7 Most Important LinkedIn Lead Generation KPIs

Written by: Outreachly - Tuesday 5th July 2022

Table of contents:

Why You Need to Set KPIs for Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Campaigns
Types of LinkedIn Campaigns and Sample Goals
How to Set Campaign Goals
7 Most Important Linkedin Lead Generation KPIs
5 Factors That Impact Your Linkedin Campaign Goals
How Can Outreachly Help You to Improve LinkedIn Lead Generation KPIs?
Conclusion

LinkedIn has been pushing its lead generation potential in recent years. From sponsored content to its paid ads, it’s evident that LinkedIn is doubling down on its potential as an effective B2B marketing channel. We can spot this from the fact that 80% of B2B leads come from Linkedin, while 97% of a business’s social media leads also come from LinkedIn.

As such, the importance of keeping an eye on essential LinkedIn lead gen metrics to boost your campaign cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, there are so many potential performance indicators to keep track of. This means that any given LinkedIn KPI will almost certainly require context before you can trust its value as an accurate indicator of your performance.

If you’re not sure what lead generation KPI to monitor, keep reading! We narrowed it down to these seven essential LinkedIn generation KPIs to track for a successful LinkedIn lead generation campaign.

Why You Need to Set KPIs for Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Campaigns

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are key metrics that help you evaluate your lead generation efforts. They allow you to track and monitor your campaigns so that you can make any changes if they’re not meeting your targets. KPIs are used across all industries, and they’re particularly important in lead generation.

So, why do you need to set a LinkedIn KPI for your lead generation?

To learn more about your lead gen campaigns – Setting up a lead generation KPI allows you to track the performance of your lead gen campaigns. Metrics such as conversion rates, retention rates, sales, and ROI provide a detailed overview of your campaign. This comes in handy when making necessary changes to improve your lead gen campaigns.

To compare your other lead generation campaigns and find out which works best – Are you running several types of lead generation campaigns, such as Google AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns, alongside your LinkedIn lead gen campaign?

Setting up your KPI for lead generation allows you to compare the performance of these different lead generation campaigns and see which ones are performing better than others. This can help you decide where to focus your efforts in the future.

To identify areas for improvement in your LinkedIn marketing strategy – Every LinkedIn KPI hovers above a crucial element of your campaign; converted leads, website traffic, ROI, cost per lead, and churn rates. With this information, it’s easy to spot thriving activities. It’s even easier to identify areas of weakness and create solutions to address them.

To track your competition – If you’re in fierce competition against other companies for the same leads, you’ll want to know how your competitors are performing. Your lead generation KPIs should help you figure out what they’re doing right and implement those same strategies in your own marketing campaigns.

In this case, you would compare the competitor’s KPIs against your own performance indicators to see where there is an opportunity for improvement.

A good set of KPIs will help you monitor your lead gen campaign so that you can see when something needs fixing.

Types of LinkedIn Campaigns and Sample Goals

LinkedIn serves several functions as a lead generation and marketing channel. You can target users based on their job title, company, or other demographics, which makes it a great tool for B2B companies. You can also create and schedule posts, write blog posts on LinkedIn, and share other people’s blog posts.

Based on these activities, here are a few samples of campaigns and goals you might already be familiar with:

Product promotion campaigns – Product promotion campaigns are aimed at driving sales. A sample goal and its KPI for lead generation in a product promotion campaign could be to boost the product page visits by 30% in one month.

Content marketing campaigns – Content marketing is about producing and distributing valuable, relevant, and useful content to the target audience with the intention of driving measurable business results. In this case, a sample goal would be to generate more content shares, comments, reactions, etc. (See a more detailed list of post analytics for your content).

Brand awareness campaigns – Brand awareness is a customer’s ability to recall your brand name, logo, and other identifying characteristics. Sample goal: to increase profile views by 75%.

Lead generation campaigns – Rather than waiting for leads to come to them, sales reps can proactively seek out potential customers and generate their own lead lists using lead generation campaigns. A sample goal, in this case, would be to increase the total number of conversions, i.e., premium content subscribers by 120%.

Pro Tip: Keep your goals specific and measurable. For example, don’t just say “boost profile views.” Instead, you want to be a little bit more specific, e.g., “boost profile views by 120%.

How to Set Campaign Goals

Having the right goals sets the foundation for the success of your lead generation campaign. Without clear objectives, there’s no way to measure success or failure and tweak your approach accordingly. Your sales team needs to invest time in setting S.M.A.R.T goals and align them with your company’s objectives.

Define Your Sales and Marketing Objectives

The first step to setting goals is to define the objectives you want to achieve with your campaign. These objectives can vary depending on your business and industry. Here are a few examples:

Increase sales: This is the classic campaign objective. Do you want to increase sales of physical goods, memberships, subscriptions, etc.?
Acquire new customers: Customer acquisition means driving potential customers to your store. Or, it could be getting existing customers to buy again.
Expand reach: You may also want to set an objective to expand your reach or increase your exposure. You can achieve this by driving traffic to your website, getting your content shared, or increasing your social media following.

Decide on a Target Audience

The audience you focus on will impact:

Which channels you’ll use
What KPI for lead generation you’ll monitor
The types of content you create, and
What message you’ll include in your marketing campaign.

If you want to drive sales, for example, you’ll want to focus on a target audience of people who are most likely to buy from you.

If you want to acquire new customers, you’ll want to focus on a target audience of people who aren’t yet decided on buying from you.

Choose the Right Channels for Your Campaign

Have you identified which marketing channels would be most appropriate to your target audience, objectives, and sales & marketing budget?

For example, if you want to drive sales and have a target audience of young B2B professionals, you might focus on digital marketing channels that are popular with this group, such as:

Social media
Paid search
Email
Content marketing.

Timing is Key

Now that you’ve chosen the right channels for your marketing campaign and decided on a target audience, set the time frame for your campaign.

For example, if you want to drive sales, you may set a goal to achieve a certain revenue amount within a specific timeframe, such as doubling your sales in 6 months.

If you want to acquire new customers, you might set a goal to increase the number of new customers by a certain percentage within a specific timeframe, such as increasing new customers by 25% within 6 months.

Determine How You’ll Measure Success

As you commit to measurable outcomes, you also need to determine how you’ll measure success. How will you track your progress and make sure you’re making the right moves to hit your goals?

For example, if you want to drive sales, you might want to track conversion rates and sales numbers.

If you want to add new customers to your sales pipeline, you might want to track how many new leads and sign-ups you get from LinkedIn.

If you want to expand your reach, you might want to track how many impressions your content is getting, how often it’s being shared, and how many new followers you’re gaining on social media.

Be Realistic and Flexible

Finally, be realistic with your goals. You want to set goals that are challenging but attainable. It’s important to acknowledge that some goals may need more time or effort than others.

Did you know?

80% of B2B marketing leads from social media come through LinkedIn.

Jerome Knyszewski 2015

7 Most Important Linkedin Lead Generation KPIs

As promised, here are seven key performance indicators (or KPIs) that should be part of any successful LinkedIn lead generation campaign:

1. Campaign ROI

Return on Investment (ROI) is a LinkedIn KPI used to calculate the profitability of your lead generation efforts on LinkedIn. In lead generation, this would mean calculating how much you have spent on generating leads and how many new prospects, clients, or customers you’ve won as a result.

To calculate your campaign ROI, calculate how much money you spent per month on marketing, how many leads you won, and how much revenue those leads generated.

2. Website Traffic from LinkedIn

Another important LinkedIn KPI is the amount of website traffic your campaign is bringing in. Google Analytics and your web service provider’s built-in analytics tools are equipped with tracking tools that show crucial information about where your leads are coming from (referrer) and what search engine they’re using to find your business.

Create your company landing page and a corresponding LinkedIn lead gen campaign to direct as many potential leads as possible to your website. More leads generated from LinkedIn are a good sign that your campaign is working.

3. Lead Conversion Rate

This LinkedIn lead generation KPI maps out the number of leads that turn into customers/clients. Tracking this metric can help you determine where to put more resources towards generating more leads and when to focus more on closing deals with the leads you’ve already generated.

If your conversion rate falls below 4-5% (based off your key engagement metrics as it might vary depending on the type of campaign you’re running), you may want to re-evaluate your campaign strategy and make sure you are targeting the right leads.

4. Sales Growth

Sales growth enables you to determine how well your sales team is doing. Do you have a sales CRM? Use it to track your sales growth, closed deals, new sales qualified leads SQLS, and actual customers/clients your sales team brought on board each month, and which lead generation campaign those leads came from.

This is especially important if you have multiple LinkedIn lead generation campaigns running at the same time.

5. Time to Conversion

Time to conversion is a metric which measures how long it takes a website visitor to convert into a customer. For instance, how long it takes a site visitor to complete an intended action. Or, if a user wants to sign up for your email newsletter, how long will it take them to do that?

To calculate the time to conversion, take the time visitors spend on your website and divide it by the total number of leads.

6. Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is a LinkedIn KPI that shows how much money you spent to generate each lead. This can be helpful when you want to determine which campaigns are bringing in the most leads but are costing you the most money.

It can also help you determine which campaigns might need some extra attention or tweaking to bring the cost per lead down.

7. Lead Quality

Lead quality is how likely a lead is to become a customer/client. This KPI for lead generation is used to identify your marketing qualified leads MQLS (leads who are more likely to purchase from you). With this LinkedIn KPI, you should be able to know where to spend more of your time and money.

5 Factors That Impact Your Linkedin Campaign Goals

Nowadays, LinkedIn isn’t just about posting an occasional update on your profile or updating your status from time to time. In order to get the most out of this platform and leverage its potential, you have to commit to setting goals, keeping on top of your connections, and consistently expanding your network.

Here are five factors that will impact your Linkedin goals:

Realistic Goals

While there is no right or wrong way to set realistic goals, there are a few things to keep in mind. First and foremost, set goals that are relevant to you and your industry. It won’t help you if you set goals that don’t apply to your specific situation.

Ask these main questions:

What types of goals are they working towards?
What do you want to achieve?
Are these goals attainable?

This can help you get a better idea of where you stand and what you want to do next. Talk to your sales and marketing team to see what goals they can achieve with the resources they have.

Network Consistently

One of the most important components of reaching your LinkedIn goals is networking. Networking is the process of connecting with others and forming meaningful professional relationships. It can come in many forms, such as participating in groups and sending connection requests to potential customers.

Remember, networking on LinkedIn takes time. Building meaningful connections with potential leads who don’t know you, takes days, weeks, or even months.

Know Your Audience

By knowing who you want to connect with and who you want to reach, you can tailor your personalized approach and increase the likelihood that they’ll be interested in hearing what you have to offer. Start with finding people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Build a Strong Presence

Consistent networking, engagement, and activity signal a strong LinkedIn presence. Your goal is to build a positive and memorable reputation so that you can connect with as many people who are interested in your products and services as possible.

Use the Automated Tools at Your Disposal

Finally, you can use automated tools to enhance your LinkedIn lead generation efforts. LinkedIn automation tools like Outreachly can help you meet your goals faster, keep track of your connections, and notify you when someone enters your network. These tools also reduce manual tasks, e.g., creating a LinkedIn message template for every new customer.

How Can Outreachly Help You to Improve LinkedIn Lead Generation KPIs?

Outreachly is an AI-powered LinkedIn lead generation tool that helps your sales team find and engage the most qualified leads for your campaign. You can search for leads based on filters such as location, industry, company size, and job title and add them to your Outreachly account.

Outreachly also notifies you when a lead responds to your message so you can engage them in a conversation.

What’s more, you can integrate Outreachly with your CRM, e.g., Pipedrive or Hubspot, to track more KPIs and pump more leads into your sales funnel.

Conclusion

When deciding what is most important to track, think about which numbers will have the biggest impact on your business. Profit, ROI, engagement rate, and sales are just a few places to start. However, the most important lead generation KPI will depend on your business goals.

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