0 Clicks! 3 Ways LinkedIn Could Trip Up Your Marketing Efforts
And how you can stop that happening
If I asked you what a click-through-rate (CTR) for a LinkedIn sponsored message means, what would you say? If it’s “number of clicks to your destination, duh”, then you, like me have been misled by LinkedIn campaign manager.
So, how can you find your real CTR and determine if those sponsored messaging ads (and other LinkedIn ads) are worth it?
Understanding the LinkedIn Analytics interface — A confusing sport
LinkedIn is a fairly late bloomer in the ads game. Unlike Facebook or Google, it’s clear from using the LinkedIn ads platform that it’s slightly behind its tech siblings. In this article, we will go through some of the cheeky ways LinkedIn can trip you up, causing high levels of stress and anguish to the author of this post.
1. UTC for everything!
For starters, LinkedIn uses UTC time for everything. Your page analytics are in UTC, your campaign ads are launched in UTC. As someone currently in a PDT timezone, I find myself constantly having to look up how UTC translates to my current timezone.
The problem with the ads though is worse: it’s happened to my twice that I launched a campaign to start the following day, that as a result of being in UTC, launched that day. For sponsored messaging ads, I would like to serve my prospects with ads in the morning, so they are the first thing in their inbox. In both cases, the budget for my ads was spent before the new day began, nullifying the possibility of that happening.
Moreover, because the platform reports the analytics in UTC, its impossible to connect CTR’s from your platform to your Google Analytics (which does allow you to select timezones).
2. Limited Page Analytics
So you make 3 posts for your company page, organic ones that is, so they don’t get tracked in ads manager. You can see how these posts performed in the analytics section of your company page. Helpfully, LinkedIn doesn’t track the performance of individual posts, providing only aggregate performance across all 3 posts.
I strongly recommend that you use an Excel sheet to track daily performance of your posts, as things like CTR can change dramatically per post per day.
Given LinkedIn reports these analytics with a 2-day delay, its always hard to attribute increases in followers views to what you are doing because you never see that information when you are running the ads.
3. Sponsored Messaging: Not the CTR you thought it was!
But above all, the reporting of performance for LinkedIn sponsored messaging is purposefully misleading. I recently tried running a bunch of ads on LinkedIn testing out different formats, and these were the results I got:
Yes, I’m a marketing genius, thank you!
By all accounts, Sponsored messaging with a CTR north of 50% was the outright winner! Given it was all in the same column as the post data I didn’t question it twice. Chuffed with this insane CTR, I diverting a lot of money into sponsored messaging and even reconsidered doing an entire re-design of the landing page because that 60% conversion was seemingly not translating into more website visitors!
Except 1 day, as I was browsing the halls of the internet I came across this brilliant post. Although the CTR for sponsored messaging and posts is listed in the same column, they represent very different things. As one would expect, a CTR on a post reflects the number of people that clicked on the link of that post. Unfortunately, for the other it means the number of people that “clicked open your message”!
What! I hear you say! Not such a genius anymore!
To see the real CTR, one has to change the columns view to “Sponsored Messaging”, where they are faced with the reality that their 61% CTR was actually 10.64%. Thats still a solid result, but nowhere near what i initially thought.
Where does this leave us?
My experience overall with LinkedIn paid ads is — Don’t do it! The only benefit paid ads offer you over organic posts is more granular individual ad data. You can circumvent this easily by taking daily recording of your post performance in an Excel spreadsheet. Moreover, by upgrading to premium you can send InMails to an audience you choose. For me, the same message sent to a hand picked list of candidates via InMails led to a 14% conversion rate (aka, new subscribers on my website) compared to a CTR of 0% when running that same message as sponsored ad.
Further reading:
A great summary on the entire LinkedIn Campaign Manager is available here
