No matter how unlikely this may sound to you, the following is a true story.
One day, a company—which we have chosen to keep anonymous (hint: it is not one of the client logotypes you see on our homepage)—approached us and explained the following: “We have spent $9,300 on running four campaigns on LinkedIn, with the aim of generating leads. We were advised by [REDACTED] and set everything up according to their instructions. However, despite all this money spent, the campaigns have generated zero leads and zero conversions.”
We were baffled to hear this. Even a campaign that is not perfectly optimized should still generate something—especially for a media budget of $9,300! Could this really be correct? The company also informed us that they were considering giving up on LinkedIn altogether. “But then someone recommended Markick to us,” they said. “Perhaps you could take a look. Can you help?”
No stranger to challenges, we of course accepted. To be fair, we did not initially know if we would be able to help this company. It could be that they were in a very difficult niche market, their audiences were not very active on LinkedIn, they did not have good content for marketing, or some other factor made LinkedIn a poor marketing channel in their scenario. We were unsure of what we would find, but we were happy to have a look and help in any way we could. Regardless of the outcome, we would share our insight with them.
Two Campaigns Gone Wrong
In the week that followed, we were given access to the company’s LinkedIn advertising account and began our analysis. We found the client had spent $5,106 on one campaign split into two efforts: lead generation on LinkedIn, and driving traffic to a landing page for conversions. They had also run a second campaign where they had spent $4,236, again as a twofold budget for lead generation and conversions. The total amount spent on these campaigns was $9,342. As shown in Figures 1 and 2, these campaigns had generated 300,000+ impressions and 800+ clicks. Despite this, remarkably, we could see that what we had been told was indeed true: the two campaigns had generated a grand total of zero leads and zero conversions.
Figure 1: First Campaign
The first campaign: $5,106 spent, 0 leads, 0 conversions.
Figure 2: Second Campaign
The second campaign: $4,236 spent, 0 leads, 0 conversions.
By now, our curiosity was fully roused, and we revved up to the challenge of pinpointing the problem and then trying to solve it. How could it be possible to spend $9,300 and not generate one single result? We had never witnessed anything like this despite seeing our fair share of poorly optimized campaigns over the years.
We began our analysis, evaluating each of the five steps of optimization that are essential for any good performance:
- Ad Creative
- Audience Targeting
- Bidding Optimization
- Landing Page
- Form
Upon examining each step separately, this is what we found.
1) Ad Creative
By looking at the clickthrough rate (CTR) of each campaign, we tried to assess the quality of the creative. CTR is not just determined by the creative, but also by the targeting; we needed to tread carefully when coming to conclusions. The first campaign had a CTR of 0.23% and the second had a CTR of 0.35%. Both were slightly below benchmark, especially the former. The rates weren’t ideal.
Looking closer at the first campaign, we could see a few issues with the creatives:
No less than 12 different creatives had been applied to this campaign, for an audience of approximately 91,000 people. This is a poor idea because an oversupply of creatives will waste budget and decrease reach. There is a method to calculate the optimal number of ads for any campaign. Here this had been overlooked.
The creatives used language which we, in-house, would call “imperative”: they were telling people to do something. This is never a good idea in content marketing (or any form of marketing), because people generally do not like being ordered around. This should not be confused with a CTA (call to action). The CTA is allowed to be a little imperative (“click here to download”), but the entire ad cannot use imperative language. In this scenario, best practices for high-performance ad formulation had not been followed.
The creatives had ambiguous CTAs, and other ambiguities as well. Consistency is important for ad performance. A feedback enhancement loop at the time of ad creation would have also optimized the ads.
Overall, our assessment concluded that, with the right processes in place, the campaign’s CTR could have been enhanced from the range of 0.23% - 0.35% to a new and better range of roughly 0.35% - 0.45%, an increase of nearly 1.5x!
2) Audience Targeting
The scope of the audience for the first campaign was 91,000 people; for the second, it was 230,000. Both targeted one specific geographic location. So far, so good: these campaigns were geared toward reasonable audience sizes and were focused on a specific market.
The following element was less optimal. The company had chosen to target by Job Function on LinkedIn, an option that allowed them to select departments they wanted to target. They had chosen the “Operations” option, excluding only one job title.
The trick is, it is essential to know that the data warehouse LinkedIn uses for advertising targeting is different from the database of LinkedIn profiles. A translation is being made between the two: given hundreds of thousands of job titles, LinkedIn groups these into only 26 different Job Functions. Globally, the Job Function “Operations” has 73 million members (!), meaning it encompasses around 9% of all the platform members. This is extremely wide targeting. Using that with just one job title exclusion is not a good strategy. The company likely had a specific operations role in mind but had not been able to narrow it down.
Our assessment showed that, had Markick’s Audience Mapping feature been applied, the audience relevance score could have increased by at least 50%.
3) Bidding Optimization
These campaigns had been set up with automatic bidding on LinkedIn, which is how most campaigns are run on the platform’s auction. That meant no bidding strategy had been created in advance, and no platform which is independent from LinkedIn had been used to optimize the bidding.
As can be seen in Figure 3 below, this meant the average cost-per-click (CPC) was $11.03 and the average cost-per-mille (CPM) was $28.12.
Figure 3: Average CPC for Failed Campaign
If Markick’s platform for Automatic Daily Optimized Bidding had been used, our estimations showed the average CPC would have been roughly $6.50 for this audience, resulting in a performance improvement of almost 2x. Meaning, the client would have generated twice as many clicks.
4) Landing Page
It is unusual to come across landing pages with zero conversion rate, but this was one of them. Quite simply, no best practices had been implemented. For example, there was a headline misalignment between the ad and the landing page, which can easily trigger confusion with the audience. There was also a scroll-to-form obstacle, and a compulsory marketing opt-in.
Markick’s process is based on a range of best practices we’ve assembled for creating high-performance landing pages. In this case, the landing page for the conversion campaigns did not follow many of these practices. Our assessment showed that even with small adjustments, this landing page could have had a conversation rate of between 4-6%: an infinite improvement, since the current conversion rate was zero.
5) Form
These two campaigns tried to generate leads both off LinkedIn (via the landing pages) and on LinkedIn. Generating leads directly on LinkedIn has the advantage that a lead gen form can be partly pre-populated with information from a LinkedIn member’s profile. This means there is less information for the member to fill out, making life easier for them. Consequently, conversion rates are generally higher.
In this case, the company had added some extra questions to the form for the audiences to fill out. While this is sometimes desirable, in this scenario it was not. The questions had been worded in a very unfortunate way, to the point where they had apparently made people reluctant to submit the form.
Our assessment showed that just by wording the extra questions differently, the conversion rate could have been 6-8% on the lead gen form.
Results After Rescue
Upon presenting our findings to this company, they decided to work with us and have another go at LinkedIn. We’re happy to say that their story has decidedly taken a turn for the better. We are now running a multitude of campaigns on LinkedIn for them, with various marketing objectives such as thought leadership, webinar registrations, and lead generation.
We have so far brought the average CPC down to $7.23 (compared to their prior $11.03). Bear in mind though, that this new and lower CPC was attained even though the audience targeting is now much more niche. We have helped the client to better specify who they target; normally, you would expect the CPC to increase, not decrease, since you’re paying a premium for being specific. Our automated daily bidding engine has done a fantastic job in keeping the CPC down. We have also managed to increase the overall average CTR to 0.38%, from a previous average of 0.25%.
Figure 4: Lower CPC and Higher CTR
Furthermore, the client has thus far spent $31,500 on generating leads, and for that amount generated 121 leads for an average cost-per-lead (CPL) of $260. Figure 5 shows this. Since the client previously had spent $9,300 without generating a single lead, the previous cost per lead was, mathematically speaking, infinitely high, since $9,300 / 0 = ¥ (when you divide anything by zero, the result is infinity).
Figure 5: Lower CPL
While a CPL of $260 may seem high to some companies, this is in fact a very good CPL for this particular client in their industry. When they successfully acquire a new B2B customer, these customers are each (on average) worth $900,000 per year, on an ongoing basis. For this client, consequently, $260 per lead is minimal. So far, out of the 121 generated leads, 10 have converted into qualified leads in the sales pipeline, with a deal likely within the next few months. Therefore, from spending $31,500 on lead gen marketing, the company has already their eyes on one deal worth approximately $900,000 annually. The client is very happy, having obtained an excellent return on investment (ROI) right there!
We still have work to do in improving the conversion rates, since 6.39% (shown in Figure 5) is a little low for our liking. This means we expect the CPL to continue to decrease. Each new client offers us a joint learning curve; by applying optimizations in a systematic way, we can expect better and better results. This is just the beginning of their new success story.
Contact Markick
If you would like a free advisory assessment of your company’s opportunities on LinkedIn, feel free to contact us here and we will get back to you within 24 hours.