LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media platforms for B2B marketing and advertising. With over 800 million members worldwide, LinkedIn provides a huge potential audience for businesses looking to generate leads, increase brand awareness, and drive website traffic.
One of the main ways businesses advertise on LinkedIn is through sponsored content and sponsored InMail ads. These ads allow you to target a specific audience by job title, industry, interests, skills, company name, and more. But how effective are LinkedIn ads? What is the average engagement rate businesses see from their LinkedIn advertising campaigns?
In this article, we will examine the typical engagement rates for the main LinkedIn ad formats to help you set realistic expectations when running LinkedIn ads. We will look at clickthrough rates, conversion rates, and overall engagement rates across the different ad options.
Average Clickthrough Rates for LinkedIn Ads
The clickthrough rate (CTR) for an ad is the percentage of people who click on your ad after it’s shown to them. The CTR shows how appealing and relevant your ad copy and messaging is to your target audience.
Here are the average CTRs for LinkedIn’s main ad formats:
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content appears in the LinkedIn feed similar to organic posts. According to LinkedIn, the average CTR for sponsored content ads is 0.90%. However, benchmarks can range from 0.15% on the low end to 3% on the high end depending on factors like your headline, ad creative, and targeting.
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail allows you to send a targeted message to LinkedIn members that looks like a regular LinkedIn message. Average CTRs for InMail range from 20-30%, with clicks tending to be higher when messaging high-value prospect targets instead of a broad audience.
Text Ads
Text ads on LinkedIn appear on the right rail of both desktop and mobile. Average CTRs for text ads tend to fall around 0.90%, similar to sponsored content.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads automatically pull content from a company’s website or blog to create ads tailored to each viewer. On LinkedIn, dynamic ad CTRs average around 0.27%.
So in summary, the major LinkedIn ad formats have the following average clickthrough rates:
Ad Format | Average CTR |
Sponsored Content | 0.90% |
Sponsored InMail | 20-30% |
Text Ads | 0.90% |
Dynamic Ads | 0.27% |
As a benchmark, a clickthrough rate of 0.5% or higher is generally considered above average on LinkedIn. CTRs under 0.2% are typically below average.
Average Conversion Rates
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who take a desired action after clicking your ad, such as downloading content or filling out a form. The conversion rate shows how compelling your landing page experience is for those who click on your ad.
Average conversion rates for LinkedIn ads include:
- Lead generation content downloads: 2-3%
- Contact form submissions: 1-2%
- Product demos: 1-1.5%
However, conversion rates vary significantly based on your goal, target audience, and landing page experience. Well-optimized landing pages can achieve conversion rates of 5% or higher.
Engagement Rates
Engagement rate measures the total number of interactions with your ad beyond just clicks. This includes reactions, comments, shares, and more.
Average engagement rates for sponsored content on LinkedIn tend to fall around 1-2%, but top performing content can generate over 5% engagement.
To calculate your engagement rate, divide the total number of engagements by the number of impressions your content receives.
For example, if your post got 300 impressions and received 5 reactions, 8 comments, and 10 shares, your overall engagement rate would be:
(5 reactions + 8 comments + 10 shares) / 300 impressions = 7% engagement rate
The higher your engagement, the more LinkedIn’s algorithm will show your content to a wider audience on the platform. Most quality content achieves at least 1% engagement on LinkedIn.
Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Ad Engagement
Here are some tips to help drive higher clickthrough, conversion and engagement rates from your LinkedIn ads:
- Create ads that are highly relevant to your target audience’s interests and pain points.
- A/B test different ad variations with unique copy, images, headlines and calls-to-action.
- Make your ad copy compelling by focusing on benefits and keeping text concise.
- Use visuals like images, graphs and video clips to capture attention.
- Target your ads carefully using LinkedIn’s detailed demographic, job role, company and interest targeting options.
- Drive traffic to optimized landing pages that make your ads’ value proposition clear.
- Test sending InMail ads to engaged audiences open to messaging instead of cold outreach.
- Encourage social sharing by highlighting your best content.
Conclusion
In summary, well-targeted LinkedIn ads can achieve:
- Sponsored content CTR of 1%+
- InMail CTR of 20-30%
- Conversion rates of 2-5%
- Engagement rates of 1-7%
Leveraging LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities and testing different ad formats and creatives is key to driving engagement above the average benchmark. Optimized landing pages and showcasing your best content also help boost desired actions from LinkedIn ad viewers.
Setting realistic expectations using these average engagement rate benchmarks provides a baseline to refine your LinkedIn advertising and improve performance over time.