LinkedIn Ads Free Analytics and Demographics - EP 54 - a podcast by AJ Wilcox

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Example image of LinkedIn's new navigation in Campaign Manager

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Show Transcript

Did you know that LinkedIn has an analytics tool that you can get professional insights about your website visitors, and you don't have to spend a dime on LinkedIn Ads? It's all about that and more on this week's LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You know, LinkedIn gives us a really rich understanding of who is interacting with our ads, and actually, who's interacting with us on our websites as well. And they call this demographics and website demographics, both of them being a separate area of LinkedIn. So we're going to walk through all of that. I'm going to give you the pros and cons, what you should pay attention to, what you should be using. First up here in the news, if you're in campaign manager this week, you'll notice a banner along the top of your screen that says coming soon, campaign manager is launching a new navigation experience. So this is cool. This means that LinkedIn is not necessarily changing their toolset, but we are going to see it look a little bit different, we'll have a different and hopefully better user experience. When I clicked through the help article, LinkedIn's help section actually shows a screenshot of what it's going to look like. And it looks pretty good. I'll include in the show notes, a link, so you can actually see what it looks like as well. That means down the left side, now, you'll see plan, advertise, test, analyze, assets, account settings, and company page. Now plan comes first, which tells me it should be the default experience. Under plan, it's going to include your matched audiences and your block lists, if you're using block lists, the LinkedIn Audience Network. Then, next comes advertise. This comes second in the list, but I definitely think this should be first because it's really just normal campaign manager. Then you'll have test, which we've had along the top navigation for a while, it gets you into brand lift studies that you can run, you or your client is spending more than like $90,000 a quarter. Then we have analyze and it says "Gain insights about your website audience with professional data and set up and measure conversions for your ads." I'm just reading into this, but it looks like it's going to be add demographics, which we're talking about today and maybe it's going to be conversion tracking setup, maybe it'll even include the insight tag, I'm not sure at this point. Previously, those things were found underneath assets. The next one is assets. And this one, it says it's going to have lead gen forms and landing pages. When you look into it, landing pages is only if you're using LinkedIn recruiter. If you have a recruiter license, it allows you to create some landing pages for recruiting. Most of our listeners won't have to worry about that at all. Then there's account settings which we expect to have the normal account settings, like who manages what, who has access to the account, all of that kind of stuff, the company page, it's attached to, currency, and the name of the account, I expect all that to be here. And then the last one is company page, it looks like it might just be a link to your company page or maybe it's a link to the settings around your company page. Either one, pretty cool. So I think it's going to take some time getting used to it. I do wish advertise came first in the list because from a user experience perspective, when we log into campaign manager, advertise is the majority of what we're going to be doing so I expect that I just don't know why they put plan first in the list. It does look to me like these sections will mostly have dropdowns with expansion, so that you don't have to actually leave the page to explore what each one of these categories does. So I'm a fan of that. If any of these take us to a different page, I do politely request LinkedIn to have all of them open in new pages so we don't lose wherever we were in campaign manager, that would be cool for all of us who want to get in and explore all the new options here.

Alright, with all of that, we're gonna dive into the meat of this. Let's hit it. So first, let's talk about the paid demographic side on LinkedIn. What this is, is as you're running ads, you can get some demographic data about the kind of people who are receiving impressions and taking action on your ads. Anywhere in your account where you can see your campaign performance, in the upper right hand corner, you'll see a box or a button. This is demographics. As soon as you click that, whatever you've selected down within your campaigns, whether it's campaigns, or ads, or campaign groups, you'll then be able to start seeing the demographics that are within them. It's helpful to note that this obeys your time range. So you can look at your demographics by time. So if you make a big change in your account or a big change in a campaign, you can segment out and look at how your demographics have changed over time. That's something really helpful to see, like the changes I'm making to my targeting over time, are they helping or are they hurting? So as you click that button, it takes you to where it'll show you demographics and then it'll tell you if you've selected a certain number of campaigns or ads or whatever. The default place that will take you is showing you a breakdown by job function. And job function is just the department that someone works in. So as I'm looking through my own here, I can see that it's showing me impressions and clicks and click through rate. And those are just the basics for any campaign that LinkedIn doesn't have deeper dimensions and data on, which we'll get into here in a minute. Then it's sorted by the job function that has the most impressions starting out. So inside of this account that I'm looking at sales is the highest, followed by marketing, followed by business development, followed by operations. But of course, job function isn't the only targeting type to break your your traffic down by so when you click next to where it says display: job function, there's a drop down, and it gives you all kinds of other things that you can display your ad demographics by. There's job function, there's job title, there's company name, there's company industry, there's jobs seniority, company size, location, and then two new ones that we got after the Microsoft acquisition, country/region, and county. Now, because the campaign's I'm looking at here happen to be text ads, the only breakdowns I get are impressions, clicks, and click through rate. If you are analyzing a lead gen form campaign, for instance, it'll give you impressions, lead form opens, open rate, leads, and lead completion rate. Similarly, if you're looking at video campaigns, you'll see impressions, views, view rate, completions, and video completion rate. If you're looking at sponsored messaging campaigns only, you'll see sends, opens, open rate, clicks, and click to open rate. So these are all worth exploring. It's really cool. Now there are certainly some limitations to this. The first is that your chart can only include 300 entities at a time. So if you're looking at campaigns, and let's say you have 320 campaigns in your account, you can only have 300 accounted for here within your demographics. And so you would have to segment something out to be able to see all of your data. Another limitation is, if you wanted to see video stats, like I mentioned, you could see like percentage completions and all that, you do have to make sure that you have selected only video campaigns, otherwise, it won't show you the video stats. Same thing with all the other ad formats, make sure that you go and specifically select just those campaigns within that ad format you're looking at. Alright, so you can see a little bit of demographic data about the people that you're paying to send ads to and that makes a lot of sense, but you might be asking, AJ, what do I do with this? Like, how do I actually use this strategically? Well, here are just a few ways that we use them strategically, to help us manage accounts better. And I'll admit, there's not a whole lot of really actionable information here, unless you see some segment of the population who's coming in as traffic or leads that you don't want, then that's pretty actionable. So let's say for instance, that you're running a job function campaign. And then if you come in and look at job title breakdown inside of your demographics, it's going to show your your about top 20 job titles that have been sending traffic. It's really helpful to look at this to say, are the job titles being represented here? Are they representative of the audience I want to reach? If you see a whole lot here that aren't a good fit for your target audience, there are a couple actions you could take. The first is you could possibly go in and try to exclude those job titles. Or the second is you could say, ah, looks like job function might be too broad here, because it's letting in a lot of people who aren't a good fit. So really, this is a comparison, a measure of how qualified your traffic is. If you're using lead gen form campaigns, for instance, you can actually see how qualified your leads are because it'll actually show you a breakdown of the job titles, or the seniorities, or the company sizes, etc, who are contributing and becoming leads. Many of you may know that as you're building a campaign over in the right rail, you can see a bit of an audience breakdown and here's how this is different. So the one that you can access within building the campaign, where on the right rail you click on where it says show segments, and what it's doing is you've defined a target audience over on the left side from choosing your targeting. And on the right side, LinkedIn is breaking this down by how the targeting you are using breaks down their membership into these different segments like job function, seniority, years of experience, company size, etc. So let's say that you have a really inactive portion of your audience. When you look here at the show segments within the campaign, it's going to show you representative, hey, there's a whole bunch of people who fit this criteria, but then when you actually go to advertise, and you find out, they're not on LinkedIn very often. The actual ad demographics that we've been talking about, they're going to be a lot more accurate. On the flip side to that, you might find that certain segments of your audience are overactive. So here's an example of that. Let's say you're building a campaign, and often the right rail under your segment breakdown, you see that 35% of your audience is made up of chief marketing officers. But you look at the demographics tab, instead of campaign manager. And you see that Chief Marketing Officers are contributing to 50% of your ad engagement. What that's telling you is of all of that audience that LinkedIn thought that you were going to be targeting, you have one really hyperactive segment who they're either more active on the platform, or they're engaging with your ads at a higher rate. And I would argue that's a really good thing, that's going to teach you a lot about who this target audience is. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the free website demographics that everyone should be using, whether you're advertising on LinkedIn or not Ads experts.

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Alright, let's jump into the free demographics data we get from LinkedIn Ads, I'm imagining that every single person listening right now has heard of Google Analytics, I'm also imagining that a good portion of you have heard of and maybe even used Facebook analytics. Both of these are tools that are free, provided by a platform, giving you some sort of an insight into your engagement, or your website traffic. One very overlooked tool that you have in your arsenal is actually what I would have called LinkedIn analytics. But LinkedIn themselves, they just call it website demographics. It's hidden within their ad tool and I don't hear anyone talking about this, but again, I think everyone here should be checking it out, especially because it's kind of like a ticking time bomb. At some point, this isn't going to be useful to us anymore. I'm guessing. That's my prediction. Okay, so first off, how do you get to this? Well, right along the top navigation, and I know, at some point here in the near future, LinkedIn is launching their new navigation experience. So these will probably be along the left side. But at least for right now, if you're just listening to this, right as soon as the episode comes out, it's along the top. You'll click the button that says website demographics. What this is, is very similar to your ad demographics, but it's showing who is actually visiting your website that LinkedIn recognizes. And of course, for LinkedIn to actually recognize what's going on on your website, you have to have the LinkedIn insight tag installed. In the world we live in right now, where some cookies are still persistent in people's browsers, what's happening is someone comes in visit to your company website, it fires the LinkedIn insight tag, LinkedIn is then looking at the cookies in that person's browser to see if they're currently logged in to LinkedIn. If they are logged in, it understands who that person is and then kind of adds them to this list of the people who are interacting on your website. Then they can aggregate that data here within the website demographics tab, and show you a cool breakdown of the kinds of people who are using your website. Now, the reason that I think that this is hidden right within campaign manager is you really do have to have the insight tag installed. But, I really do wish that this was a separate domain, where it was like LinkedInanalytics.com, and you go and install the Insight tag, you know, it's the same one you'd use for advertising, but you install it, if you have an ad account, it syncs to it so you're always using the same insight tag, it's not going to give you a second one, which would be a real problem if you tried to implement both. Then I think people would use it more. We probably see people talking about it at PPC conferences and stuff. At least so far, I haven't seen people get too excited about the feature, but I really like it. One of the biggest things that I like about this, it's being able to analyze your website traffic by who someone is professionally. This isn't just those who are interacting with your ads, because we expect to get some data on who they are because we're paying for it. This is anyone who uses your website that LinkedIn recommends. Think about it, if you are specifically selling a product to companies of 200 or more employees, but you look here in your website demographics and realize it's made up of a whole bunch of interactions from employees who are at companies with a size of like 11 to 50, then you know that maybe some of the other marketing you're doing isn't hitting the right audience and you could maybe try to adjust that somehow. And, of course, you don't have to pay a dime for this, you don't have to be a current advertiser, you just get to go open a LinkedIn Ads account, which is free, install the Insight tag and then as soon as your website has generated at least 300 people that LinkedIn can identify, all of a sudden, boom, you're getting this data. That's pretty cool. Obviously, the reason why LinkedIn would give us this data for free, is to help us want to buy more ads, I'm imagining that it would work like this, if you're seeing that a lot of the people on your website are not from the titles, or the right size companies, or representing the right industries, you might want to pay for additional people of the right people to get them there. So I'm sure that's what the aim of this is, but again, I think this is super valuable, even for B2C companies to make sure you're getting. As far as I understand this is 100%, based on the cookies in someone's browser. After iOS 14.5, we know that iOS devices, or any Apple device isn't going to reliably carry that browser cookie anymore so we have no idea how many of those people are making it through this. This just got a lot less valuable. Here in the next year, when Google Chrome stops accepting third party cookies, we're going to see another big chunk taken out of here. I wouldn't be surprised if here in the next year or two years, this product is obsolete, but we can sure use it now. I do hope that LinkedIn does something to improve it to save the data.

Now, of course, everyone uses Google Analytics. Google Analytics is really cool to see how people are interacting with your website. So what pages they're viewing, and what they're doing on those pages, where they came from, the technical aspects about them. So what screen size are they using? What language is their browser set to? What part of the world are they from based on their IP address? Google is really cool to see how people are interacting with your website. Then you have Facebook Analytics, which is very much a social breakdown of who is interacting on your website. So you might get information, like, for instance, you can see how someone is engaging with your website, compared to how they engage with it socially. So it'll tell you the number of views that that page got, according to what Facebook can see, but then how many times people have liked that page, how many Facebook members that post reached, and that kind of information. Obviously really helpful if you're doing a lot with Facebook Ads. LinkedIn doesn't really get into the structure of your LinkedIn website demographics, or what I would prefer, they call LinkedIn analytics. It just tells you the amount of interaction you get from each type of professional breakdown from someone on LinkedIn. So like, we've talked about, their job function, their job title, the company they represent, their industry, seniority, company size, location, country/region, and county. It works the same way as your free demographics, you just look for where it says display:, and then you click that break down and choose how you want to see your traffic. Like we mentioned, it requires having the Insight tag installed on your website. Sometimes we haven't quite figured out when this is the case, but sometimes it won't actually start collecting this data until you set up a matched audience. Specifically a website retargeting audience. So the best thing you can do, when you set up a new LinkedIn ads account, immediately go into your matched audiences, it's creating a retargeting segment of everyone who visits the website. And then you're sure to at least get this data on everyone that LinkedIn recognizes from that group. Some of the breakdowns that you can get here are like, you can see the percentage of the pageviews that LinkedIn figured out that were generated from each of those targeting facets. You can see the number of pageviews in the upper left hand corner that this represents. So for instance, on the data I'm looking at, I can see that companies with size 11 to 50, make up 34.2% of my pageviews and then I look in the upper left hand corner, and I can see this is representing 3,156 pageviews and so I could figure out oh, that's a little over 1000 people who represent companies of the size 11 to 50. We can also see a time period change. So it will automatically compare to the previous segment. So if you're just looking at the last seven days, it will show you how that has changed up or down by what percentage compared to the previous seven days to that. And one other really cool thing here that I don't hear people talk about a lot, but you can actually break this data down by any sort of segment on your website that you have previously created. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you took my advice, you went in and created one website retargeting segment that is everyone who came to the website. And then maybe you also say, hey, let's create a segment that just retarget anyone who has made it to one of our landing pages. And then let's say that you do another one that's just anyone who hit one of our thank you pages. This is where they hit only after they've already become a lead. You now have these three different segments. And here inside of LinkedIn's website demographics tab, the very first option, you'll see where it says website audience, there will be a little drop down arrow. You can click that and you can look by each of these retargeting segments. So you can see what's the difference in someone, you know, professionally, who visits the website, versus those who make it to our landing page, versus those who actually end up converting. If you can see the demographics of the people who tend to convert, isn't that gonna make you update your campaigns and go and target more people like that? I think it's a really, really natural way of closing that loop. I mentioned before, this is totally based on cookies, which means it might go away, it might not be useful after cookies aren't helpful, but my hope is that LinkedIn finds a way to update this and get us this kind of data because I don't think this is going to be overly valuable if it only represents like less than 20% of all the traffic across the website. But, certainly I'm grateful for whatever data we can get. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

All right, I've got the episode resources for you. First off in the example image of what LinkedIn's new navigation is going to look like inside of campaign manager, so definitely check down in the show notes for the link that you can see what that's going to look like or you can go search on LinkedIn's Help section for it. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads at a deeper level, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is also going to be in the show notes. It's the least expensive and the best course out there so far. If you like what you heard, please do look down at your podcast player and hit subscribe, if you're not already. I do want you hearing all the new episodes that come out if LinkedIn Ads is in your wheelhouse. And please do rate it. Rate the podcast. Of course we'd love to see the five stars, but if you have anything critical you want to say or you want us to change, I'd love to hear it so feel free to say it in the comments or just email it to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Please leave a review for the podcast. It helps other people, like you, other ads managers, other LinkedIn ads fanatics, find the show. Of course, we're always grateful if you do that. We'll even shout you out here on the show. Alright, with that being said, we'll see you back here for the next episode. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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