For marketers, measurement and attribution is still a headache, which is throwing a major wrench in campaign planning.
Campaign planning is also a struggle for B2B marketers, who often use LinkedIn to reach top decision-makers at companies that could be in the market for products and services from printers to new HR software. These companies can’t afford to waste money on reaching the wrong audience, said Jae Oh, head of ads measurement at LinkedIn. These marketers face economic pressure, competition and budget constraints, he said.
To help B2B marketers make the most of their media budgets, LinkedIn unveiled a new conversion API and upgrades to its revenue attribution report on Wednesday. Together, these two products allow marketers to use their own first-party and offline data to measure their campaigns over a longer lookback window.
B2B marketers need unique products tailored to their needs, which are different from direct-to-consumer marketing needs, Oh said. For example, according to LinkedIn’s research, B2B marketers consider qualified leads to be a more important metric of campaign success than return on investment.
In the case of both ad products, LinkedIn wants to make it cheaper and more efficient for B2B marketers to buy targeted ads on its platform, Oh said. With improved measurement and attribution, marketers can lower their cost per lead, he said.
Early results among marketers using LinkedIn’s CAPI suggest brands are seeing a 20% decrease in cost per action and a 39% decrease in cost per qualified lead.
LinkedIn courts marketers with CAPI
Conversion APIs are not unique to LinkedIn. Social media platforms like Meta and Snap also use their own version of a CAPI to track customer interactions directly from their server during campaign flights. The promise of CAPI is to provide reliable attribution despite the signal loss from regulatory and policy changes, including Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework.
But in LinkedIn’s case, its CAPI is designed to serve specifically B2B marketers looking for quality leads that are most likely to result in an actual sale. Marketers are under mounting pressure to justify every dollar of ad spend to the C-suite, Oh said.
Marketers using LinkedIn’s CAPI can utilize first-party data like event attendance, email sign-ups or phone records, Oh said. The platform’s CAPI also includes integrations with Salesforce, Google Tag Manager and customer data platforms such as Tealium and Adobe.
Prior to launching CAPI, “we weren’t capturing all those [conversion] events,” Oh said. But now, with direct server integrations between LinkedIn and a brand’s first-party data, marketers on LinkedIn can “more accurately measure and reduce that cost per action.”
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For example, marketers using LinkedIn’s CAPI can use those attribution reports to determine which conversions represent customers they should be retargeting on other channels, including CTV, Oh said.
Early results for LinkedIn’s CAPI suggest marketers are seeing a 31% increase in conversions attributable to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s attribution play
LinkedIn’s revenue attribution report (RAR), which first launched in 2022, is also designed to improve attribution specifically for B2B marketers.
Attribution is even trickier for B2B brands because the purchase window is typically much longer than direct-to-consumer purchases. The sales cycles for brands on LinkedIn take at least six months to a year on average, Oh said. According to LinkedIn’s research, 87% of B2B brands say it’s getting harder to measure the long-term impact of their campaigns.
Which is why LinkedIn is extending its attribution lookback window to 365 days, up from 180 days. Tracking campaign results for twice as long will help marketers ensure they’re measuring qualified leads they may have missed otherwise, Oh said. These leads might include B2B brands that decide to, say, buy a new fax machine eight months after first seeing an ad for the product.
The name of the game is to “get more quality leads in the pipeline” to increase a brand’s bottom line, Oh said.
