27 Jul Paid Advertising on LinkedIn: The Value of the LinkedIn Insight Tag
Most social platforms offer a snippet of code advertisers can place on their websites that offer benefits such as enhanced targeting, tracking, and insights. There’s the Facebook Pixel, Pinterest Tag, and Snap Pixel, to name a few. LinkedIn has a lightweight Javascript tag; the “LinkedIn Insight Tag”.
In this post, we will cover the key benefits of implementing this tag that includes insight into rich audience data, creating important target audiences essential for campaign effectiveness, and the ability to track and analyze key conversions associated with your campaigns that would not be available otherwise.
Here are a few key stats to keep in mind before diving into the LinkedIn Insight Tag:
- It’s projected that more than half of marketers will leverage LinkedIn for marketing and advertising by 2021 (excludes companies that use it strictly for recruiting).
- And it’s probably because of this trend, there is an uptick every year with users on LinkedIn (it’s slow but steady).
- By 2024, the US alone will have nearly 71M LinkedIn users or just over a quarter of the population.
- Ad revenue continues to grow. In 2018, LinkedIn ad revenue totaled $1.16B and that number is expected to double by 2022.
So, there is quite a bit of data to support LinkedIn staying prosperous in the upcoming years. And it’s uniquely business. So hard to replicate on, let’s say, Instagram or TikTok.
Now without further ado, the LinkedIn Insight Tag ultimately provides several benefits to advertisers. We will cover the top use cases for the tag and show you how to put each to use.
Deep, Relevant B2B Audience Insights
The Website Demographics tool offers key information about the LinkedIn members visiting your website. It’s not the standard age and gender demographics data you might be accustomed to seeing. It’s the juicy B2B data that is typically hard to uncover. You can filter by job title, industry, seniority, function, company size, location, and company. You can even compare different pages on your site to see how the demographics change. For instance, blog pages (upper funnel) versus contact us pages (lower funnel). In addition, the tool shows time period % change to spot upticks or declines in any of those aforementioned categories. Here are a couple of use cases just to get your gears turning:
You run a campaign targeting companies of all sizes because you aren’t sure what the sweet spot is. After running a campaign for a month on LinkedIn, you find that the CTR is particularly high for companies with 51-1,000 employees. You decide to exclude companies that are underperforming as to not waste valuable impressions, truly optimizing those marketing dollars.
Let’s say you are trying to attract senior-level executives from the CPG industry to your website. You have the Insight Tag placed on your site and decide to check out what type of visitors went to your blog pages in the last 3 months. You find traffic is coming from mid-level managers in retail at a relatively high volume. Based on this data, your marketing team pivots to switch up the marketing strategy to focus on thought leadership and develops content that reflects the top 10 challenges of CPG in the space.
Uniquely Qualified Audience Creation
Under Account Assets in Campaign Manager, you’ll see “Matched Audiences” and it’s in this section of the platform where much of the unique audience targeting takes place. There are three types of audiences you can create; retargeted website, lookalikes and uploaded lists (uploaded lists do not require the Insight Tag):
Retarget Website Lists
A great way to keep your content in front of your target audience(s) is by retargeting website visitors, be it retargeting visitors that went to an exact URL (e.g., awesomeco.com/bestproductsever) or went to a URL that starts with (e.g., awesomeco.com) or went to a URL that contains this word (e.g., awesomeco.com/contactus/thankyou, e.g., awesomeco.come/subscribeblog/thankyou). You could use this to bump up your frequency with a target audience and you can also use it to strategically push them through the funnel. There are several different use cases with retargeting website visitors.
Lookalike Audience Lists
If you run campaigns on other platforms, like Facebook, you are probably familiar lookalike audiences. This feature uses an existing matched audience, such as website visitors, and finds audiences with similar characteristics to the target. The original audience is not included in the lookalike audience you create. Lookalikes can only be created from matched audiences with 300 or more matched members. For instance, if you want to create more activity on your blog to drive users through the funnel, you can create lookalikes of blog visitors.
Uploaded Lists
Uploaded lists include company lists or contact lists. For company lists, LinkedIn recommends uploading at least 1,000 companies (max 300K). You can match by company name, website, email domain, LinkedIn company page URL, or stock symbol. With contact lists, LinkedIn recommends at least 10,000 contacts (max 300K). An email address, first and last name, mobile device ID, or google ID can be used to match. For both, other fields such as a state or zip for company matches or company and job title for contact matches, increases the accuracy. Here are links to the matched lists templates:
Creating and Tracking Conversion Events to Reveal Meaningful KPIs
Conversion campaigns are the ideal way to optimize campaigns where it is important to drive to key pages or key events. Even if you decide not to select a conversion campaign as the ad objective, for example using the awareness or traffic objective, you can still track conversions. In the end, you’ll be able to tell (1) if your campaign created conversions, (2) how many conversions were created, (3) the cost per conversion, and (4) who converted (recall that you get rich audience data using the tag). There are two ways to create conversions:
- Site-wide Insight Tag: With this approach, you enter the URL of the website you want to track. This can range from very upper funnel, such as a blog page, or very lower funnel, such as a confirmation page (e.g., registering for an event, submitting contact info). Boolean options are available as well so you can either broaden or narrow the conversion. For instance, if you want visitors that go to an exact URL or if you want visitors that go to any URL that contains a piece of text.
- Event-Based Image Pixel: This option tracks conversions when associated pages aren’t available. When this route is taken, LinkedIn provides you with the code to install for the event you wish to track.
The process for creating a conversion includes:
- Naming your conversion
- Setting a type (e.g., lead, key website pageview)
- Setting a value (optional)
- Defining the attribution window
- Selecting applicable campaigns
- Finally, the details on tracking
In the last stage, you can use the site-wide tag or get the event-specific pixel to incorporate, which you can copy to a clipboard.
On a final note, I’ll add that running paid advertising on LinkedIn isn’t inexpensive when compared to other social media platforms. LinkedIn justifies the higher cost by touting the quality of the product by means of reaching a more qualified audience. Whether or not you agree with this explanation, taking the time to leverage the tag is a wise use of resources as it squeezes the most value out of every dollar.
In addition, be sure to also think about other ways to create awareness of your brand and engage users on the platform, such as executing (and staying devoted to) LinkedIn Groups or new features that have rolled out such as LinkedIn Polls. If you need help with running ads on LinkedIn or need assistance with a more comprehensive LinkedIn strategy, please feel free to contact us using the form below.
