Ads are important to enabling LinkedIn to provide many of our services to members without a fee.
Advertising customers pay LinkedIn to surface ads to our members. Once LinkedIn members engage with an ad (view or click on the ad), LinkedIn logs this activity. We use these “logs” for our own internal business purposes, advertiser customer billing purposes (to be able to get paid for the ads we surfaced on behalf of the advertisers), and to provide advertising customers with reports that show aggregate counts of metrics that measure the ad’s performance and communicate the return on investment (“ROI”) on the advertiser’s ads running on the LinkedIn platform.
We also share data (such as clicks and views and advertising campaign information) with third-party measurement partners to enable advertisers to independently measure and verify LinkedIn ad performance with metrics like viewability, brand safety, and invalid traffic. These partners commit not to disclose member-level personal information to advertisers.
- No Personal Data Shared by LinkedIn with Advertisers - LinkedIn does not provide advertisers with data about specific members, or identify members who may have engaged with their ads. However, advertisers can gather personal information from you if you interact with their ads or consent to sharing more information with them (e.g., fill out a Lead Gen Form, sign up to receive more information, choose to follow their LinkedIn Page). If you click on an ad, the advertiser will know a LinkedIn member visited the page linked to in the ad.
Billing and Ad Performance Measurement Reporting
LinkedIn uses member activity data (e.g., ad (including video ads) views, clicks and other reactions) to calculate the following types of aggregate counts/metrics and the professional characteristics of members who engaged with the ad for billing and reporting on ad performance to customers. Please note the list is illustrative and similar metrics may be added or replace existing metrics in the future.
| Metric | Definition |
| Total impressions | Total number of times the advertiser’s ad was displayed. |
| Total clicks | Total chargeable clicks based on advertiser’s campaign objective. |
| Video ad views | Two or more continuous seconds of playback while the advertiser’s video is at least 50% on screen. |
| Average click-through rate (“CTR”) | Total chargeable clicks divided by total impressions. |
| Average cost per click (“CPC”) | Total amount spent by the advertiser on ads divided by total clicks. |
| Cost-per-mille (“CPM”) | Total amount spent by the advertiser on ads divided by 1,000 impressions. |
| View Rate | Number of video ad views/impressions, multiplied by 100. |
| Completions | Number of times the advertiser’s video was watched at 97-100% of its length, including watches that skipped to this point. |
Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics represent how members’ various social actions have contributed to the performance of the ad campaign in the aggregate. Please note the list is illustrative and similar metrics may be added or replace existing metrics in the future.
| Comments | Total count of comments the ad received. |
| Shares | Number of times the ad was shared. |
| Reactions | Total count of positive reactions the ad received. |
| Dwell Time | Average time spent viewing the ad when at least 50% of the pixels are present on the screen. |
| Clicks to Landing Page | Number of clicks to an advertiser’s website landing page. |
Viral Metrics
Viral metrics result when members share an ad to their own network of connections. Please note the list is illustrative and similar metrics may be added or replace existing metrics in the future.
| Viral Impressions | Impressions resulting from members sharing an ad to their own network of connections. Viral impressions are not counted as regular impressions. |
| Viral Reactions | Total count of positive reactions on viral Sponsored Content ads which can capture like, interest, praise, and other responses. |
| Viral Comments | Total count of comments received from viral impressions. Please note neither the content of the reactions nor the members’ identifying information is disclosed to the advertiser. |
| Viral Shares | Total count of shares from viral impressions. |
The diagrams below show how these aggregate counts would be displayed to the advertisers.
Professional Demographic Metrics
Professional demographics provides advertisers with broad categories of professional characteristics of members who engaged with the ad. The available demographic breakdowns are based on standardized profile data provided directly by members and consist of: company, company size, industry, title, function, seniority, region, county, country. To preserve member privacy, these professional breakdowns are aggregated and the relevant filters (company, company size, industry, title, function, seniority, region, county, country) cannot be layered on top of each other.
- Modeled Performance - Where the actual data is not available to use, e.g. due to members’ preferences, we may use models to extrapolate the aggregate performance for a campaign (e.g. total number of conversions or members reached) from the data that is available.
- No Personal Data Shared by LinkedIn with Advertisers - LinkedIn does not provide advertisers information that identifies you, but only general professional demographic information which is provided in aggregate with the information of all other members who have seen the ad. LinkedIn also applies minimum thresholds and privacy preserving techniques known as “Laplacian noise” to any professional demographic reports before displaying them to the advertisers.
