Social ROI has long been a point of contention. For many, they still don't see how all those Likes and shares correlate to direct return on investment - and really, that's the job of social media marketers, to prove definitive links between their on-platform efforts and the bottom line. But those links are gaining clarity - both Facebook and Twitter, for example, have been developing their own versions of "conversion lift" metrics which directly align their online efforts to in-store sales.
As social becomes a more significant part of the business landscape, the tools and systems available to connect social efforts to financial results are also evolving. And today, LinkedIn has taken their next steps towards providing more definitive revenue links through their offerings, announcing "conversion tracking" to better enable advertisers to measure how many leads, sign-ups, content downloads, purchases, and other specific results they're getting from their Sponsored Content and text ad campaigns.
"With conversion tracking, you can understand more about the specific ads and even the unique LinkedIn audiences that are driving your campaign conversions - including the seniority, industry, job function, and company size of the people you're converting to leads."
It works like this:
In LinkedIn Campaign Manager, users will be able to click on "conversion tracking" which will walk them through the process. Your first step is to select where you want to track conversions (normally your website).
You don't need to install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on all the pages you want to track as you've had to do in the past with other tags - LinkedIn's has simplified the process so you only need to install one tag that applies across your entire site.
You then need to add a conversion action to be tracked by LinkedIn - for example, once the visitor has completed a conversion they're transferred to a thank you screen, signaling the conclusion of the sales process.
Once you've added the relevant tag and action for each page, you can select the action/s you want to add to your campaign.
Based on this, LinkedIn will be able to provide you with more data on your campaign effectiveness and - importantly - additional insights on who, exactly, has been clicking on your content, based on the details listed on their LinkedIn profile.
This will help advertisers refine and target their campaigns more specifically, and get a better understanding of what types of people are most interested in their products and/or services.
Similar tools are available through other platforms (Pinterest added their own variation of this only recently) and it's a great addition to the LinkedIn advertising process. The more accountability and targeting we can add to the social advertising process, the better, and LinkedIn's new tools will help brands better hone in and focus their ad efforts to maximize opportunities.
If you want to get started with LinkedIn's Conversion Tracking, you can start here.