Assess Your Marketing ROI: What Are You Aiming For?

Before data made marketing effectiveness more measurable, most ad spend was an act of faith. Marketers believed their spending was working; they just had a hard time proving it. As the famous line attributed to retailing pioneer John Wanamaker puts it, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Fast forward more than a century since the quote, and we see an industry that still struggles to flag waste. Unlike Wanamaker though, we have the data to calculate marketing ROI almost across the board. We also have the tech to optimize marketing spend at scale, yet until recently, few marketing teams have made marketing ROI a priority. We recently asked webinar attendees to grade their teams as it pertains to calculating marketing ROI. Two-thirds of respondents said they were either “just starting to learn it” (62.2%) or “What’s ROI?” (3.7%).  

No matter where your team is on the ROI-calculating continuum, you’ll find plenty of tips on this page to better understand marketing ROI and how to calculate your marketing ROI on LinkedIn.

Defining the Marketer’s Approach to ROI

At its highest level, ROI is a very basic equation (below). We’ll help you master it from a marketing sense.

Ad-Sourced Revenue ÷ Ad Spend = ROI

The Curve of Marketing Math Success

By climbing the curve of marketing math success, you’ll realize a more mature approach to measurement, one that goes far beyond the click to ultimately capture the ad-sourced revenue that enables marketers to calculate ROI.

Simply put, you want to be able to look at an ad and see exactly how many conversions it has generated. Ultimately you want your ad to turn into a lead and then into a customer.

Many marketers begin at the left-hand side of the curve, focusing on CPS and CTR, but these don’t tell the whole story. Top marketers invest more time on the right side of the curve, learning which actions and ads lead to actual conversions.

 

How to Measure Impact on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Conversion Tracking, a set of capabilities built directly into LinkedIn Campaign Manager, enables you to easily measure leads, sign-ups, content downloads, purchases, and other desired actions on your LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Text Ads campaigns. Specifically, you can understand more about the specific ads and even the unique LinkedIn audiences that are driving your conversions. You can even identify the seniority, industry, job function, location, and company size of the people who are becoming leads.

With LinkedIn Conversion Tracking, you can:

Track the metrics that matter most: Track website conversions from your LinkedIn programs directly in Campaign Manager. At a glance, you can understand your LinkedIn advertising ROI, conversion count, cost-per-conversion, conversion rate, and return on ad spend. You can even track which audience segments are driving the most conversions.

Record every conversion, every time: track conversions on your website from desktop and mobile, whether members converted after clicking on - or even after just viewing - one of your ads.

Optimize your campaigns to drive even better performance: Monitor the specific campaigns, ads, and the nature of the audiences that are driving conversions. Then use this information to improve your Sponsored Content and Text Ads targeting, creative, and maximize the downstream impact of lead and opportunity pipeline goals.

Take Advantage of LinkedIn’s ROI-Facilitating Features

Achieving ROI is much easier when you have access to the right technology and insights. LinkedIn Website Demographics is a free reporting tool that lets you see what types of professionals are coming to your site, empowering you to tune your marketing to those visitors, and develop better targeting and content for your campaigns.

LinkedIn Matched Audiences offers three tools to reach the audiences that matter most to your business via Website Retargeting, Account Targeting, and Contact Targeting.

Achieving ROI is also easier when it’s easy for audience members to engage with your content. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms allow your audience to quickly access your gated content with just a few clicks, while still giving you the accurate lead data you need.