Do we measure the return on investment or ROI of LinkedIn ads? I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the founder of b two linked dot com, and we are the LinkedIn ads performance agency. We've run many of LinkedIn's largest account, and we are the only agency who are official LinkedIn partners. I'm also the host of the LinkedIn ads show podcast. Measuring the ROI of social campaigns has always been difficult, but I've got some great news for you that it's actually possible to do now with probably the technology that you already have access to. We know that purchase behavior is not nearly as linear as the traditional funnel diagram looks. But we do know that certain channels play certain roles during that sales process. I really enjoy the bant framework for assessing lead quality, and that is b a n t, your budget, your authority, your need, and your timing. The concept is when you're talking to a lead, if they have the budget for it, it makes them a higher quality lead. If they are the person who has the authority over the purchase decision, then that makes them even higher. If they have a need, it means that there's going to be more of a need for what it is you're offering. And if the timing's right, again, it makes them even higher quality. And different channels are going to affect the leads that are in those categories, the b, the a, the n, and the t. For example, with LinkedIn, we can target companies that are large enough to make it more likely that they're going to have a budget to pay for a more expensive product or service. We can also use LinkedIn's native targeting to make sure that we are hitting decision makers with our ads, so that when we do talk to someone, we're reaching the person with the purchase authority. The n and the t in band, the need and the timing, these are much better reached through search channels like SEO and Google ads and Bing ads. And this is being able to capture people who are expressing the need and saying that the timing is right. Because they're searching for it. So social channels, especially LinkedIn, are really good at introducing someone to your brand who may not have heard of you before. And of course, search channels are best for when someone is towards the end of their buyer's journey, and now they're comparing products and looking to actually put something in place. So then the challenge becomes, if I'm running all of these different marketing channels, How do I unify them and see the entire process happening at once? The simple answer is, it's all about your CRM. Your CRM system is going to track all of the interactions across all of the marketing channels that it has access and vision into. And the way that it does this with your ads platforms is you send tracking parameters through the URLs, that are being clicked on in your ads, so that when someone fills out a form, or and it goes into the CRM, you're getting data about what ad and what campaign that prospect interacted with. If you're using Google Analytics, these parameters are called UTM parameters. And if you're using something like Adobe Analytics, might be a different parameter, like a CID parameter. So now you start to get a vision of which interactions are making a difference in the customer journey. And every marketing team gets to decide for themselves which channel gets the credit as multiple channels are all interacting with the same prospect. You can decide to give all of the credit to the first touch because that was the ad or placement or whatever that led and introduced someone to the brand. Or you could give all of the credit to the last step, meaning, this is the last step that caused them to get pushed over the edge and close the deal with it. You can have multi touch attribution that assigns different credit and weight depending on whatever sort of situation you set up. Because we're an ad agency that only runs LinkedIn ads, I invented a type of I invented a type of attribution called any touch attribution. And the concept here is that any conversion that's generated because of a touch on LinkedIn ads I want to know about it, because then we'll get to credit the campaigns and the ads that drove those, and be able to optimize to get more of And of course, this simplifies the process quite a bit, but imagine you have all of this data in your CRM about which ad channels and which marketing channels have hit each of these prospects? Now, you can run a report out of your CRM and pull things like, show me all of the deals that are in sales qualified lead status and along with the UTM parameters that show which platform it came from and maybe which ad in which campaign, and then we could go and run a report from LinkedIn where we're advertising that also has those UTM parameters or tracking parameters, we can marry those together and actually run a report that says, here's what your cost per sales qualified lead is. Or even better bonus points if you have your report all the way down to the closed deal, and you can show how much you paid in order to generate those sales qualified leads, and that's gonna give you a clue as to what your return on investment is, how much you paid versus what you got out of You probably need to know the closed deal size of each of those deals, but then you can actually calculate your return on investment. I like to think of your LinkedIn ads results a lot like baking bread, because you're going to spend money today that's going to result in sales qualified leads or deals six months from now or a year from now or two years from now, just depending on how long your sales cycle is. So if you go and let's say you're doing this report based off of the last quarter, just know that whatever you see, it's just gonna get better as time goes on. And as those leads have a chance to to bake out, or mature.
