Measurement and ROI

7 Key Metrics to Track the Success of your LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

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You’ve heard of “putting the cart before the horse”, right? In most cases, it’s a bad idea. But when applied to content marketing, this approach can work brilliantly. In fact, it’s how best-in-class marketers today begin their content marketing and native ad campaigns. On LinkedIn, they reverse engineer their campaigns first by visualizing their end goals and then backing those goals into a LinkedIn Sponsored Updates strategy.

Why start at the end? Because a successful campaign is about achieving meaningful, measurable business outcomes. Before you think about setting up a Sponsored Updates campaign, ask yourself: “What outcome do I hope to achieve?”

Most marketers’ goals tend to cluster into two categories:

  • Brand building through Thought Leadership
  • Gathering prospects through Lead Generation

The first step toward succeeding with Sponsored Updates is to ask yourself which goal is most relevant to your business. Whether you aim for thought leadership or lead generation, you want to measure outcomes that have the biggest impact on your business. Read on for seven key metrics to track the success of your Sponsored Updates campaigns.

For thought leadership campaigns, consider tracking these metrics:

  1. Engagement with your content:

The number of clicks, likes, shares, comments, company follows, and downloads are all indicators of audience engagement. (You can even measure average engagement rates on LinkedIn Campaign Manager.)

  1. Site traffic and time per visit:

How much traffic you get to your site and how long visitors stay when they get there are good indicators of whether people are engaging with your content.

  1. Brand lift or purchase intent:

You can measure brand lift by surveying a random sample of site visitors and comparing responses from people who saw your campaign with responses from those who did not.

  1. Executive-level follow-up:

You can see if your content is reshaping your company’s standing within your industry by tracking activities like the number meetings scheduled or advisory board invitations accepted.

Expert Tip: “As a brand, you really want to measure the relationships you’re building. One key indicator is the time that people spend with your content. Per Chartbeat, if someone spends 3 minutes of engaged time with your content, they’re twice as likely to return to your website within a week compared to someone who spends only one minute with your content.”

- Joe Lazauskas, Editor in Chief and Director of Editorial, Contently, a LinkedIn Certified Ads Partner

For lead generation campaigns, consider tracking these metrics:

  1. Volume of qualified leads:

HubSpot offers a terrific framework for qualifying leads based on prospect goals, needs, budget, timeline, etc.

  1. Cost per lead (CPL):

CPL is based on your conversion rates and customer lifetime value (CLV). Within this blog post, Hubspot provides a great resource for determining the lifetime value of a customer.

  1. Marketing-influenced or marketing-sourced bookings:

By linking your CRM to leads captured from your campaigns, you can tell whether your campaigns sourced a customer (e.g., the customer bought within 30 days of exposure to your content) or influenced customer acquisition (e.g., the customer bought within one quarter of exposure to your content).

Discover more tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn Sponsored Updates by downloading our latest eBook, The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.

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