A Legal Marketer’s Guide to Analyzing LinkedIn Advertising Performance

Once you’ve created and launched a LinkedIn ad campaign for your law firm, you’ll need to analyze its performance and look for opportunities of improvement. Tracking and analyzing ad performance can help you glean insights, optimize strategy, and ensure you are allocating resources only to methods that are generating real business results. If you aren’t regularly analyzing your ad performance, you’ll miss out on opportunities to refine your strategy and get the best results for your marketing budget.

The most important KPIs to measure LinkedIn ad performance:

Measuring the success of your law firm’s LinkedIn ad campaign depends largely upon your overall strategy and what you are trying to accomplish. That is why it is extremely important to figure out your goals and objectives before you carry out your campaign. You need to determine what your Social Media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are. Depending on your goals and objectives, the KPIs will differ and what metric you are evaluating will slightly vary by LinkedIn ad type. Below are some of the most important KPIs to measure.

1. Click Through Rate (CTR):

The number of people who took action on your LinkedIn ad divided by the number of impressions. This metric is a good indicator of how engaging your ads are, since it shows how many people were interested enough in your message to take a next step. If you come across a low CTR, you’re likely not appealing to your audience and need to figure out why. 

2. Cost Per Click (CPC):

Though not the most important factor, how much you’re paying per click should factor into your decisions. You also want to understand how much it costs to access a certain audience on LinkedIn. Some audiences are more expensive than others (i.e. decision makers).

3. Conversion Rate:

This number points to anyone who has taken an action that you wanted them to. For example, in lead generation campaigns that action could be filling out a form. It might be supplying information, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading content. 

4. Cost Per Conversion (also called CPA for Cost Per Acquisition or CPL for Cost Per Lead):

Though every law firm measures this a little differently, the important takeaway is a clear picture of how much your firm must spend to get a lead to take a desired action. 

How do you stack up against LinkedIn’s benchmarks?

Knowing which metrics to keep an eye on is a great first step. However, without context those numbers aren’t always insightful. We’ve compiled some benchmarks shared by LinkedIn for the different types of advertising they offer.

LinkedIn Sponsored Content Benchmarks:

In North America, the CTR across all of LinkedIn sponsored content ads is about .35%, while paying between approximately $7-11 per click. It’s worth noting that for very high profile targets – for example, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you could pay closer to $20 per click. 

In terms of conversion rate, that metric varies across industries and which part of the funnel you’re targeting. For sectors like legal, where you are likely attempting to first provide value through gated content, you can expect about a 15% conversion rate (exchanging contact information for the content) of something with real value. If your conversion rate is under 10%, you need to step back and evaluate the value of what you’re offering, the messaging, landing page, etc.

Based on the numbers above, if you’re paying $7 to $11 per click and getting conversion rates in this range, your cost per conversion will probably be around $30-$60. If you find your law firm’s LinkedIn ad campaigns are getting above $75 per conversion, start looking at what you need to adjust. 

LinkedIn Text Ads Benchmarks: 

Text ads are LinkedIn’s cheapest ad format, so if you’re looking for a low cost per conversion, start here. Unfortunately, they do tend to have a lower CTR of .025% on average – meaning they get  2.5 clicks out of every 10,000 times they’re shown. Generally, if you have above a .03% CTR, that’s outstanding. Below .025% requires testing and optimization. With those statistics, the average CPC on text ads should be $3 to $6.

LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging Benchmarks:

Sponsored Messaging (formerly known as Sponsored InMail) is a more complex ad format for legal marketers. In these cases, you’re paying purely to send a message to an individual with no guarantee they’ll see, open, or click on it. That being said, the average open rate is about 50%. From there, an average of 3% to 4% will end up clicking on the offer inside.

Doing the math, you’ll see that sponsored messaging is LinkedIn’s most expensive ad format at an average of roughly $23 to $58 per click. On the other hand, if a large percentage of people take action on the ads, you can actually drive your costs down. 

How do you access and monitor all of these metrics? Use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to identify statistics and track data on any of your advertising activities. Campaign Manager is LinkedIn’s ad management tool that empowers anyone to create, launch, and evaluate the performance of LinkedIn ad campaigns. Learn more about how to create ad accounts.

Takeaway

Your law firm’s LinkedIn advertising performance will vary depending on a variety of factors. The benchmarks here show how much the ad types differ in metrics like conversion rate and cost per click. The important thing is understanding what success looks like to your law firm, and then using that information to test and refine your strategy and messaging. Properly analyzing your law firm’s LinkedIn ads on a regular basis will lead to actionable insights that drive better results.

If you need help building out a LinkedIn advertising strategy or adjusting current initiatives, reach out to us today. We have vast experience helping lawyers and law firms achieve measurable success through LinkedIn advertising.