5 Best Practices to Improve your Law Firm’s LinkedIn Ad Performance

LinkedIn offers unmatched opportunities for lawyers to get in front of their audience and establish credibility. However, there are best practices that can ensure your firm lowers the costs of ads, reaches the right audience, optimizes performance, and properly tracks success. Here are 5 proven best practices that will improve your law firm’s LinkedIn ad performance. 

1. Discover Your Lowest CPC Bid

You want to look for ways to lower your costs per click (CPC). You can start by leveraging LinkedIn’s Enhanced CPC Bid, which allows marketers to bid a designated amount to reach people that LinkedIn has identified as likely to click on their ad. Obviously, you want the most clicks at the lowest bid possible. Start by bidding low and gradually increasing your bid as necessary. In order to find a sweet spot for bidding, select “enhanced CPC bid” for bid type, enter a low amount (like $1.00). LinkedIn will show you an error message and display the lowest amount that you can bid. Start with that number and then gradually increase it if you’re not seeing results. This is a good way to ensure you’re paying the lowest price possible while still reaching your audience. 

2. Retarget Based on CRM Lists – and Keep Them Current

Retargeting is a very powerful form of marketing, and in today’s hyper-connected world, it’s becoming easier. Creating a retargeting audience based on a CRM list is a smart way to stay top of mind with warm prospects and leads. To take advantage of that tactic, you will upload a list pulled from your CRM into LinkedIn and create a “Matched Audience”. This process can take a little while to work – it takes about 24 hours for LinkedIn to match LinkedIn profiles against the list you uploaded and generate a retargeting segment. However, it’s important to know that once a matched audience is created, it must be used for a LinkedIn advertising campaign within 30 days or the segment expires. After that, you’d have to complete the process again, which can delay the launch of your ads. 

3. Make Sure You Properly Track Conversions

By now we all know that conversion tracking is a critical component to advertising success. To do this in LinkedIn, you have to define how you would like to track your conversion. We suggest using your site-wide Insight Tag to track conversions based on when people visit a webpage. Some marketers choose to track a precise URL, but often users may enter on an unsecured connection, and therefore their conversion would not be tracked. So that this doesn’t happen, choose “contains” and input the later part of the URL, cutting it off before the UTM parameters. 

1. 1. When setting up your conversion tracking, you’ll select “Use my site-wide insight tag”. 
   2. In the box under “Count conversions from people who visit any of the following pages”, select “contains” from the drop-down and then input the later part of the URL, without the tag. 

4. Use the “Duplicate” Feature to A/B Test

A/B testing is a really important part of optimizing your advertising efforts, but many marketers are simply too busy to spend time creating and tracking a bunch of different ad creative. You can make this process easier by leveraging the “duplicate” feature to quickly make an exact replica of your original ad, and then alter one element at a time. For example, make a duplicate and then change the headline, then make another duplicate and change the image for your next round of testing. Tip: If you’re using  HubSpot, make sure to add a unique content term to each ad for proper tracking within the HubSpot platform.

5. Regularly Check Demographics to Ensure Your Ads Reach the Right People

Even though LinkedIn gives you the option to define your targeting criteria, it’s important to understand if ads are actually reaching your intended audience. We suggest digging into demographics data regularly to ensure that your campaign is reaching the people you created it for. To do this, go to the Campaigns tab and choose the campaign you want to look at. Then, click the “Demographic” button at the top. This pulls up a window that shows the top impressions share, clicks, click-through-rate, conversions, and conversion rate by all of the targeting parameters you set (for example, job function, company, location, etc). If you see that impressions or clicks are coming through that are not related to your initial targeting, you can exclude them from your targeting criteria. This will help to ensure your budget is being effectively spent only on the people you want to reach. This is a process that you should repeat periodically to gain insights that can help you to improve performance over time. 

Takeaway:

LinkedIn can do great things for your business goals, but only if you’re taking advantage of all that the platform has to offer. That’s not always easy to do – many people don’t even know about all of the features and functionality that can be used to improve advertising! If you’re struggling with LinkedIn advertising, we can be of assistance. We help firms to develop the right strategies, create compelling content, and optimize bidding in order to generate real leads from paid social campaigns.