Sep 8, 2022
Show Resources
Here were the resources we covered in the episode:
NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript
I think B2B marketing and CRMs go together like chocolate and
caramel. Today, we're diving into CRM reporting on this episode of
the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you listened to the last
episode about the cookiepocalypse, you know that conversion
tracking as we know, it probably isn't going to be reliable in the
future. Luckily, B2B and E commerce have something in common here.
In E commerce, marketers will always have purchase data, whether or
not it occurred, what the sale value was, etc. And no cookie can
affect that. There's a very clear line all the way from ad
impression to a purchase. In business to business. When someone
fills out a form it goes into your CRM. So if you're doing it
right, there's never a challenge in figuring out how many leads
came from a specific effort. If someone filled out a form and
submitted it, it's in the database, it's become increasingly
important in business to business to make sure that we've got data
available to us as marketers, so we can close the loop on
reporting. That way, when a platforms conversion tracking is way
under reporting, because cookie data is limited, or when a platform
may be way over reporting because it's using some algorithm to
calculate the estimated number of conversions, you can be totally
carefree. On this episode, we're gonna dive into the connection
between your ads efforts, and your CRM platform and show you what
you can do with the day that to close that reporting. Another hat
tip to Mark Bissoni for requesting this topic. And any of you out
there who have a topic you'd like us to cover, please do reach out
to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. We are always looking forward to
helping you become more super powered and hear about the topics
that you're interested in. In the news, for you listeners who are
attending HubSpot Inbound conference in Boston, I'm going to be
speaking on Thursday there. So I'd love to get to connect if you're
going to be in town. I heard a couple of weeks back that my session
was totally filled up. So I hope you got registered early. But if
not get there early to stand in the standby line, I speak at quite
a few digital marketing conferences every year. And Inbound is by
far the largest one that I speak at. And it's one of the ones I
most look forward to every year. Okay, for the topic at hand, let's
hit it.
2:27
What is a CRM?
What is a CRM? First of all, we talk about it a lot in business to
business, we may use the acronym, or we may say customer
relationship management platform. But realistically, we're gonna
say CRM, because the other one just hardly makes any sense. It's
basically a database of your customers, your prospects, really
anyone you'd want to keep track of. There are so many different
types of CRMs out there. Really, anything can qualify as a CRM. If
you just keep an Excel sheet, or a Google sheet of all of your
current customers with some data about them, that is a really basic
CRM. So don't be daunted when you hear the term if you haven't
heard of it before. Some of the major CRMs that you've probably
heard of before, are like Salesforce, HubSpot, Constant Contact.
There's way, way, way too many to list all here. And all of them
have their own personalities. Some are very tailored to sales, some
are tailored more to marketing, some are better for email versus
reps who are making calls. We B2Linked we actually went through
several CRMs testing this, and we would have one that worked
really, really well when we were doing outbound. And another that
was much better with handling inbound. One connected to email
really well and made it easier to do newsletters. And ultimately,
you're gonna have to study all of the different capabilities based
off of what you need your CRM to do. I would say most of our larger
clients use Salesforce. And what's so cool about Salesforce is it's
infinitely customizable. You can literally make it do whatever you
want. But along with that customizability it means it's incredibly
complex. Most of our clients who use salesforce.com have an
internal Salesforce admin whose job it is just to keep the platform
up and running. So if you don't want to hire a full time admin,
there are certainly simpler CRMs. But it's great because you can
make it do whatever you want. HubSpot has recently become a pretty
great contender in the enterprise space. It offers the CRM
functionality for free, but then the fees really start to kick in
when you add on different marketing or different sales packages. I
should say that HubSpot relationship with LinkedIn really makes it
special. Because HubSpot and LinkedIn communicate really well. A
lot of these integrations that we're going to talk about are done
pretty much automatically. So as a marketer, why would you want to
do this? Why should you care about a CRM? The simple fact is that
your CRM extends your data, your ability to analyze, and your
optimizations, beyond just those front end metrics. If all you do
is rely on just LinkedIn's campaign manager, the deepest insights
that you can get are things like a cost per lead, or a conversion
rate, which as you'll remember from the last episode, those metrics
are even getting muddy. So that means you can't actually get
accurate lead counts, or number of qualified leads, or figure out
your lead quality by campaign, or even solve the Holy Grail, which
is calculating your ROI. You can't do any of this without involving
your CRM.
5:26
Getting the advertising data into the CRM
In order to connect your advertising data in with your CRM, you
have to get the advertising data into the CRM. And there are two
different ways to do that. The first is if you're using LinkedIn
lead generation forms. If you want to know more about this, go back
to Episode 17, where we did a deep dive on them. And these are
really, really great, they tend to have super high conversion
rates. But because that data actually lives on LinkedIn, you then
have to get that data out. Of course, you could log into LinkedIn
every day, and download the leads that have occurred in the past 24
hours, and then manually process them. But good heavens, if you are
listening to this podcast, you are paid way too much for doing that
activity.
6:07
Automation
Okay, so let's figure out how to automate that. LinkedIn has
partnered with several of these CRMs to allow you to just send that
data directly into the CRM without any sort of human contact,
Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, and quite a few others,
I've included a link down below in the show notes so you can see
all of the different integration partners with your LinkedIn Ads.
But if you're not using one of the CRMs, that LinkedIn fully
integrates with, don't worry about that, because you have a pretty
cheap solution. Zapier.com, last time I checked, their $20 per
month plan could get all of your LinkedIn lead gen formatted data
directly into about any CRM or any workflow that you want. And $20
a month is definitely a cheap price to pay, compared to having to
do that all manually. So that's LinkedIn lead gen forms. What if
you're driving traffic to your website and you want the form on
your website to pass into your CRM? That's definitely possible.
We've all been doing that for years. And here's how that process
works. First of all, when someone clicks on your ad and visits your
landing page, the link that they visit, can and should have
tracking information in it. We call these tracking parameters. So
those tracking parameters are just sitting in the address bar when
someone is there on your page. And then when they decide to fill
out the form, the info that it asks for might be things like your
name, your email, etc. And then they hit submit. But what they
don't know is that before the form is submitted, the JavaScript of
the page made note of the whole URL that was up in the address bar,
and all of its tracking parameters that could have in it, and it
sent them along into the CRM, along with those visible form fields.
So the CRM now has data about who someone was, as well as a little
bit of information about where that traffic came from, which is
incredibly helpful to you as a marketer. So then your CRM needs to
be configured to actually look for those parameters and how to
recognize them. And it'll store them inside that lead record that
was just created through that form submission. Since the vast
majority of marketers out there are using Google Analytics, we
should take some time to talk about UTM parameters. Now don't get
confused by the acronym UTM. Hardly anyone knows what it means it
doesn't really mean anything. It stands for urchin tracking module.
Urchin was the company that Google acquired to actually turn it
into Google Analytics. So it's just a brand name, you don't have to
worry about it. But now we as marketers talk a lot about UTM
parameters, because Google Analytics has a set of five standard
parameters that it accepts natively. And those are source, medium,
campaign, content, and term. The first three are required, you need
to provide a source, a medium and a campaign, but content and term
and then a whole bunch of other custom ones, they're optional. So
I'll give you an example. If I was sending traffic from LinkedIn
Ads into my website, my UTM parameter for source would probably be
LinkedIn. It's the website or the channel that I'm using. For my
medium, I like to identify the different ad formats I'm using. So
if I'm sending sponsored content ads to my website, I would
probably put SC for sponsored content in media. Then for campaign I
like to actually include information about either the actual
campaign within LinkedIn, or a description of the audience. And
that way, if I go into Google Analytics, I can see all of my
reporting by audience segment, which is really cool. Then we have
content. And Google originally designed this to be a way that you
could tell the difference between your AB tests that you're
running. So when we create ads, every single ad has its own unique
UTM content parameter. And because it absolutely has to be unique.
By far the easiest way I've found to make something unique is to
stick today's date in it because obviously today's dates not going
to repeat itself. So one of our content parameters might look
really daunting to someone who doesn't know what they're looking
at. But it may say something like LI, short for LinkedIn, SC, short
for sponsored content, and then a six digit number representing
today's date. And then like 0102, an incremental digit for which ad
this was that we were publishing. And what's so cool is because
that content parameter includes all of that information, it allows
us to go back and figure out the exact image, the exact everything
that was associated with that ad later on. And we track that all
internally with proprietary tools. So this is obviously a very
proprietary way that we handle the UTM content parameter. But I
hope just as an example, this was helpful or interesting to you.
The last standard UTM parameter is term. And that was used to track
the individual keyword from different search campaigns. But
obviously, because we're dealing with paid social here with
LinkedIn, we don't really bid by keyword. So term is just one of
those ones that's leftover. You could use it for something if you
want, but you don't have to. So whether you're using Google
Analytics or not, you can still use Google's UTM parameters. Or you
could really use anything else. For instance, if you use Adobe
Analytics, which is very much used by those enterprise companies,
they have a parameter called a CID parameter. And of course, it can
be very customized. But this is oftentimes one parameter that
represents everything that Google asked for five parameters to
represent. When you're advertising on Google, on Google Ads, Google
will automatically put something called a gclid, or a Google Click
ID inside the URL. And a lot of people are able to grab that
parameter and make it useful and identifying an individual click.
Facebook has something similar, they call it the FBclid, or
Facebook click identifier. And if you don't want to use any of
these, you don't have to, you could do your own custom URL
parameters. If you look at a URL, anything after the question mark
doesn't usually change the content of the page or change the
address of the page at all. It's just extra information for some
system about that traffic. There are a few very technical
exceptions here. But usually, when you look at a URL, the address
of the page ends, right as soon as you hit the question mark, and
then everything after that, you can change and make whatever you
want. So the question mark becomes your first query parameter. And
then if you have multiples, they are separated by the ampersand or
the and sign. So you can have as many query parameters as you want,
it's just the first one is going to start with a question mark. All
the other ones after are ampersands. And there's absolutely nothing
magic about the parameters that you choose, it just means that
you're going to have to configure some system to recognize and
identify them, and store them if you want to use them. So if you
haven't built parameters before, especially if you're using Google
Analytics, there are a whole bunch of free tools out there to build
your UTM parameters and your URLs for you. We've linked to one down
in the show notes called utmbuilder.com. But it's a very, very
simple type of function. And so a whole bunch of different
companies have evolved to do this for free. We actually do this all
within Excel. We have an automatic URL builder that grabs things
from all the different columns that we're building our ads inside
of Excel with, and just concatenates them together in the right
format. So there are a lot of options, you can really do this any
way you want. And we're going to talk a lot about how this
information makes it into your forms. But it's helpful to know that
UTM parameters were originally designed just to tell your analytic
solution, how to categorize the traffic that you're bringing in. So
for instance, if you click on a post inside of LinkedIn, that takes
you to someone's website, Google Analytics is going to see the
referring URL as LinkedIn. And that's pretty much all it knows. And
it knows that LinkedIn is a social platform. It's going to
categorize that as an organic social referral, which is actually
correct in this case. But what if you were running ads on LinkedIn,
and you didn't put any sort of parameters in the URL, someone
clicks from one of your ads and lands on your website. And now
Google Analytics is categorizing it exactly the same, it thinks it
was an organic referral from social. But if you put UTM parameters
in your URLs, you're telling Google Analytics, this is how I need
you to classify this traffic. This is not an organic referral. This
is an ad click. And here's the audience that was targeting. And
here's what ad type we were using all kinds of different
information that you can pass to them be able to properly analyze
your marketing efforts. They enable you to look inside of analytics
and see website traffic behavior, broken down by any of the UTM
parameters you set up. You can see things like average session
duration, or pages viewed by campaign or audience or individual ad
or ad type. Really, possibilities are nearly endless. Alright,
here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the
weaknesses of URL track.
14:52
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts.
15:01
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the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology
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you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal
prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we'd
absolutely love to get to work with you.
15:49
Weaknesses of URL tracking
Alright, let's jump into the weaknesses of URL tracking. So first
off, since it captures only traffic that submitting forms, this is
best suited for what we would call the trust stage. We tend to
break our stages down into three different stages, your awareness,
your trust, and your advocacy. So you could have tracking
parameters in your URLs. But if no one ever fills out a form, it
really didn't do much except communicate to your analytics solution
where the traffic came from, but nothing is going to make it into
your CRM. So you wouldn't be able to tell from your CRM, about view
through conversions, or assists from other platforms. The cool
thing though, is that your analytics platform can still track what
you define as a conversion. And the analytics solution is going to
attempt to track all of the activity of that user. Of course, if
you listen to our last episode about the cookie pocalypse
conversion tracking may not be all that reliable in the future. So
we'll just kind of have to wait and see.
16:43
Tracking Parameters
And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look
clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite.
And then the website can
I have come across some websites that do some crazy stuff with
URLs. So for instance, you might send a URL with all of the
tracking parameters. And then some web developer decided they
wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in
JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can
automatically strip out your tracking parameters to try to make the
site look really clean to your user. The problem is that when that
URL gets rewritten, it destroys your tracking. It might be great
for visual cleanliness. But the vast majority of users are not
going to care that they have junk at the end of their URL, we're so
used to seeing long URLs with stuff that we don't understand.
Another weakness that we've come across is if someone lands on the
page, and then has URL parameters in their URL, but then they click
to a different page, those parameters are then lost. Your analytic
solution knows that that traffic came in from those parameters. But
if that second page is the one with the contact form, and it's
trying to grab those parameters, they're not there and it's just
going to send through blanks. So when advertising on LinkedIn, my
recommendation is to land traffic on a landing page that has the
form on that same page. Don't give them opportunities to click
elsewhere. Otherwise, you'll lose a lot of this tracking data, we
actually experienced this ourselves, we sent ad traffic to a page
with a link to a contact form. And of course, we love when someone
chooses to contact us. But then as soon as the user navigated to
the page with the form, it dropped their URL tracking parameters
and so we lost them. We still ask them the discovery call where
someone heard about us. So we'll still get a little bit of data
about which channels are performing and turning into appointments
for us. But it's not nearly as reliable as if I had the UTM content
parameter telling me exactly which ad drove that person. So you
need to make sure that you configure your CRM to accept this data
that you're giving. And this is all to make sure that when someone
submits the form, and that data is passed into your CRM, it carries
with it information about the source of that traffic. And that
means that any lead that enters into your CRM that had tracking
parameters in the URL when the form was filled out, would
communicate that source information on that lead form. So now once
you have the data in your CRM, we get to do some really cool stuff.
As a disclaimer here, I'm going to talk you through the steps that
I would take in Excel to do this. So if you're not already
comfortable with Excel, this may sound a little bit like
gobbledygook. But first off, you want to go and find out in your
CRM, how do you generate a report for a specific timeframe? What
this report should look like the first column should be the date.
The second column should be some tracking parameter. For us, it
would be the UTM content parameter, but you could put anything you
want in there, the UTM campaign, it could be an Adobe ad CID, or
anything else. And all subsequent columns would be a count of the
number of records for each of the down funnel conversion steps that
you want to track. So for instance, in standard B2B, we might have
like an MQL for marketing qualified leads and an SQL for sales
qualified leads. We might have number of proposals sent out Number
of close deals that happened. And that means any of my tracking
parameters that brought in a lead, or graduated to an SQL or
graduated to a proposal or a closed deal on that date, it would
have an incremental digit in one of those columns. You export this
to Excel so that you can get ready to combine it with your spend
performance data. I'm going to refer to this CRM data as CRM data
from now on. Then you want to actually go to your LinkedIn ads
reporting. So you go into LinkedIn Ads, it's very important, you
want to make sure you've set your timeframe for your reporting as
the same timeframe that you're looking at for your CRM data, then
you want to export your ad performance data into Excel. Now, it's
really important that you do choose the ad Performance Report,
because that's the report that is going to have all of your click
URLs in them. And your click URLs is where your UTM parameters or
other tracking parameters are housed. You should generate this as
an all time report. Otherwise, you might have a row for every
single ad that ran for every single month or every single day that
it ran. So generate that as an all time combined report and then
you won't need to run an extra Pivot Table on your data later,
which would be a pain. If you haven't listened to Episode 69 of the
podcast all about reporting, you'll definitely want to make sure
you do that. Then the next steps that I do is I will take the
destination URL column, which houses all of the URLs with their
tracking parameters and I make a duplicate of that column. And
someone who's really good at Excel is about to tell me how dumb I'm
doing this, I need to strip out just the tracking parameters that I
care about into their own columns. And so I do this with the search
and replace function inside of Excel. If I'm trying to isolate just
my UTM content parameter. For instance, I'm going to do a search
and replace on that column in Excel. I'm going to start with the
asterisk, which is a wildcard in Excel. And then I'm going to put
UTM underscore content equals and then I'm going to leave the
replace blank. So what happens is Excel is looking for anything
that comes before UTM underscore content equals and replacing it
with nothing. So now on the left side of that URL, I have only the
contents of my UTM content parameter. If there are other parameters
that came after it, I can do the same thing by doing a search and
replace for whatever comes after that maybe the first few
characters or something with a wildcard after that. And then again,
replace that with nothing. Now I have a column where just the
values of my UTM content parameters are housed. If I care about the
other UTM parameters, I can do the same thing to isolate source,
medium, campaign, term, etc. So now you have a column for each UTM
parameter that was associated with each ad. So now I can create a
pivot table where the row is the tracking parameter and then my
values are the columns that I bring in are things like spend,
impressions, clicks, and any other ad performance data I care
about. So this sheet that you're working with right now becomes
your base data, as I call it. So you want to keep this sheet open.
And I'm going to refer to this as your ads data from now on. So if
you're tracking so far, we have a spreadsheet containing your CRM
data. And we have this one that contains your ad data. So now you
want to go and take your CRM data and paste it into a new sheet in
your workbook. That way, it's one Excel file that houses all of
your CRM and your ad performance data. Then once it's all in one
sheet, you get to start doing the magic work, you can start
combining your ads data with your CRM data to find insights. So in
your ads data, I would then go and create a new column for each of
the lead stages. So I might create a column for MQL, one for SQL,
one for proposal, one for closed deal. And then to fill those
columns up, I'm going to do a V lookup, which allows me to bring in
the number of each type of those conversions by whichever tracking
parameter was there within my ads. So if I were doing it, I would
look for that ads individual UTM content parameter, that's my
tracking parameter, then I would go to our sheet that contains the
CRM data and pull in the number of MQLs associated with that UTM
parameter. I'd go and do the same thing, another lookup to bring in
the second stage, maybe SQL, another one to bring in proposals, and
other to bring in closes. So now we don't even need that sheet with
our CRM data anymore. We can do everything from right within the
ABS data. Now highlight all of your ABS data and create a pivot
table from there. And again, you want your tracking parameter to be
the row and then for your values. You want to bring in all of your
ad performance. So your spend your impressions your clicks, video
views, whatever you want to bring in. And then what I do is inside
of that pivot table, I go to create additional calculated columns.
You can do it manually is kind of the lazy way. But it's a lot
easier to do this as calculated columns. So I'll go and create
calculated columns for click through rate and cost per click. I'll
create one for conversion rate, that is essentially my MQLs divided
by my clicks, or leads, divided by clicks, whatever you're using, I
can create one for cost per conversion. But now because I have
these columns in my data for number of MQLs, number of SQL, all
those further lead stages, I can create a calculated column of my
cost per MQL, my cost per SQL, my cost per proposal, my cost per
closed deal. Extra credit if you're actually pulling in the deal
value from your CRM, then you could actually do a calculation of my
actual return on adspend, or my return on investment. I also like
to create columns for my close rate, or my graduation rate from
every stage of the funnel. So I could show my graduation rate from
MQL to SQL. So now you're actually looking at a report making
decisions about the ad performance, based on the performance all
the way down the funnel. It allows you to make decisions like oh,
my cost per conversion is cheap with this audience, but they
convert to sales qualified lead at a really poor rate. So it's
really not worth us running. And there are so many more steps here
that just talking you through, it isn't going to work very well. So
I would encourage you to come follow us on YouTube. And I'm going
to do a walkthrough of a down funnel report, the whole build, in
the coming weeks, so you can follow along. And you can see the link
to our YouTube channel, just down in the show notes below. Make
sure you're subscribed.
26:44
Nurturing Your Leads
So let's get away from the geeky stuff. Now, what can you do to
actually nurture your leads, once they're in the CRM? Well,
remember, your CRM is basically just a database of the people that
you've put in there. So you could export from your CRM, all current
customers, and then upload that into LinkedIn as a matched
audience, to target and show messaging to those who are your
current customers, which could be really good for retaining them.
And once you have that list, you can also exclude it from your
other targeting, so that you're not showing prospecting ads to
people who are already paying you money. Something else I really
like to do from nurture, is download a list of active leads,
especially the companies that who have become leads, but haven't
yet closed the deal. And I can upload that into LinkedIn, and
create a warming campaign just around trying to inspire those
active leads to close. But of course, if this is done inside of
your CRM, most of the time, this is able to be pushed out through
your marketing automation workflow, or as an email list. So the
same advertising you could do to people who are active leads, but
haven't closed, you could also send them emails to keep them
informed. Or maybe your marketing automation system does SMS or
text messaging. If you have a list of emails, most ad platforms, at
least the major ones, allow you to upload those lists of emails and
target them with ads, just like LinkedIn. But Facebook, custom
audiences can do it. Google can, Quora can, Twitter can. So there's
a lot here that you can do across all of your different platforms.
And just another note here on lead quality reporting, you could
wait for sales to give you some sort of a lead quality or a lead
score on the leads as they come in. But I find if I have enough
leads coming in just my graduation rate from MQL to SQL, or SQL,
which might be stage two to stage three, whatever comes next is
going to be really effective at telling me the quality of the leads
that are coming through. If they're not graduating to stage two or
stage three in my sales process, chances are sales does not think
those leads are very high quality. So for instance, if one campaign
has a higher cost per SQL than another campaign, you can take
action by lowering the bids or pausing that campaign entirely. Or
if you have one ad that has a terrible graduation rate, you could
pause that ad and go and try something else.
27:16
Pitfalls
As you're setting up your CRM to be able to do everything that
we're talking about, there are some pitfalls that you might come
across. So let's go through a few of those. We have had a situation
several times with our clients CRMs, where our point of contact
will ask us to send over the tracking parameters in advance so that
they can set the CRM up to recognize and watch for that parameter
to occur. We don't want to do this, since it requires human work
before every ad launch. And if you happen to launch ads before that
work has been done in the CRM, then the CRM won't properly track
that traffic, which is not great. So just know that whatever CRM
you're using, it can be set up so you don't have to do this. What
it does is it just dynamically grabs every parameter from the URL
and inserts it in the lead record. So make sure you're set up to do
that. I should note that hubs Spot does this really, really well,
because of its integration with LinkedIn. As traffic comes in from
LinkedIn to your website into HubSpot, I'm pretty sure this is
already right out of the gate. Another pitfall that we've come
across is multiple forms being filled out by the same user ends up
overwriting the tracking parameters from the last time. So for
instance, if I clicked on a LinkedIn ad, and filled out a form, and
then came back three weeks later from a Google retargeting ad, and
then filled out a different form, as they both go into the CRM, a
lot of times what happens is the CRM goes, oh, we have an update on
this user and so I'm going to delete the tracking parameters that
say that they came from LinkedIn and update it as now they came
from Google. And I'm sure you can see why this is a problem. If
you're trying to track your LinkedIn performance, you don't want to
lose those leads that are just taking further action with the
website. So what you want to happen is you want to stack all of
their tracking parameters. So every time a user comes through, and
fills out a form, and they come up with new tracking parameters, it
just keeps record of all of the steps that that user took in their
journey. You might also have some logic that decides how to treat
duplicate form fills. Some teams really care about net new leads.
So sure, you're gonna drive traffic from LinkedIn. And the same
person over a two month period maybe has filled out a form twice so
there's two conversions. But if the team says we only care about
net new conversions, they might treat that just as a single
conversion. I get asked a lot about different attribution models.
Do we recommend first touch attribution, last touch, W shaped multi
touch? Well, I definitely have an opinion here. But I don't have a
blanket opinion that boosts one model up over another. The model I
care about is what I call any touch attribution. Since we're
managing only one ad channel, but our clients, our points of
contact, they need to judge the performance over multiple channels
that they oversee, they're going to need to select the attribution
model that they care about and want to use. And we do of course,
hope that it's one that fairly attributes the performance across
all the channels. So that's attribution done by the manager. But I
suggest every individual channel owner gets access to every single
lead that was touched by their channel. And I call this any touch
attribution. What this means is when we go to do reporting on
LinkedIn ad performance, every ad and every conversion that was
driven, I can then link up to spend that occurred on the platform.
So we have a precise calculation for the cost per lead, and their
cost per qualified lead, etc. And ultimately, if the manager
decides that they want to give the credit for a deal, partially or
fully to another channel, I don't care. What I care about is
getting as much data about which of my ads and campaigns are
driving actions. So I can then go and optimize towards those data
points and make the LinkedIn account better. So as a recap here,
managers over multiple accounts should be using a general
attribution method. But individual channel owners should be running
off of any touch attribution, because you're definitely going to
want as much data about performance down funnel as possible to help
improve your ad creative.
30:53
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.
33:29
We mentioned lead gen form ads on LinkedIn, that's episode 17, so
go and make sure you've listened to that. Also, Episode 69 is all
about reporting so make sure you've caught up on that. To build UTM
parameters onto your URLs, that's just utmbuilder.com, You can see
the link in the show notes as well. There's also a link to our
YouTube channel where you can see future reporting breakdowns that
I'm gonna do. If you or someone on your team is looking to learn
more about LinkedIn Ads, definitely pass them the course you'll see
the link down below. It's the LinkedIn Learning course all about
LinkedIn Ads that I'm the author of. It's by far the least
expensive and the most in depth training that you can find on
LinkedIn Ads right now. So check that out. Also, look down at your
podcast player right now. If you haven't already, hit subscribe,
and everything I'm sharing with you absolutely is free. But I hope
you'll consider going to actually leave us a review in your podcast
player. It is the biggest way that you can say thanks for us
putting these episodes together with any questions, tips, tricks,
suggestions, anything like that, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com.
And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week.
Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.