LinkedIn Ads CTRs and Why They Matter - Ep 59

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ad Saturation

Benchmarking your LinkedIn Ads performance

How the LinkedIn Ad Auction works

Performance Chart

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Show Transcript

Click through rates on your LinkedIn Ads don't matter at all, and you shouldn't pay attention to them. Well, I've heard this argument and I totally disagree. We're talking about click through rates and why they matter on this week's LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! My digital marketing beginnings were in Google ads. And for years, I would hear the argument about both click through rates and quality score. People saying they don't matter, you shouldn't focus your attention on them. Just don't pay attention at all. I've seen the same case made for LinkedIn Ads. But I'm here to tell you that click through rates are incredibly important on this platform. Sure, it's not something that you'll want to report to your boss or to your client, quite honestly, they're not going to care. But for you, as an ad manager, it's one of the strongest signals that you can use to spot problems in your account, as well as leverage to get better results. So let's hit it.

First of all, what is click through rate? Well, the simple definition is it's your clicks divided by your impressions. So it becomes a percentage rate. And when you have nothing to compare it to, then it really doesn't mean anything. But if you've listened to Episode 15 of the podcast, if you haven't, feel free to go back and check it out, it's all about benchmarks. And when you have a benchmark to compare your results to, all of a sudden it becomes increasingly important. Plus, you can always compare to past performance, if this is a campaign that you've been running for some time. What I like about click through rate is it really is the easiest way to tell if your ads are interesting to your audience or not. And one of the arguments that I've heard is that your click through rate doesn't matter if you're paying by the click anyway. And sure all admit that. If you're paying by the click, and you're happy with the costs per click that you're getting, and you're spending all the budget that you won't really want to, then you really don't have to care too much about your click through rates. But as soon as you want to scale up and spend more, or if you decide that you want to optimize your efforts to either decrease costs, or improve your conversion rates, this becomes an entirely different story. So I'm here to tell you that your click through rate matters. And you shouldn't dismiss it just because it's front end data. Your click through rate really begins your data story. Of course, it is only the beginning. But hey, we all judge books by their covers, don't we? In order to tell the full story of why click through rates are so meaningful here on LinkedIn, we need to talk a little bit about relevancy scores. And the history here is that back in early days of Google Ads back when it was Google AdWords, they needed a way to prioritize which advertisers ads that they showed above another one. So let's say that you have two advertisers who are both bidding $3 for a click, the platform obviously wants to maximize its revenue and make Google more money. But when two advertisers are both willing to pay $3 for a click, then you really can't tell which one should be prioritized. So what they did is they started looking at click through rates. And if one adverti