LinkedIn Boosting 101: Paid Advertising

Mar 19

Does your business need to invest in paid advertising?

At Goho HQ, we pride ourselves in building clients’ social media accounts solely through organic growth; however, as social media adapts and evolves, it’s important that we do not allow our clients to miss out on a vital piece of digital marketing - paid advertising.
In February 2024, we trialled a short LinkedIn boost on our company page to see the results and if the investment was worth it. In this blog, we will guide you through the ins and outs of LinkedIn boosting, how to set up a boost on LinkedIn, our results and if we think you should set a budget aside to invest in paid advertisement as part of your social media strategy.

What is LinkedIn boosting?

LinkedIn boosting is exactly what it sounds like: you pay a small fee to LinkedIn and in exchange, you’ll have the ability to run a targeted ad campaign on one of your recent posts. The aim is to increase your content’s visibility by allowing it to be viewed by a wider and more targeted audience outside of your current following.

“Well, how is this beneficial?” we hear you ask. With over 1 billion users worldwide, this makes LinkedIn the biggest and most influential B2B (Business to Business) platform on the internet and while it may sound like a great place to go for organic business growth and sales, it also means that the competition present on the site is fierce.

This is where boosting comes in clutch. Your content will not be washed away in the mass uploads Linkedin receives every second but instead, a boosted piece of LinkedIn content will be pushed to users who do not follow your page.

This instantly expands your reach - with just a click of a button and some targeted audience tweaks, LinkedIn enables you to reach thousands of more users than you would organically.

Goho’s results on our LinkedIn boost.

For our LinkedIn boost, we ran a targeted campaign with the primary goal of increasing website traffic through clicks.

LinkedIn often recommends running ad campaigns for at least two weeks to maximise their effectiveness. Excited to share our content, we opted for a one-week duration instead, potentially limiting our reach. Despite this, we attracted significant attention with 18,472 impressions (the number of times our ad was served) and 84 total engagements (the total number of interactions on your posts, which includes clicks, reactions, comments, and shares) The bulk of these engagements (82) were clicks directing people to our website, supplemented by a few other types of interactions like likes and comments.

Our ad's click-through rate (CTR) was 0.44%. This measured what percentage of people clicked our ad after seeing it. This number falls within the average CTR (0.44% - 0.65%) for LinkedIn posts.

However, the overall engagement rate of 0.45%, scored poorly by comparison, especially when benchmarked against the average 1 - 3.5% engagement rate seen in more interactively successful posts. This lower engagement rate was anticipated since our main goal was to boost website visits, which often doesn't prompt as much LinkedIn interaction such as likes or comments as other types of campaign objectives might.

Regarding our performance projections, LinkedIn forecasted that we would receive an estimated 55 to 220 clicks to our website. Having run the campaign for just half the intended time, we achieved 82 clicks. Projecting this out and extending the campaign to the full two weeks, we could predict approximately 164 clicks throughout the campaign's lifetime. This is just over the average of forecasted results LinkedIn predicted for us at the beginning of our campaign.

This demonstrates the benefits of following LinkedIn's duration recommendation and highlights the need for realistic expectations based on the actual campaign duration and observed performance.

Do we recommend it?

YES! Boosting your LinkedIn posts to drive traffic to your website is an effective strategy worth considering. As you just read even with a shortened one-week campaign, we still achieved impressive results. This shows just how powerful LinkedIn's advertising can be in getting your content in front of the right people. We highly recommend it for anyone looking to boost their website visits, sales, or overall content reach.

Well, how can I set this up on my company page?

There are 8 simple steps to setting up your LinkedIn boost but before we get into the nuts and bolts, there are three essential criteria that need to be met by you and our company page to use this feature:

You can only boost a page if you must have “content admin” or “ super admin” access on the page you wish to boost content on.
You can only boost videos, single-image posts, texts or events. Polls and carousels are not currently allowed to be boosted.
You can’t boost the same post twice.

Now that you have the basic knowledge of what can and can’t be boosted, let’s move into the next steps to set up your campaign:

Go to your company page's admin view, not your personal profile.
Find the post you want to boost in the 'updates' section and click the 'Boost' button above it.
On the 'Boost Post' page, select a campaign objective that aligns with your company's goals from the drop-down menu.
Choose your target audience based on criteria like interests, location in Australia, or job title.
Opt out of 'Automatic Audience Expansion' and 'Include LinkedIn Audience Network' unless you prefer these options.
Set your campaign's schedule and budget.
Select the billing ad account.
Click 'Boost' to start your campaign.

Now you're equipped with the knowledge to boost your LinkedIn posts. However, if the process seems daunting or time-consuming, our social media experts are here to help. With extensive experience in social media marketing and ad campaigns, our team can manage everything for you. From crafting monthly content that resonates with your audience to strategising and implementing paid advertising campaigns, we've got you covered!