I came across a post from our friends at PPC Hero about 5 Facebook Settings to Audit in Your Account. I’ve been spending a good chunk of my days in LinkedIn lately so that post got me thinking.

Which settings are folks potentially overlooking in their LinkedIn campaigns that could be costing them money or impacting their efforts?

Below is what I think is worth checking out on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis specifically for LinkedIn.

Conversion Tracking

In my opinion, LinkedIn is one of the trickiest channels for conversion tracking because of the fact you have to individually select your conversions at the campaign level. Miss this step and you’re left with no conversion tracking.

You can now apply conversions to your selected campaigns when setting up conversion tracking (which is a new and useful addition to the previously painful process).

It’s worth noting that in April 2018, LinkedIn released conversion windows. This allows advertisers the ability to customize the number of days after a click that a conversion is recorded. This allows advertisers additional control over their LinkedIn conversion reporting.

Even after setting up and applying your conversion tracking, you may still run into some differences in reporting. The most common issue I have had is in regards to time-zone differences and LinkedIn’s built-in timezone, especially for my clients who are on the West Coast.

It’s always worth checking out your conversion tracking to make sure one of your conversions didn’t deactivate without your knowing.

To do this head to Account Assets > Website Tracking > Conversion Tracking to see an overview of all of your tracking.

Block Lists

If you have clients who request for their ads to not run on specific websites, it is worth checking to make sure your block lists are applied to the appropriate campaigns.

If you want to know how to create block lists on LinkedIn, check out this post I wrote a while back. You only have to worry about block lists when your ads are running on the LinkedIn Audience Network.

To review your exclusions, head to the campaign of your choice and select the Audience tab. Scroll to the Audience Network section and select “Show Audience Network advanced options”. You’ll see any excluded categories and lists here.

Lists & Audiences

Audiences and lists are one of the easiest ways to take your B2B LinkedIn campaigns from good to better. Not only is it worth checking to make sure converters are excluded and the proper audiences are included or excluded, it’s also worth giving your lists a refresh. If you exclude current customers or are using any nurture strategies, it’s worth double-checking these settings from time to time.

Head to the Audience tab in your respective campaign and review your retargeting lists and targeted lists of accounts and contacts. For the best coverage, I always recommend uploading both the email addresses and accounts for maximum coverage and refreshing these lists at least once a quarter with once a month being even better.

Auto-Optimization Settings

As of October 2017, advertisers are able to use bid auto-optimization settings to reach campaign goals. For normal Sponsored Content campaigns, the options here are Awareness, Website Visits, and Website Conversions. Similar to other auto-optimization settings, this communicates to LinkedIn what your goals are so that LinkedIn will automatically raise and lower your bids to get the best possible return on your dollar.

For Lead Gen Form campaigns, the options are Awareness, Lead Form Opens and Lead Form Submissions. This is a relatively new addition and it’s something I was glad to see.

To check out this setting, select Bid and Budget in your campaign.

Ad Rotation

This is another setting that can really throw off your testing and data if set incorrectly. For campaigns where you want to test assets or calls-to-action as a fair A/B test, you will most certainly want “allow ads to enter auction evenly.” On new campaigns, this ad rotation setting is automatically set to “Optimize for performance (recommended)”.

To double check your ad rotation setting is correct, head to Bid and Budget in your campaign and scroll to the bottom. Select “Show end date, total budget, and ad rotation options.”

Conclusion

That concludes my lists of “must check” settings in your LinkedIn campaigns. The next time you find a spare minute, I’d recommend giving them a check to make sure everything is correct. If not, it can mean trouble for you and your clients.

What settings would you recommend reviewing on an on-going basis in LinkedIn? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!