When starting out, entrepreneurs seek social media advertising as an easy channel to gain new customers. However, LinkedIn is often left out of the go-to list of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr–big mistake. This article will go over how to track your LinkedIn Ads KPIs by providing a LinkedIn Ads Spreadsheet report as an example in order to master your LinkedIn strategies.

Unique from all other social media platforms, LinkedIn offers segment targeted messaging. Because LinkedIn users are required to provide basic demographic information related to their business, position and duties, you can make sure your ads get in front of as niche of a market as you need. This has the potential to increase your network with the specific type of people you are trying to communicate and will most likely reduce bounce rates (the number of people who click your page and immediately leave).

Due to the fact that LinkedIn offers this strategic advertising method, your network or following becomes more likely to grow with the type of people you want to communicate with (people directly interested in what you are talking about or selling). Naturally, your Conversation, Applause and Conversation Rates will likely increase.

This now puts you in the direct path of building rapport with your target audience. The more your LinkedIn connections communicate with you and share your content, you or your company begins to position itself as a thought-leader and resource within your industry.

So how could we complete this post without including some sort of explanation about a KPI (key performance indicator)? Don’t worry–we won’t.

By now, you should be on your way to total LinkedIn marketing success and part of that includes a sound strategy on tracking your success (and failures)with real data. The best way to do this is by determining the percentage of conversions that come from your LinkedIn content. A great way to do this is by A/B testing two different sponsored content posts so see which of the two get the best results.

For us at Factivate, when testing sponsored content on LinkedIn, when the combined total of conversation rate, applause rate, and amplification rate reaches 50, that means the ad can be released and expanded into a larger campaign. Depending on what your goals are and the stage of your company, your “success number” might be greater (or less). Regardless of where you are, testing the traffic and KPIs of your content is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, so we’ve included some images of how we do it.

In the graphic below, you start to identify a trend among marketing managers. When we began seeing the positive results among the ads and eventually three (seen in the second image) hit our marked and were determined “Ad Ready”.

While LinkedIn is a great channel for SaaS entrepreneurs to focus on, in reality, successful social media marketing is spread across all platforms. In order to determine which is the best to reach your audience, you should look at KPIs from multiple sites. We use Facebook and Google AdWords heavily, so we’ve created a template to reference them together.

Have other methods or KPIs to test and track your social media marketing? Comment and share below!