In the constantly developing world of digital marketing, LinkedIn has proven itself as probably the most powerful platform for B2B marketers. There are many reasons why the professional network is among the most trusted and preferred social media platforms. When it comes to advertising, LinkedIn offers the ability to easily target a specific audience, provides a wide variety of ad formats, and, best of all, LinkedIn ads have more than double the conversion rate of Google’s.
Advertising on LinkedIn is objective-based, structured around three main types of objectives, aligned with different levels of the LinkedIn marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. However, for practical purposes, these objectives can be grouped into four primary types: generating leads, driving website visitors, growing brand awareness, and driving engagement on posts.
Maximizing B2B Success: Optimizing Your LinkedIn Ad Campaigns
Creating the perfect LinkedIn ad campaign not only requires choosing the right objective but also collecting insights on the performance of your ad. Understanding your LinkedIn benchmarks for each of these objectives is crucial for optimizing your LinkedIn ad campaigns.
LinkedIn have recently published some data that can help you compare your results and get a better feedback on how do your ads perform. Following the benchmarks is an essential step of data analysis according to Alexander Krastev, founder of the LinkedIn marketing agency BookMark:
“When managing a LinkedIn ad campaign in Campaign Manager, you need to operate on two levels of analysis. Monitor the ads daily to identify and address any irregularities, making exclusions as necessary. However, conducting a weekly LinkedIn benchmarking analysis is essential for the overall success of the campaign.”
Here are the stats you should use when you fine tune your active campaigns and analyze the results of past ones.
LinkedIn Brand Awareness
Brand awareness should be one of your first and main goals when establishing your presence in the market and making your brand known to potential customers. These kinds of LinkedIn ad campaigns are recommended when launching a new service, entering a new market, or trying to build a broader recognition of your brand. You can publish infographics, news from your industry or even boost content about your business, made by other sources.
Brand awareness campaigns target about 95% of your potential customers. According to the 95-5 rule, these 95% are potential buyers who are not ready to make a purchase today, but may do so at some point in the future. That’s why it’s crucial to make sure your performance is good. Here are the metrics you should pay attention to:
- Click Through rate (CTR)
- Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
- Engagement Rate
- Reach & Frequency
- Video view through rate
- Video completion rate
When evaluating the performance of your brand awareness campaigns on LinkedIn, you can compare the results to these LinkedIn benchmarks:
| LinkedIn Ads Global Benchmarks | Single Image Ad | Video Ad | Carousel Ad |
| Click Through Rate (CTR) | 0.39% | 0.29% | 0.26% |
| Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) | US$5.69 | US$7.55 | US$7.53 |
| Cost per Click (CPC) | US$1.60 | US$3.37 | US$4.07 |
| Engagement Rate | 0.39% | 0.30% | 0.26% |
| Video view through rate | – | 23.00% | – |
| Video completion rate | – | 1.70% | – |
Website Visitors from LinkedIn Ads
Whether your company provides services or operates in the e-commerce sector selling goods to other businesses, driving more traffic to your website is a crucial objective, aimed at increasing the number of visitors who explore your products or services. Website visits LinkedIn ads are recommended for the second stage in the LinkedIn marketing funnel – engagement.
This is the step where people already know you as a brand and now want to learn more about what you actually offer. Here we recommend relying on LinkedIn videos ads, customer testimonials and success stories.
To evaluate your LinkedIn ad campaign performance for this objective, it is recommended to focus on these metrics:
- Clicks to landing page
- Click Through rate (CTR)
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
Here are the LinkedIn benchmarks for this objective. Remember not to give up if you are not close enough to them. Some things take time and better optimization, which also comes with time or with the help of an expert in the field. Yes, we’re talking about us.
| LinkedIn Ads Global Benchmarks | Single Image Ad | Video Ad | Carousel Ad |
| Click Through Rate (CTR) | 0.90% | 0.51% | 0.83% |
| Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) | US$15.75 | US$1.00 | US$19.68 |
| Cost per Click (CPC) | US$1.40 | US$3.89 | US$2.06 |
| Engagement Rate | 1.14% | 1.00% | 1.03% |
| Video view through rate | – | 29.60% | – |
| Video completion rate | – | 3.30% | – |
Engagement on Posts on LinkedIn
Engagement-focused campaigns aim to boost interaction with your content, whether it’s through likes, comments, shares, or follows. This objective is important for building a community around your brand, gaining trust and encouraging user interaction.
You can use LinkedIn engagement campaigns to promote content that encourages discussion, such as thought leadership articles, industry insights, or community-building posts. Remember that the engagement depends mostly on how strong your CTA is.
When your goal is to drive more engagement, you should focus on these metrics to evaluate campaign performance:
- Engagement clicks
- Engagement Rate
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Video View Through Rate
To make sure you’re on the right track with your campaign, you can compare your results to these LinkedIn benchmarks:
| LinkedIn Ads Global Benchmarks | Single Image Ad | Video Ad | Carousel Ad |
| Click Through Rate (CTR) | 1.61% | 2.10% | 1.36% |
| Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) | US$10.14 | US$15.64 | US$12.59 |
| Cost per Click (CPC) | US$0.54 | US$0.76 | US$0.89 |
| Engagement Rate | 1.62% | 2.23% | 1.37% |
| Video view through rate | – | 27.80% | – |
| Video completion rate | – | 1.30% | – |
Lead Generation
Getting more leads is usually the main goal for B2B marketers using LinkedIn. This objective is typically pursued through the use of Lead Gen forms, which allow users to submit their information directly on LinkedIn without leaving the platform. These LinkedIn ads are particularly effective when looking to reach professionals and decision-makers in specific industries.
The primary goal of Lead Gen forms is to collect information from potential customers, such as names, email addresses, job titles, and company names. This form of ad can be used for webinars, newsletter sign-ups, whitepaper downloads or demo requests and free training.
When your objective is to get more leads, you should focus on the following metrics in order to evaluate campaign performance:
- Number of leads
- Cost Per Lead
- Lead Form Fill Rate
And what are the benchmarks? Let’s see…
| LinkedIn Ads Global Benchmarks | Single Image Ad | Video Ad | Carousel Ad |
| Click Through Rate (CTR) | 0.61% | 0.62% | 0.67% |
| Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) | US$38.08 | US$27.01 | US$21.23 |
| Cost per Click (CPC) | US$6.49 | US$4.48 | US$3.14 |
| Engagement Rate | 1.20% | 1.33% | 1.04% |
| Form fill rate | 6.91% | 2.81% | 2.20% |
| Cost per lead (CPL) | US$84.09 | US$116.39 | US$114.41 |
When it comes about a LinkedIn marketing campaign, there is no second opinion that what matters the most are insights. No matter how great your ad looks, if you don’t analyze its performance and see where you can improve yourself, you won’t grow and the results won’t be satisfying enough.
Understanding the LinkedIn benchmarks for LinkedIn ad performance is essential for creating and optimizing successful campaigns. Each goal has different metrics to pay attention to, and being familiar with the average performance can help you set realistic goals and measure your success more accurately.
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