world, we’ve spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and we’re official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we’d absolutely love to get to work with you.

15:49
Weaknesses of URL tracking
Alright, let’s jump into the weaknesses of URL tracking. So first off, since it captures only traffic that submitting forms, this is best suited for what we would call the trust stage. We tend to break our stages down into three different stages, your awareness, your trust, and your advocacy. So you could have tracking parameters in your URLs. But if no one ever fills out a form, it really didn’t do much except communicate to your analytics solution where the traffic came from, but nothing is going to make it into your CRM. So you wouldn’t be able to tell from your CRM, about view through conversions, or assists from other platforms. The cool thing though, is that your analytics platform can still track what you define as a conversion. And the analytics solution is going to attempt to track all of the activity of that user. Of course, if you listen to our last episode about the cookie pocalypse conversion tracking may not be all that reliable in the future. So we’ll just kind of have to wait and see.

16:43
Tracking Parameters
And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can
I have come across some websites that do some crazy stuff with URLs. So for instance, you might send a URL with all of the tracking parameters. And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can automatically strip out your tracking parameters to try to make the site look really clean to your user. The problem is that when that URL gets rewritten, it destroys your tracking. It might be great for visual cleanliness. But the vast majority of users are not going to care that they have junk at the end of their URL, we’re so used to seeing long URLs with stuff that we don’t understand. Another weakness that we’ve come across is if someone lands on the page, and then has URL parameters in their URL, but then they click to a different page, those parameters are then lost. Your analytic solution knows that that traffic came in from those parameters. But if that second page is the one with the contact form, and it’s trying to grab those parameters, they’re not there and it’s just going to send through blanks. So when advertising on LinkedIn, my recommendation is to land traffic on a landing page that has the form on that same page. Don’t give them opportunities to click elsewhere. Otherwise, you’ll lose a lot of this tracking data, we actually experienced this ourselves, we sent ad traffic to a page with a link to a contact form. And of course, we love when someone chooses to contact us. But then as soon as the user navigated to the page with the form, it dropped their URL tracking parameters and so we lost them. We still ask them the discovery call where someone heard about us. So we’ll still get a little bit of data about which channels are performing and turning into appointments for us. But it’s not nearly as reliable as if I had the UTM content parameter telling me exactly which ad drove that person. So you need to make sure that you configure your CRM to accept this data that you’re giving. And this is all to make sure that when someone submits the form, and that data is passed into your CRM, it carries with it information about the source of that traffic. And that means that any lead that enters into your CRM that had tracking parameters in the URL when the form was filled out, would communicate that source information on that lead form. So now once you have the data in your CRM, we get to do some really cool stuff. As a disclaimer here, I’m going to talk you through the steps that I would take in Excel to do this. So if you’re not already comfortable with Excel, this may sound a little bit like gobbledygook. But first off, you want to go and find out in your CRM, how do you generate a report for a specific timeframe? What this report should look like the first column should be the date. The second column should be some tracking parameter. For us, it would be the UTM content parameter, but you could put anything you want in there, the UTM campaign, it could be an Adobe ad CID, or anything else. And all subsequent columns would be a count of the number of records for each of the down funnel conversion steps that you want to track. So for instance, in standard B2B, we might have like an MQL for marketing qualified leads and an SQL for sales qualified leads. We might have number of proposals sent out Number of close deals that happened. And that means any of my tracking parameters that brought in a lead, or graduated to an SQL or graduated to a proposal or a closed deal on that date, it would have an incremental digit in one of those columns. You export this to Excel so that you can get ready to combine it with your spend performance data. I’m going to refer to this CRM data as CRM data from now on. Then you want to actually go to your LinkedIn ads reporting. So you go into LinkedIn Ads, it’s very important, you want to make sure you’ve set your timeframe for your reporting as the same timeframe that you’re looking at for your CRM data, then you want to export your ad performance data into Excel. Now, it’s really important that you do choose the ad Performance Report, because that’s the report that is going to have all of your click URLs in them. And your click URLs is where your UTM parameters or other tracking parameters are housed. You should generate this as an all time report. Otherwise, you might have a row for every single ad that ran for every single month or every single day that it ran. So generate that as an all time combined report and then you won’t need to run an extra Pivot Table on your data later, which would be a pain. If you haven’t listened to Episode 69 of the podcast all about reporting, you’ll definitely want to make sure you do that. Then the next steps that I do is I will take the destination URL column, which houses all of the URLs with their tracking parameters and I make a duplicate of that column. And someone who’s really good at Excel is about to tell me how dumb I’m doing this, I need to strip out just the tracking parameters that I care about into their own columns. And so I do this with the search and replace function inside of Excel. If I’m trying to isolate just my UTM content parameter. For instance, I’m going to do a search and replace on that column in Excel. I’m going to start with the asterisk, which is a wildcard in Excel. And then I’m going to put UTM underscore content equals and then I’m going to leave the replace blank. So what happens is Excel is looking for anything that comes before UTM underscore content equals and replacing it with nothing. So now on the left side of that URL, I have only the contents of my UTM content parameter. If there are other parameters that came after it, I can do the same thing by doing a search and replace for whatever comes after that maybe the first few characters or something with a wildcard after that. And then again, replace that with nothing. Now I have a column where just the values of my UTM content parameters are housed. If I care about the other UTM parameters, I can do the same thing to isolate source, medium, campaign, term, etc. So now you have a column for each UTM parameter that was associated with each ad. So now I can create a pivot table where the row is the tracking parameter and then my values are the columns that I bring in are things like spend, impressions, clicks, and any other ad performance data I care about. So this sheet that you’re working with right now becomes your base data, as I call it. So you want to keep this sheet open. And I’m going to refer to this as your ads data from now on. So if you’re tracking so far, we have a spreadsheet containing your CRM data. And we have this one that contains your ad data. So now you want to go and take your CRM data and paste it into a new sheet in your workbook. That way, it’s one Excel file that houses all of your CRM and your ad performance data. Then once it’s all in one sheet, you get to start doing the magic work, you can start combining your ads data with your CRM data to find insights. So in your ads data, I would then go and create a new column for each of the lead stages. So I might create a column for MQL, one for SQL, one for proposal, one for closed deal. And then to fill those columns up, I’m going to do a V lookup, which allows me to bring in the number of each type of those conversions by whichever tracking parameter was there within my ads. So if I were doing it, I would look for that ads individual UTM content parameter, that’s my tracking parameter, then I would go to our sheet that contains the CRM data and pull in the number of MQLs associated with that UTM parameter. I’d go and do the same thing, another lookup to bring in the second stage, maybe SQL, another one to bring in proposals, and other to bring in closes. So now we don’t even need that sheet with our CRM data anymore. We can do everything from right within the ABS data. Now highlight all of your ABS data and create a pivot table from there. And again, you want your tracking parameter to be the row and then for your values. You want to bring in all of your ad performance. So your spend your impressions your clicks, video views, whatever you want to bring in. And then what I do is inside of that pivot table, I go to create additional calculated columns. You can do it manually is kind of the lazy way. But it’s a lot easier to do this as calculated columns. So I’ll go and create calculated columns for click through rate and cost per click. I’ll create one for conversion rate, that is essentially my MQLs divided by my clicks, or leads, divided by clicks, whatever you’re using, I can create one for cost per conversion. But now because I have these columns in my data for number of MQLs, number of SQL, all those further lead stages, I can create a calculated column of my cost per MQL, my cost per SQL, my cost per proposal, my cost per closed deal. Extra credit if you’re actually pulling in the deal value from your CRM, then you could actually do a calculation of my actual return on adspend, or my return on investment. I also like to create columns for my close rate, or my graduation rate from every stage of the funnel. So I could show my graduation rate from MQL to SQL. So now you’re actually looking at a report making decisions about the ad performance, based on the performance all the way down the funnel. It allows you to make decisions like oh, my cost per conversion is cheap with this audience, but they convert to sales qualified lead at a really poor rate. So it’s really not worth us running. And there are so many more steps here that just talking you through, it isn’t going to work very well. So I would encourage you to come follow us on YouTube. And I’m going to do a walkthrough of a down funnel report, the whole build, in the coming weeks, so you can follow along. And you can see the link to our YouTube channel, just down in the show notes below. Make sure you’re subscribed.

26:44
Nurturing Your Leads
So let’s get away from the geeky stuff. Now, what can you do to actually nurture your leads, once they’re in the CRM? Well, remember, your CRM is basically just a database of the people that you’ve put in there. So you could export from your CRM, all current customers, and then upload that into LinkedIn as a matched audience, to target and show messaging to those who are your current customers, which could be really good for retaining them. And once you have that list, you can also exclude it from your other targeting, so that you’re not showing prospecting ads to people who are already paying you money. Something else I really like to do from nurture, is download a list of active leads, especially the companies that who have become leads, but haven’t yet closed the deal. And I can upload that into LinkedIn, and create a warming campaign just around trying to inspire those active leads to close. But of course, if this is done inside of your CRM, most of the time, this is able to be pushed out through your marketing automation workflow, or as an email list. So the same advertising you could do to people who are active leads, but haven’t closed, you could also send them emails to keep them informed. Or maybe your marketing automation system does SMS or text messaging. If you have a list of emails, most ad platforms, at least the major ones, allow you to upload those lists of emails and target them with ads, just like LinkedIn. But Facebook, custom audiences can do it. Google can, Quora can, Twitter can. So there’s a lot here that you can do across all of your different platforms. And just another note here on lead quality reporting, you could wait for sales to give you some sort of a lead quality or a lead score on the leads as they come in. But I find if I have enough leads coming in just my graduation rate from MQL to SQL, or SQL, which might be stage two to stage three, whatever comes next is going to be really effective at telling me the quality of the leads that are coming through. If they’re not graduating to stage two or stage three in my sales process, chances are sales does not think those leads are very high quality. So for instance, if one campaign has a higher cost per SQL than another campaign, you can take action by lowering the bids or pausing that campaign entirely. Or if you have one ad that has a terrible graduation rate, you could pause that ad and go and try something else.

27:16
Pitfalls
As you’re setting up your CRM to be able to do everything that we’re talking about, there are some pitfalls that you might come across. So let’s go through a few of those. We have had a situation several times with our clients CRMs, where our point of contact will ask us to send over the tracking parameters in advance so that they can set the CRM up to recognize and watch for that parameter to occur. We don’t want to do this, since it requires human work before every ad launch. And if you happen to launch ads before that work has been done in the CRM, then the CRM won’t properly track that traffic, which is not great. So just know that whatever CRM you’re using, it can be set up so you don’t have to do this. What it does is it just dynamically grabs every parameter from the URL and inserts it in the lead record. So make sure you’re set up to do that. I should note that hubs Spot does this really, really well, because of its integration with LinkedIn. As traffic comes in from LinkedIn to your website into HubSpot, I’m pretty sure this is already right out of the gate. Another pitfall that we’ve come across is multiple forms being filled out by the same user ends up overwriting the tracking parameters from the last time. So for instance, if I clicked on a LinkedIn ad, and filled out a form, and then came back three weeks later from a Google retargeting ad, and then filled out a different form, as they both go into the CRM, a lot of times what happens is the CRM goes, oh, we have an update on this user and so I’m going to delete the tracking parameters that say that they came from LinkedIn and update it as now they came from Google. And I’m sure you can see why this is a problem. If you’re trying to track your LinkedIn performance, you don’t want to lose those leads that are just taking further action with the website. So what you want to happen is you want to stack all of their tracking parameters. So every time a user comes through, and fills out a form, and they come up with new tracking parameters, it just keeps record of all of the steps that that user took in their journey. You might also have some logic that decides how to treat duplicate form fills. Some teams really care about net new leads. So sure, you’re gonna drive traffic from LinkedIn. And the same person over a two month period maybe has filled out a form twice so there’s two conversions. But if the team says we only care about net new conversions, they might treat that just as a single conversion. I get asked a lot about different attribution models. Do we recommend first touch attribution, last touch, W shaped multi touch? Well, I definitely have an opinion here. But I don’t have a blanket opinion that boosts one model up over another. The model I care about is what I call any touch attribution. Since we’re managing only one ad channel, but our clients, our points of contact, they need to judge the performance over multiple channels that they oversee, they’re going to need to select the attribution model that they care about and want to use. And we do of course, hope that it’s one that fairly attributes the performance across all the channels. So that’s attribution done by the manager. But I suggest every individual channel owner gets access to every single lead that was touched by their channel. And I call this any touch attribution. What this means is when we go to do reporting on LinkedIn ad performance, every ad and every conversion that was driven, I can then link up to spend that occurred on the platform. So we have a precise calculation for the cost per lead, and their cost per qualified lead, etc. And ultimately, if the manager decides that they want to give the credit for a deal, partially or fully to another channel, I don’t care. What I care about is getting as much data about which of my ads and campaigns are driving actions. So I can then go and optimize towards those data points and make the LinkedIn account better. So as a recap here, managers over multiple accounts should be using a general attribution method. But individual channel owners should be running off of any touch attribution, because you’re definitely going to want as much data about performance down funnel as possible to help improve your ad creative.

30:53
All right, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

33:29
We mentioned lead gen form ads on LinkedIn, that’s episode 17, so go and make sure you’ve listened to that. Also, Episode 69 is all about reporting so make sure you’ve caught up on that. To build UTM parameters onto your URLs, that’s just utmbuilder.com, You can see the link in the show notes as well. There’s also a link to our YouTube channel where you can see future reporting breakdowns that I’m gonna do. If you or someone on your team is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, definitely pass them the course you’ll see the link down below. It’s the LinkedIn Learning course all about LinkedIn Ads that I’m the author of. It’s by far the least expensive and the most in depth training that you can find on LinkedIn Ads right now. So check that out. Also, look down at your podcast player right now. If you haven’t already, hit subscribe, and everything I’m sharing with you absolutely is free. But I hope you’ll consider going to actually leave us a review in your podcast player. It is the biggest way that you can say thanks for us putting these episodes together with any questions, tips, tricks, suggestions, anything like that, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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