What is LinkedIn marketing ROI (and why does it matter)?

LinkedIn marketing ROI is the return you earn from the time, money and resources you put into LinkedIn campaigns. It’s how you measure whether LinkedIn is helping your business drive revenue across paid and organic efforts.

Measuring LinkedIn marketing ROI is crucial for driving strategic growth, boosting your bottom line and demonstrating value. While your upfront investment in LinkedIn may be significant, it’s counterbalanced by the distinct strategic advantages LinkedIn offers B2B companies. Tracking your ROI on LinkedIn provides the clear data you need to optimize performance and inform future marketing campaigns. Plus, LinkedIn is one of the only social media networks that monetizes its organic offering—you can pay for a premium company page or a premium personal profile. Neither is required, but it stands to reason that being a paying customer will give your brand more visibility.

B2B marketers already recognize this value: LinkedIn is the fastest-growing network for B2B strategies worldwide, according to August 2024 data.

As investment in LinkedIn marketing grows, the need to accurately measure ROI becomes even more critical. It’s essential for justifying spend, tracking performance and applying insights to inform strategies—as well as enabling social teams to connect the dots between their marketing efforts and their business impact to leadership.

How to calculate LinkedIn marketing ROI: Formulas and measurement strategies

Measuring ROI on LinkedIn will depend on your campaign approach—whether you’re measuring paid ads, organic efforts or a hybrid of both. For paid campaigns, marketers often track return on ad spend (ROAS) to gauge immediate performance. But organic and hybrid efforts typically require a broader ROI calculation for a complete view. Ultimately, both ROAS and ROI try to answer the same question: Did your marketing investments generate a valuable return?

Marketers often measure these metrics with simple formulas:

• ROI: (Return – Investment) ÷ Investment
• ROAS: Revenue from LinkedIn Ads ÷ LinkedIn Ad Spend

Measuring your investment is pretty straightforward. It includes how much you’ve spent on ads, tools, content creation and staffing. The challenge lies in accurately capturing return, particularly as LinkedIn often influences customer decisions early on and isn’t typically what motivates the final conversion later on.

To gain a more complete picture of your LinkedIn ROI, you’ll need to apply one or more measurement strategies, like attribution modeling, marketing mix modeling (MMM) or incrementality testing.

Below, we’ll explore each strategy in more detail:

LinkedIn attribution modeling

Attribution modeling enables marketers to understand how various LinkedIn touchpoints contribute to revenue. That might involve someone clicking on a paid ad, reading a newsletter or engaging with a document posted by your executive team weeks before they fill out a form.

To understand the influence of these touchpoints, you’ll need to combine data from multiple sources. At minimum, gather consistently tagged LinkedIn data using a LinkedIn analytics tool like Sprout Social and your CRM. Each tool should integrate with a business intelligence (BI) tool, like Tableau or Salesforce BI, where attribution modelling happens.

Once your data can flow across systems, you’ll need to choose an attribution model—the logic that determines how to assign credit across all touchpoints. These are a few popular choices:

• First-touch or last-touch: These models assign 100% of the credit to the first or final interaction. LinkedIn is often an early or mid-funnel channel, so these models tend to undervalue its influence.
• Multi-touch: This model allocates credit between the first and last interactions and distributes the remaining value across middle touches. It’s a strong choice for LinkedIn as it reflects how potential customers might discover a brand on LinkedIn but buy later through another channel.
• Custom or algorithmic models: Teams build these around your specific sales cycle or marketing performance data. With these models, you can intentionally assign more weight to LinkedIn formats that tend to drive intent, even if they don’t lead directly to conversion.

Attribution modeling works best when you have reliable, well-organized user-level data. This means your data is consistently tagged, accurate and easily flows between systems. While powerful for understanding a specific campaign’s performance, attribution modeling can be even more insightful when you supplement it with MMM to compare impact across devices and channels.

LinkedIn MMM

MMM is a method that estimates the contribution of LinkedIn to a business outcome compared to other channels. It uses aggregated historical data to identify patterns between marketing efforts and the results they generate over time.

Here’s how to apply MMM to LinkedIn:

1. Choose your outcome metric: Model revenue to calculate ROI, even though MMM can model any business result, including pipeline, lead volume or brand impact.
2. Gather historical data: Collect at least six months of marketing and business data to give the model enough variation to detect patterns. Include LinkedIn performance, results from other channels and revenue, all broken out by time period.
3. Organize LinkedIn activity into performance categories: Group your LinkedIn data by campaign objective, like lead generation or brand awareness so the model can estimate each category’s impact. This typically involves labeling and exporting separate datasets for each category before making them available to your marketing agency, marketing analytics team or uploading them to your modeling tool.
4. Control for external variables and apply the model: Add separate inputs for the impacts of seasonality, economic shifts or traditional media. Then, apply a regression-based model using your analytics platform or a tool like Google’s Lightweight MMM.

MMM is especially useful for measuring LinkedIn ROI because the social channel’s influence is often indirect. Tactics like live events, executive posts or sponsored content may not convert immediately, but they can still drive long-term outcomes. To understand whether LinkedIn is truly driving those results or simply showing up alongside them, measure its incremental lift.

LinkedIn incrementality testing

Incrementality testing helps you figure out whether LinkedIn is behind the business results you see or simply appears alongside them. When calculating ROI, compare revenue between a group exposed to a LinkedIn campaign and a group that wasn’t. Here’s how:

1. Choose a LinkedIn initiative to test: Pick a specific campaign or tactic to isolate, like a live event series, a video campaign or a concentrated push of organic posts to your Company Page. The test works best when it’s tied to a focused effort with a defined start and end date.
2. Define exposed and control groups: Create two audience segments: one exposed to the LinkedIn activity, and one that’s not exposed. For paid marketing campaigns, you can use tactics like geo-targeting or matched audiences. For organic efforts, it can involve limiting post visibility by region or posting in one LinkedIn Group versus another.
3. Track outcomes through to revenue: Use your CRM or ERP to capture the revenue generated by both groups during the test period. An analytics tool like Sprout can help you manage and monitor your test groups.
4. Measure the incremental lift: Subtract the revenue from the control group from the revenue of the exposed group. The difference is your incremental lift. For example, if the exposed group generated $200,000 and the control group generated $140,000, the incremental lift is $60,000.

Incrementality testing pinpoints LinkedIn’s actual contribution, but tracking the right metrics every day helps you ensure your strategy is continuing to move the ROI needle over time.

Identifying metrics and tools that help you track LinkedIn marketing ROI

How do you know whether what you’re doing is driving ROI with LinkedIn? You identify the relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate positive ROI.

Look for LinkedIn analytics that consistently correlate with revenue. For example, you might find that an increase in impressions aligns with sales or that form fills are a more reliable signal. Here are some potential metrics to investigate:

• A rise in comments or reposts, which are strong LinkedIn engagement indicators
• Completed video views, especially from short-form videos (new on LinkedIn as of March 2024)
• Increases in LinkedIn newsletter subscribers or live event attendees
• Traffic from LinkedIn ads with high conversion rates or click-through rates
• Form fills that deliver qualified leads at a low cost per lead

Keeping an eye on those metrics is tough without the right LinkedIn analytics tool. Sprout, a social media management platform, empowers you to surface and track the LinkedIn metrics that predict ROI.

For example, you may notice that a rise in incoming messages usually correlates with high ROI. You can then use Sprout’s Inbox Volume chart to review the total messages received during a given period.

Maybe you’ve noticed that followers from paid campaigns tend to correlate with higher ROI. With Sprout’s LinkedIn Audience Growth report, you can break down audience growth between paid and organic efforts.

When you know what metrics matter and contribute to ROI—and why—you can use your insights to fine-tune and strategically steer your digital marketing strategy and effectively explain your results to leadership.

How to present LinkedIn marketing ROI to leadership

A high ROI looks impressive, but if you can’t explain how it happened or know how to replicate it, it’s just numbers. That’s where insights come in: they transform raw data into actionable knowledge that drives better decisions and success you can repeat—and explain.

But first, watch out for the ROI trap. Imagine you have two campaigns: “A” and “B.” “A” has 8% ROI, and “B” has 90%. “B” looks like the winner, but in reality, “A” generated $2 million in profit from a $25 million investment, and “B” generated $90,000 in profit from a $100,000 investment. That’s an insight that’s important to clarify with leadership when comparing campaign or channel ROI.

Another valuable place to look for insights is where potential customers get stuck in their buyer journey. That might mean optimizing for metrics like:

• Form fills from a LinkedIn ad campaign that aren’t MQLs
• High live event engagement that doesn’t result in demo requests
• Low newsletter subscribers after sending an InMail campaign to followers

Investigating these patterns takes time. The key is not to overreact to every change in your metrics. Instead, use your understanding of your LinkedIn results to guide your next move.

Step-by-step guide for improving LinkedIn marketing ROI

To consistently improve your LinkedIn marketing ROI, you have to track metrics and uncover insights consistently. Occasional data check-ins won’t do. Implement a system that helps you monitor key metrics, identify trends and confidently communicate your results.

Step 1: Establish consistent tracking

Use structured UTM parameters across all paid and organic LinkedIn campaigns. Use tools like Sprout to tag campaigns by target audience, objective and format so you can reliably connect activity to revenue later on.

Sprout lets you track all your UTM links in one place, simplifying management and making it easier to stay on top of things and track consistently.

Step 2: Run structured A/B tests to identify impactful changes

Test LinkedIn content formats, messaging or targeting strategies with controlled variables to determine which ones improve metrics that correlate with ROI.

Step 3: Review cross-channel dashboards to uncover insights

Bring LinkedIn performance data into a centralized reporting tool. When you can see how LinkedIn compares to other channels in context, it’s easier to prioritize what to fix or scale.

Step 4: Schedule quarterly audits of your integrations

Audit your UTM links, CRM field mappings and any platform integrations that affect reporting so your numbers stay accurate.

Step 5: Use AI-powered analytics tools to proactively identify changes

Leverage platforms like Sprout, Salesforce or Tableau. These AI-powered tools track performance and quickly identify patterns and trends in engagement or lead quality, flagging potential issues before they affect pipeline or revenue, giving you time to respond.

You don’t have to dig through complex data, saving time and making it easier to share clear, useful updates with your team.

Step 6: Continuously tighten your tracking and automation for reliable quarterly ROI

Look for gaps in campaign tagging, inconsistencies in reporting or areas where automation could streamline tracking. An optimized system will boost your confidence in your quarterly ROI analysis.

The more reliable your system, the more effectively you can track what’s working, make faster, smarter decisions and explain your results.

Smarter LinkedIn marketing with Sprout

ROI is only as useful as your ability to explain it. The only way to do that consistently is by tracking the right signals, surfacing insights early and building a reporting system that makes sense to you and translates directly to leadership’s goals for business growth.

Sprout helps you explain your ROI by pulling your LinkedIn data into clear, actionable reports. These reports highlight patterns in metrics, providing insights into how to influence ROI, and their data seamlessly integrates with other tools that measure ROI for a clearer view of LinkedIn’s contribution.

Try Sprout for free today to easily track the metrics that support your ROI and prove LinkedIn’s value as a vital part of your marketing strategy.