MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA: B2B marketers are finally able to take advantage of a feature that has long been available to their B2C counterparts as LinkedIn launches conversion tracking.
Announcing the introduction of the capability in a blogpost, the professional social networking site said that marketers would now be able to "easily measure how many leads, sign-ups, content downloads, purchases, and other specific results you're getting from your Sponsored Content and Text Ads campaigns'.
Russ Glass, VP of products for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, admitted that conversion tracking was "table stakes" in the world of digital marketing.
"We should have put [conversion tracking] out a long time ago, but we wanted to do it in a way that really took advantage of LinkedIn's data set," he said. "We wanted to make sure it was a universal pixel that laid the groundwork for more features to come."
Those will include retargeting and custom audience features.
"In the future, we'll be hooking up all this conversion data to help marketers identify the most likely conversion scenarios," Glass told Ad Exchanger. "[Instances] where we'll see all the way down to revenue and into the CRM system and do more with that data."
For now, Glass believes that the ability to cross-reference those people who convert with its own audience data – and so give brands a breakdown of how many conversions their ads produced by segments such as industry, position, job function and company size – is the "biggest differentiator" for LinkedIn.
That could enable them to see if a campaign was producing more conversions in one industry than another, for example, and to shift advertising spend accordingly.
The 200 advertisers that have been testing LinkedIn's conversion tracking reported an average 21% improvement in cost-per-conversions, Glass said.
Announcing the introduction of the capability in a blogpost, the professional social networking site said that marketers would now be able to "easily measure how many leads, sign-ups, content downloads, purchases, and other specific results you're getting from your Sponsored Content and Text Ads campaigns'.
Russ Glass, VP of products for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, admitted that conversion tracking was "table stakes" in the world of digital marketing.
"We should have put [conversion tracking] out a long time ago, but we wanted to do it in a way that really took advantage of LinkedIn's data set," he said. "We wanted to make sure it was a universal pixel that laid the groundwork for more features to come."
Those will include retargeting and custom audience features.
"In the future, we'll be hooking up all this conversion data to help marketers identify the most likely conversion scenarios," Glass told Ad Exchanger. "[Instances] where we'll see all the way down to revenue and into the CRM system and do more with that data."
For now, Glass believes that the ability to cross-reference those people who convert with its own audience data – and so give brands a breakdown of how many conversions their ads produced by segments such as industry, position, job function and company size – is the "biggest differentiator" for LinkedIn.
That could enable them to see if a campaign was producing more conversions in one industry than another, for example, and to shift advertising spend accordingly.
The 200 advertisers that have been testing LinkedIn's conversion tracking reported an average 21% improvement in cost-per-conversions, Glass said.
Data sourced from LinkedIn, Marketing Land, Ad Exchanger; additional content by Warc staff
