LinkedIn is an essential platform to help you connect with other businesses, potential employees, and more. And LinkedIn Ads can help you reach them even more effectively.
But how do you know your LinkedIn Ads account is set up for success? A LinkedIn Ads audit can help.
When it comes to auditing your LinkedIn Ads account, the process is quite a bit different from other channels we’ve covered not only because it’s a social platform, but also because its tools and options are unique to this platform. I’m going to go through this in roughly the same order I would do for an actual audit for a client and give some examples along the way.
How to do a LinkedIn Ads audit
Follow these steps to complete a comprehensive LinkedIn Ads audit that will set you up for long-term success:
- Determine your account objectives
- Get clear on performance and conversion tracking
- Choose campaign objectives
- Dig into your audience targeting
- Look into additional audience settings
- Analyze audience size
- Check ad placements
- Review budget and schedule
- Look at your bidding strategies
- Make sure applicable conversion settings are applied
- Check your ad formats and creative
- Review your calls to action
1. Determine your LinkedIn Ads account objectives
Before I start any LinkedIn Ads audit, I have a discussion with the client to understand what they’re trying to get out of the platform. Every account is different and everyone’s goals are different, so what works for one might not be what another is trying to go for.
Here are the questions to ask yourself as you begin this process:
- What are you trying to accomplish with your LinkedIn campaigns?
- Are you looking for conversions?
- If so, what are the conversion actions you want? Demo requests, content downloads, webinar registrations, inbound phone calls?
- If not, are you looking for on-platform engagement, traffic to the site, audience and awareness building, etc?
- What types of efficiency metrics are you looking for? Do we need cost per lead (CPL) or cost per acquisition (CPA) to be within a certain range or are we just trying to get as much traffic to the site for the lowest CPC we can attain?
The answers to these questions will help you in your audit process in two ways. First, you’ll be able to tell if your current setup is helping you achieve your goals or not. Second, you’ll be able to identify new tools you may not be using that can also help you realize your goals. Those will all come as we move through the audit, but without this foundational information about what you’re trying to achieve, it’s hard to know what you’re looking for.
At this stage, we also need to understand who the target audience is. LinkedIn’s B2B targeting is second to none, but that also comes with a premium on cost. It’s expensive to reach those users, so you want to make sure you’re reaching the right folks and only the right folks.
- Who is your target audience and how do you identify them? Job titles, company size, company revenue, industry, job function, interests?
- Are there segmentations to be aware of for better targeting? Do you only focus on companies with 500 or less employees? Is your system not suitable for companies in a different industry?
Just like the account goals above, knowing who the target audience is will help you make better optimization and testing suggestions throughout the audit.
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2. Get clear on performance and conversion tracking
The second area we need to review is how we’re tracking performance and campaign success. Just like understanding the goals of the account, we need to know if the data we’re looking at is accurate or not. It’s one thing to audit an account and give ideas on why someone isn’t achieving their goals. It’s an entirely different thing to do that and then realize later on that conversion tracking is broken and none of the data you’re looking at is accurate. Trust me, I’ve been there.
Always start by auditing the conversion tracking setup on any account to ensure you’re making changes based on good data. Look for the pixels to be placed on the right pages of the site and ensure all triggers are firing appropriately for each call to action in the buyer funnel.
3. Choose campaign objectives
Depending on what the stated goals are of the account, campaign objectives can make or break an account’s success.
If you’re trying to generate more sales from LinkedIn but you’re only using Video View or Brand Awareness objectives, there’s a bit of a mismatch there. Conversely, if you want to drive awareness and spread the word about your product but are focused only on Website Conversions, that could also be a problem.
Here are the questions to ask when looking at campaign objectives:
- Do the campaign objectives you’re using align with your stated goals?
- Are there additional campaign objectives you should be using to complement your current efforts?
- Are there any campaign objectives you should stay away from based on what you’re trying to do?
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4. Dig into your audience targeting
Now comes the fun part, at least for me, we get to see how you’re targeting your potential customers. This is where we need to apply the persona information we received to determine if the campaigns are actually reaching the users you want or if they’re missing the mark.
Start by determining how you’re reaching your audience: are you using Job Titles, Industries, Company Size, Company Lists, or some combination of multiple options? There’s no right or wrong with this one, you’re just simply trying to determine if you’re reaching the right users.
A helpful tool for this is the Segment breakdown on the right-hand side of the screen. You’ll see the audience size, which we’ll come to in a second, and then a Show segments link below it. If you click on that, it’ll open up a short list, usually starting with Function. This tells you the breakdown of the audience you’re currently targeting with that campaign.
Now, if you’re using certain Job Function targeting, you would expect that it would match up pretty closely, but it doesn’t always. In the image above, Healthcare is who we’re trying to target, but there’s 19% for both Business Development and Accounting. These aren’t who we’re trying to reach, so I would suggest adding these as exclusions.
But as you can see in the second image, you can choose from a few different dropdowns to get different insights on the audience. Check through each of these to make sure the Seniority, Company Size, and Industries match up. Years of Experience and Interests aren’t as finite of targeting options as we’d like, so I usually just make note of those but don’t necessarily take action based on them.
In addition to looking at who you’re targeting, it’s also important to look at who you’re excluding.
- Are there any exclusions at all?
- Are you excluding your customers?
- If you’re using lead generation forms, are you excluding anyone who has filled out the form?
- Do you exclude competitors from your campaigns? What about partner companies?
5. Look into additional audience settings
In addition to the targeting and exclusion settings, there are a few other things you can do in the audience section on LinkedIn.
The first is pretty straightforward: what location and language are you targeting? This is likely a quick check off the list if you’re in the right place and using the right language. Easy-peasy.
The same is true for the last option in the audience builder: Audience Expansion. With a simple check box, you give LinkedIn the ability to reach users who are “similar” to your audience but wouldn’t qualify to be in it. Personally, I never check this box and I don’t think you (or anyone else) should either. If you need expansion, there are plenty of other targeting types you can test and iterate on without ever needing to use the Expansion feature.
If this is checked, I suggest you uncheck the box and then try other audiences to test if you need more scale.
6. Analyze audience size
Speaking of scale, what’s the right size audience for LinkedIn?
There’s no one single answer for this, but usually somewhere in the 30,000 to 100,000 range is a pretty solid size.
Anything below that can get restricted and you can oversaturate your group pretty quickly. Anything above that can leave potential for performance optimizations with audience segmentations on the table.
That’s not to say that audiences outside this range can’t work, but on average, you likely have an uphill battle in one way or another.
If the audience you’re auditing is less than 30,000:
- Try and research additional targeting options you could test to expand the campaign’s reach.
- Look to see if you’re being too restrictive with exclusions.
- Potentially try other personas based on how the buying process works. For example, if you’re selling software and only targeting the folks who will sign the contract, you could be leaving valuable influence on the table by not targeting the folks who will actually use the software and empowering them to make the case to those decision-makers for you.
If the audience you’re auditing is more than 100,000:
- Can you find meaningful segmentations to try? Should you break your campaigns out by company size for more direct messaging?
- Are there Job Functions or Industries sneaking into your targeting without knowing that they should be excluded?
Building and targeting the right audience on LinkedIn is a bit of art and a bit of science. The size doesn’t have to be exactly in that range, but as long as you’re targeting the right folks with an audience size that’s close to the goal range, you should be in a good position.
7. Check ad placements
For now, we’re going to skip the Ad Format section and cover creatives all at once, so that brings us to the next important section of Placement targeting.
Like just about every other advertising platform, LinkedIn lets you publish ads directly on their platform as well as a network of third-party sites that they’ve partnered with.
Just like with Audience Expansion, I turn this off on all of my campaigns. The benefit of LinkedIn is the control and placement of the ads to the exact right users. While the network says you can reach the same folks around the web, my experience (and the experience of many others I’ve talked to) is that the network only drives crap to the site. The CPCs might be lower, but the actual ROAS isn’t there.
If the account you’re auditing does have the Audience Network turned on, then do your due diligence and check the network performance.
In the main campaign tab, click on Breakdown, then select Placement. As I mentioned, I don’t have any accounts with this on, but this view will show you how the Audience Network is performing compared to “On LinkedIn” so you can see how it’s contributing before suggesting to turn it off.
If it’s driving leads and overall performance looks good in the account you’re auditing, I would ask how the overall quality of the leads is before making that suggestion. If you’re the rare case where the leads from that network are fine, then keeping it on is okay, but keep an eye on quality and if that ever wanes, then one of the first things would be to test turning off the extended network and see if that fixes the problem.
8. Review budget and schedule
The Budget & Schedule section is a pretty simple review: are you following the budget you have assigned and are you running the ads during the right period of time?
The budget can be daily, lifetime, or a combination of daily and lifetime controls. No real “wrong” way to do this. Just make sure whatever you have in the settings matches up to your stated budget.
Same thing with scheduling. You can set up an ad schedule to have a start and end date or to be always on, or what I call evergreen. Make sure this lines up with your calendar of efforts and make changes if it’s not.
9. Look at your bidding strategies
This section of the audit is typically where I see most folks doing the wrong thing. It’s small, and there’s really only one way to fix it, but my guess is that most of the accounts you encounter will be in a similar position.
Depending on which campaign objective the campaign is using, there are up to three bidding options on LinkedIn: Maximum delivery, cost cap, and manual bidding. As a note, if you don’t see manual bidding, it’s because they have it hidden under the “Show Additional Options” link, which only hides that one item.
In the vast majority of accounts, the setting we want to avoid is maximum delivery. As my friend AJ Wilcox says, “It’s expensive.” And he’s right.
The key phrase in the maximum delivery description is “with your full budget.” With this setting, LinkedIn tries to spend the full amount it has available every single day, regardless of what the returns are.
Cost cap is its own beast and if the account you’re auditing is using it and it’s hitting goals, then it’s fine to keep it.
But the best option on LinkedIn is manual bidding. With this option, you set your bids to whatever the maximum you’re willing to pay for a click rather than letting LinkedIn set it for you.
Here’s the strategy I always use for this:
- Opt into manual bidding.
- Set your starting bid super low. Way lower than the range they suggest.
- As you see performance come in, increase your bids slowly to get more volume and ideally more leads.
- If you don’t see any traction in the first few days, you might be too low, and that’s OK! Just slowly increase your bid until you do, then adjust accordingly.
This way, you get the same target audience but with the lowest CPCs possible to start, then you control the volume and CPC you get by increasing or decreasing bids based on the performance you see.
10. Make sure applicable conversion settings are applied
Lastly in your campaign setup, we need to make sure that all applicable conversion actions are added to the campaign if you’re using a compatible campaign objective.
Depending on the goals for the campaign, make sure all applicable conversions are added so you’ll be able to see the full results in the campaign’s tab. Additionally, no matter which bidding strategy you use, the platform will help you hit your goals in some way, shape, or form. With maximum delivery or most cap, it’s fully automated, but with manual bidding, you’ll see in the section above, that LinkedIn will “Enhance” your bid when it thinks a conversion is likely.
For this setting, make sure all valuable conversions are tracked for each campaign, depending on their individual goals.
11. Check your ad formats and creatives
Now on to what your LinkedIn ads actually look like.
Formats
As you’re likely aware, there are quite a few different ad formats on LinkedIn depending on which campaign objective you’re using.
All of them have their use cases and different accounts and calls to action will perform differently, so there’s no single format to avoid or always include. If anything, I like to see accounts using multiple different formats depending on what they’re advertising and who they’re trying to reach.
Here are some questions to ask:
- Which ad formats are you using?
- Are there any that seem to be performing better or worse than others?
- Are there ad formats you’re not using that you should test?
- Should you change campaign objectives based on the call to action you’re using so you can leverage a different ad format?
Creatives
No matter what format you select, it’s important to review the ad creative and make sure you’re taking advantage of all they’re able to.
LinkedIn will always suggest having five or more creatives in a campaign to help improve your CTR. I actually agree with LinkedIn on this, but the number five is a little arbitrary.
Ideally, any campaign should have anywhere from three to six ad creatives running at a time to create some variety for your target audience and also provide you with insights on what works best.
From there, you should review the creatives themselves for some key points:
- Are the images you’re using eye-catching or are they boring and bland?
- Do you have landscape, square, and mobile images to cover the best rendering on all devices?
- Are you using the surrounding text to the fullest? Does the messaging entice someone to click or is it boring and sales-y?
- Are you speaking directly to the target audience you’ve cultivated or are you simply reusing corporate messaging?
This is where you need to be creative. Clearly, there are thousands of ways to create an ad on LinkedIn, but it’s your job to help the client make those ads appealing. What are you seeing that could be better? What do you see that’s working well? How can you level up your ad game?
12. Review your calls to action
The last point I have for you is not a specific setting but is instead a bit of a soapbox topic for me.
What calls to action is the account using? Or put a different way, what is the account offering its prospective customers?
All too often we get so excited about our ability to target the exact buyer persona we need on LinkedIn that we jump right to the bottom of the funnel and ask for a sale before even introducing ourselves.
For example, this is an actual ad from my personal LinkedIn feed. No shade on Crunchbase, but I’ve only tangentially heard of them so I’m not entirely sure what they do, plus I’ve never engaged with the brand before, but here they are asking me to sign up for a free trial.
A free trial of what?
Okay, company intelligence, sure. But what does that even mean? Am I getting a user interface? A list of companies to target on LinkedIn? What types of intelligence am I getting?
All of this is a perfectly good ad…IF I would have been nurtured to this point.
For the call to action review, you’re looking for a few things:
- Are you targeting multiple stages of the funnel or only the bottom?
- What types of formats are you using to engage with prospects? Website visits, lead gen forms, some combination?
- What are you offering your users? Is there a case study, an industry report, access to a webinar, demo request, sales call, or request to watch customer review videos?
If there’s not a combination of assets and options for the prospective customers, then you should be pointing out that their offer is one-dimensional and needs to be spiced up a bit. Quite frankly, bottom of the funnel only marketing on LinkedIn just doesn’t work. Brands need to work a little harder to court their customers and help them make the buying decision.
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Audit your LinkedIn ads account for stellar results
Auditing a LinkedIn Ads account can be a ton of fun. There are so many options for marketing that you’ll nearly always find something new to suggest that you may not have tried yet. Use this list to make sure you’re doing the fundamentals, then put your own spin on how you could be doing things differently (and ideally more creatively) to see results in your account.