Can you call B2B Social Media Paid Campaigns with above average CTRs successful?

As an inbound marketing agency, customer acquisition is what we stand for. In order to achieve that we use several channels, and social media is one of them.

Have you run paid campaigns on social media before? Were they successful? Are you sure? We make an attempt to answer the above questions using data collected from social media paid campaigns in the IT Services sector. Here comes the case study.

Social Media Paid Campaigns Performance

Social Media is a powerful channel to generate B2B leads because your buyer personas spend time on it. Well, who doesn’t in this digital era? In our case, we targeted our campaigns to CMO, CFO, CIO of various sectors, with a focus on the US Geography.

The results obtained in terms of CTR’s were as follows:

• LinkedIn - 0.45%                                                                    
• Facebook - 1.51%

Did the Ad campaigns do well? So, we looked at comparative benchmark CTR’s for B2B Social Media Marketing campaigns.

Facebook Ad Benchmarks

The Wordstream team published average CTR for various industries and sectors.

• B2B’s - 0.78%. (Our 1.51% CTR seem to have fared well)
• Industrial Services - 0.71%
• Apparel - 1.24%
• All industries - 0.90%

LinkedIn Ad Benchmarks

The LinkedIn team blogged about the performance benchmarks across  all LinkedIn Ad formats. For Sponsored Updates, CTR ranged from 0.35% to 0.45% .

Campaigns Successful?

Undoubtedly. If you go just by the CTRs achieved and the benchmarks given by Wordstream and LinkedIn. Outcomes tell a different story though. Lead numbers achieved by the above campaigns were lacklustre, at best.

Lead / Clicks Ratio

Here is where everything seemed to have gone wrong.

• Facebook at 1 / 24
• LinkedIn at 1 / 307

Leads / Clicks ratio is a true indicator of campaign performance. Unfortunately, in this case, it did not hold.

Key Takeaways

• CTRs are not the only parameter that determine the success of your campaign.
• CTRs above benchmark does not mean lead generation would follow.
• Poor lead generation results warrants deeper analysis to understand reasons of failure.

Have your paid campaigns been performing lately? Did you learn anything spectacular?

Happy Campaign Management!