Data Meets Decision-Making: Reporting, ROI and Smart Experimentation on LinkedIn

Welcome back to our four-part series on the new rules of B2B marketing measurement. In this post we round the final turn and head down the home stretch with our fourth and final phase: Evaluate & Maximize. 

Just joining us? You’re all good! You’ll find a link to the introductory post above, as well as links to the first three phases below. 

Getting Started with B2B Marketing Measurement Strategy — Phase 4: Evaluate & Maximize

• Phase 1 — Define: Build the foundation for effective and purposeful engagement
• Phase 2 — Capture: Turn customer behavior into measurable signals
• Phase 3 — Activate: Use data to deliver value in real time
• Phase 4 — Evaluate & Maximize: Prove what works, scale what matters
  

So far, in the first three phases, we’ve built a foundation for purposeful engagement, created a way to capture customer behavior signals, and activated our systems to deliver value in real time. Now, in phase four, we’re going to set the stage for steady performance and continual improvement.

The Evaluate & Maximize phase: An overview

As a reminder, the Evaluate & Maximize phase works in tandem with the Activate phase. Activation and Evaluation are ongoing loops. When you activate audience segments and optimization rules, you simultaneously evaluate what’s working and refine accordingly. 

Evaluate and Maximize is the phase where data meets decision-making. This is where you analyze campaign results, compare performance against goals and identify opportunities for improvement and scaling. 

This is also where ROI is proven. By connecting ad spend to pipeline or revenue, and by optimizing based on verified insights, you close the loop on your strategy. It works like this: As you evaluate what’s working, you immediately feed those insights back into the Activate phase to refine your targeting, creative and budget allocation.

What are the key actions of the Evaluate & Maximize phase?

The main objective of this fourth and final phase is to improve your ongoing ability to measure and improve impact. As such, here are the key actions we recommend:

Measure the metrics important to you: Set up campaign reporting to provide your team with the full-funnel visibility they need to make data-driven decisions. While certain metrics will understandably be weighted more heavily than others, it’s also important to use a combination of metrics that enables a full view of performance. 

Refine targeting to reach your audience: Use real-time engagement data to refine your targeting strategy, reach more of the right people and accelerate your pipeline. 

Enable smarter decision-making: Make sure you’re taking advantage of tools that can improve your decision-making efficiency and effectiveness. For example, LinkedIn’s built-in recommendations can highlight the following areas of opportunity (these tailored recommendations are designed for immediate action to improve your performance and ROI):

• How to adjust your bid strategies
• How to expand audience reach
• How to refine creative assets

Products and tactics for the Evaluate & Maximize phase

Here’s a quick breakdown of the products and tactics that can help you refine your targeting, creative and budget allocation in the Evaluate and Maximize phase. 

Reporting and ROI tools: Here are a few reports (and a few other locations where difference-making insights tend to hang out.

• LinkedIn’s Revenue Attribution Report links ad data to revenue and pipeline
• Campaign & Professional Demographics allows you to see how your audience and audience engagement breaks down by role, industry, region, etc. 
• Check out the Companies Hub for account-level insights
• The Organic & Paid Report provides a unified view of total LinkedIn performance
• Take advantage of Dynamic UTMs to enable granular tracking of attribution and performance
  

Experimentation tools: To kickstart performance improvement, we recommend using both A/B testing, which compares two variations of a campaign element, and brand lift testing, which compares brand perceptions between people who have seen your ads and people who haven’t. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be thought of as a formalized approach for the A/B testing process as a whole. Learn more about testing in Campaign Manager.

LinkedIn Marketing Partners: When it comes to powering up your experimentation and reporting capabilities, it helps to have a capable Marketing Partner. Check out LinkedIn Marketing Partners for Reporting and  Experimentation. LinkedIn is committed to working with industry leaders to enable further measurement capabilities across key measurement outcomes:

• Insights
• Signals
• B2B Attribution & Analytics
• Experimentation
• Verification

Next steps

The best way to get started with the Evaluate and Maximize phase is to, well, start evaluating your performance with an eye toward improvement. You can start by reviewing your Revenue Attribution Report, or whichever report makes the most sense for what you’re trying to measure and improve. 

Make sure you’re taking advantage of opportunities to break down your performance by key demographics as well as company-level engagement. Check out Professional Demographics and the Companies Hub for key insights that can help you improve performance via smarter targeting.

You’ll also want to make sure that you’re validating your assumptions scientifically rather than randomly. If you haven’t already, implement a system for when and how to incorporate A/B testing, brand lift testing, and conversion lift testing into your B2B measurement strategy. 

Finally, close the loops for continual improvement and make sure your findings are being put to good use. We’ve talked about how you should feed findings back into the Activate phase, but that’s just one loop. Make sure your findings inform the next rounds of your Definition and Capture phases as well. 

And that’s it! You’re now officially hip to the new rules of B2B marketing measurement.

Yes, following these new rules can help you boost the performance of your next campaign, but it’s more than that. It’s about adopting and honing an approach that allows your organization to improve marketing performance systematically and reliably.

That’s what a revamped B2B marketing measurement strategy can do for you.

Check out The Future of B2B Marketing Measurement to learn more about the principles that will guide marketing forward. You can also find more measurement-focused content on our blog to explore every corner of modern marketing analytics.