How Cognism Manages Their Paid Marketing Machine

In a nutshell, everything is about your campaign objective, and when you optimize the campaigns, you need to stick to the objective you put in place first. Our campaigns have four main objectives, reach. traffic, video views, and conversions.

We are using reach as an objective in most of our campaigns. Reach is emphasized because it is the best way to penetrate the potential audience. We use reach for the messages that can be consumed in the LinkedIn feed. With reach, we are not after the CTR; we are after engagement in the feed. So, those are the ads that you can see within your feed. You don’t need to click. You get the message, and you can continue scrolling.

Campaigns with the reach objective have two types of metrics that we constantly track to optimize campaigns: major and support metrics.

The major metrics for the reach campaigns are reach frequency, engagement rate, reach, and impressions.

The important thing here is the reach frequency because you don’t want to make the ad frequency so high that your audience repeatedly sees your ads. You need to make sure that you keep it steady, and we try our best not to exceed which frequency per person to three.

Supportive metrics for the reach campaigns are CPM, cost per result, and cost per 1000 member accounts reach. When we optimize the campaigns, we compare the ads with those with the same objective. We compare campaigns that have the same reach objective. And if the frequency is high, then for us, it means that it is time to optimize if the engagement rate is higher, we need to create more similar content. If we are getting impressions with a good CPM/CPR, it means that this content is consumed in the feed very well, so we need to create more content similar to that.

The second objective we use in our campaigns is the traffic objective and with traffic objective, in-feed consumption isn’t the primary goal. Think of a blog post or a case study that directs your visitors to your website. To optimize traffic campaigns, again, we have major and supportive metrics.

Those are CTR impressions, CPC, and clicks to the landing page because our objective is to increase CTR as much as possible. But if those prospects don’t end up on our landing page, this objective is not successful. So we are tracking clicks to the landing page and comparing that data with CTR metrics to understand how well our campaigns work.

We also compare this data with the bounce rate and the average session duration. So to optimize the campaigns that have traffic objectives, we consider CTR, landing page visits, bounce rate, and average session duration.

Also, for supporting metrics, we take into account engagement rate and average frequency because if the engagement rate is low, it means that your CTR will be low as well, or if your average frequency keeps increasing and if your CTR keeps decreasing week after week, it means that people who might click/engage with your ads have already clicked.

The third objective is the video view objective. We obviously use this for videos, and video view objective is basically the reach objective, but for videos. This objective works much better than other objectives for video content.

The fourth one is the conversion objective. We use conversion objective in a limited number of campaigns because conversion objective tends to hold reach back. So this should be only used in a limited number of campaigns because if you use conversion, you cannot reach a wider audience. After all, the LinkedIn algorithm will show yours to the people who can convert.

This amount of people is always limited compared to the actual audience that you are targeting with your campaigns. For the conversion objective, we are, measuring the conversion rate, cost per conversion clicks to the landing page, and CTR because, for us conversion means a website conversion.

When we are optimizing the campaigns, we measure the website conversion rate, the cost per conversion, and how visitors are performing on our website. We, again, track website metrics, such as bounce rate, session duration, exit rate, etc.

These are for LinkedIn and Facebook. However, Google is entirely different because Google is only for demand capture, not demand generation.

What is important is to generate revenue. Therefore, to optimize the Google campaigns, we basically track the number of opportunities created and the ACV. Therefore, we don’t care about the number of conversions on our website. We don’t care about MQLs, we don’t care about form submissions.