One of the most common questions we get asked by clients is “How do we compare to other clients?” Knowing whether your campaigns perform better than similar companies running the same tactics is a really useful indication of the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Often, however, it’s hard to get benchmarks against which you can compare. No one likes sharing their stats – at least not before they know they are in the top quartile of performance!
LinkedIn is one platform where we’ve seen significant success when both working for clients and promoting the agency. But it’s hard to know whether the campaigns are doing well as there is fairly limited data available. So I was delighted to see a blog post from our LinkedIn sales consultant, Felim McMahon, that explains Benchmarking and Optimisation for LinkedIn Advertising.
In the post he gives the following very useful benchmark statistics for different “well implemented” paid campaigns on LinkedIn:
Sponsored Content
Minimum: 0.30% CTR
Range: 0.35%-0.45% CTR
Text Ads
Minimum: 0.010% CTR
Range: 0.012%-0.030% CTR
Sponsored InMail
Minimum Open Rate: 20%
Minimum CTR: 1.5%
Open Rate Range: 25-45%
CTR Range: 2-5%
The numbers give some interesting insight. Anyone who has experience of running LinkedIn advertising will know that the text ads get far fewer clicks than sponsored content (about 1/20 according to Felim’s metrics). It’s also interesting that you should expect around 80% of your InMails to remain unopened. The great thing about having these stats is that you can quickly compare the likely CPC for campaigns using the three different paid approaches on LinkedIn.
Obviously results will vary by industry and type of campaign (upper v. lower funnel), but Felim believes that these numbers are pretty good indications of what you should expect, and if you’re not achieving these metrics then it’s a sign that there is something wrong with the campaign. Our experience suggests that in B2B tech, these figures are pretty good approximations of what you should expect to achieve.
Check out our page ‘LinkedIn- Everything you Need to Succeed’ for further information and advice on LinkedIn.