Performance Analytics in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

The other big issue, for me really troublesome and uncomfortable when managing campaigns, is again related to the reach and number of users in LinkedIn campaigns.

Again, in a Consideration/Web Site Visits objective, the campaign manager analytics tools for performance in LinkedIn do not account for number of users reached and related indicators like impressions per user, clicks per user, costs per user, etc.

Why this is a big thing for me. Well, whatever we are planning in B2B marketing, we are marketing and buying media time according to number of users. In B2B marketing we are communicating to people, not legal entities, companies, organizations, brands or whatever entity we are making our business and strategic marketing plans against. And not having campaign data on the for me most critical marketing metric is not good.

Now, LinkedIn allows you to see estimated number of users to be reached, the approximate budget for this reach but in the end does not give us the data for the real reach.

I have had campaigns which were unique for particular geographic market. For example, certain software for a particular industry with limited marketing so far. The platforms, both Facebook and LinkedIn probably have not had experience and data on similar campaigns and one can see in the analytics data in Facebook how the “machine learns” and becomes more and more accurate in its predictions and targeting.

And in both reach and web sites visits goals, in similar campaigns I look very carefully in the number of users and related KPIs. If, for example, I have setup brand awareness objective and I notice that number of uses and therefore reach stops growing, or growth rate slows significantly, but the impressions per user are growing and this happens when I have budget and time in the period left, I could decide that we have made our optimum reach and level of frequency and I can save money by stopping the campaign.

Similar with web sites clicks objective. Usually, then the platforms increase impressions per user in order to stimulate clicks. But when I notice that impressions per user are increasing significantly but clicks do not grow with expected rate, I manage campaign trying to improve its results.

Now, in both cases impressions and clicks only by themselves do not help for campaign management. Even worse if we are paying for impressions but we are aiming for clicks.

Now, I tried to raise this with LinkedIn campaign management support but I received “interesting” response, one that kind of made me feel that either they are not sure what they are talking about or they are made to circumvent the question. I was told that I can see users in the planning stage and then impressions and click in analytics. Basically, they avoided direct answer to my question.

I am not sure what is the reason behind this LinkedIn policy but the bottom line is that LinkedIn still has some work to do to catch up to Facebook and Google in user-friendly advertising management.