Best Practices: Linkedin Campaigns

To ensure best-practice execution of 6sense-LinkedIn campaigns, there are several helpful tips and nuances to be aware of as you work across these two sophisticated platforms using the integration.

[Also see this Knowledge Base article]

User Access Management

To access and manage LinkedIn syncs users will need to have the right permissions and account access in both platforms.

6sense Permissions

Within 6sense, users will need Marketing or Admin user permissions to be able to create and manage syncing of segments used in LinkedIn Campaigns.

LinkedIn Permissions

To connect audiences from 6sense to your company’s LinkedIn Ad Account, you must also be a member of the LinkedIn Ad Account associated with the segment you plan to sync or manage and signed in to that account in the 6sense platform.

Multiple LinkedIn Accounts

6sense can support matched audience syncs to multiple LinkedIn accounts. When using multiple accounts, be sure to check you are syncing a segment to the right LinkedIn account before sending as a matched audience. 

6sense Segment and LinkedIn Audience Requirements

The LinkedIn and 6sense have several requirements to ensure both platforms properly sync segments to matched audiences.

If a customer wants to use a 6sense audience to exclude instead of include in a LinkedIn campaign, they can use 6sense's 3rd party segment as exclusion. 6sense only allows analytics for campaigns which have 3rd party segment inclusion, so they will not be able to see LinkedIn analytics for that campaign on the 6sense platform.

Minimum LinkedIn Audience Requirements

LinkedIn campaigns require a minimum of 300 people matched from an account list to create a matched audience. LinkedIn generally recommends a audience size of at least 1,000 accounts, but 6sense customers have seen success with smaller segments, especially of larger accounts.

LinkedIn Sync Maximum Limits

While LinkedIn can technically support matched audiences of up to 300,000 accounts via manual uploads, their API framework with our platform is currently limited to segments of 100,000 accounts.

Initial Matched Audience Build Time

Most segments will be synced to LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences in 24-48 hours; however, it is advisable to allow up to 72 hours for audiences to sync to LinkedIn when planning for your campaign launch.

Reporting Nuances and Campaign Design Practices

There are several important campaign planning and reporting factors to take into consideration when deploying paid social campaigns to meet the unique requirements of the LinkedIn platform.

Country-Level Campaigns

LinkedIn’s reporting engine and API is currently restricted to single demographic factor pivots.

To properly see the account-level performance for a campaign in 6sense’s platform it is important to set your campaigns in LinkedIn to target audiences by a single country per campaign.

6sense will display a warning whenever you sync a segment containing multiple countries to LinkedIn to remind you of this requirement.

Country-Level Campaign Example

• Segment A synced to LinkedIn contains accounts in both the United States and Canada.
• In LinkedIn, run two different campaigns against the matched audience:
  • One targeting people in the United States from the matched audience.
  • One targeting people in Canada from the matched audience.
• In 6sense reporting, you will see results for each campaign with account-level details for all the accounts reached in the target country.
• The unique campaigns can be combined in our campaigns reporting engine to build a unified view of performance for the entire synced segment across all countries.

Target Persona Campaigns

Similar to the country-level reporting requirements, to see distinctive performance for specific personas by account in the 6sense reporting engine, it is important to set your campaigns in LinkedIn to target only a specific persona (and country if necessary).

Target Persona Campaign Example

• Segment A is synced to LinkedIn to reach a target list of 1,500 accounts.
• In LinkedIn, two campaigns will be set up to report unique persona outcomes.
  • One targeting Marketing Director and above personas in the matched audience.
  • One targeting Sales Director and above personas in the matched audience.
• In 6sense reporting you will see results for each campaign with account-level details for each target persona’s results.
• The unique campaigns can be combined in our campaigns reporting engine to build a unified view of performance for the entire synced segment across all personas. 

LinkedIn Demographic Analytics “Noise”

To protect member privacy when viewing demographic-level (e.g. 6sense’s account-level) metrics, LinkedIn will randomly add “noise” to individual account performance stats. This will often be a measure of up to +/- 3.

Campaign-level performance figures will always be accurate total with no noise.

Demographic Noise Example

• Acme Corp. may produce five clicks in your campaign.
• LinkedIn may show seven in the 6sense report for Acme Corp. as a result of random noise.
• The campaign-level total click value will count the actual five clicks towards the total.

Audience Expansion

By default "LinkedIn Audience Expansion" is enabled in your LinkedIn campaign. This may be the reason you're seeing more accounts be targeted than you originally expected. To disable this, see this LinkedIn help article.

LinkedIn Account-Level Reporting Minimums

LinkedIn sets a minimum requirement of three actions to show a demographic statistic. In 6sense’s reporting view, this means that for any statistic to show for an individual account, there must be at least three actions attributed to that account. Any time there that is less than three actions recorded a “Below Reporting Minimum” will show for the given statistic.

Campaign-level performance figures will always display an accurate total.

Reporting Minimum Example

• Acme Corp. has two clicks in your campaign by day 7 – a “Below Reporting Minimum” is shown.
• Acme Corp. has six clicks in your campaign by day 10 – six clicks will be shown for Acme Corp.
• The campaign-level total click value will always reflect the actual # of clicks.