LinkedIn has announced upgrades to its lead generation forms, ad testing, group targeting and machine learning systems.

Improved Lead Gen Forms

Let’s get things started with lead generation. According to LinkedIn, “your lead lists are about to become even more actionable”.

The reason? An update that pre-fills a member’s business domain email address instead of their personal email when you use the work email form.

Gina Kleiner, Director of Product Marketing, LinkedIn

“Your team will now be able to more seamlessly qualify and nurture leads while reaching them in the most relevant inbox. Beta tests have shown a 100% lift in work emails collected.”

Lead Gen forms make it easy for advertisers to collect leads using forms pre-filled with LinkedIn profile data. When a user clicks on your call-to-action button on a LinkedIn ad with an attached Lead Gen form, it automatically populates with contact and profile information. Now, that information will include a business email address.

LinkedIn

“Once members have engaged with your Lead Gen Forms, you can create Matched Audiences Lead Gen Form audience segments to retarget engaged members in future campaigns.”

According to LinkedIn, Lead Gen Forms have better conversion rates than LinkedIn’s typical ad performance benchmark. There is no additional cost for them outside of the associated ad campaign, so this could prove to be an excellent option for marketers looking to collect leads.

Improved Brand Testing and A/B products

LinkedIn is also working hard to improve its ad testing via Brand Lift and A/B products. The platform is currently testing on-device expermintation, which provides marketers with the insights required to build better campaigns while giving users the privacy they expect.

It does this via randomisation and attribution being processed via a virtual device.

Brand Lift Testing helps marketers to measure how well their ads work by surveying members in test and control groups. Brand Lift Tests are designed to provide a detailed view of results to help marketers better understand the impact of ads on various brand metrics.

With brand building a growing focus for enterprise and B2B communicators, LinkedIn’s latest addition is well timed – although LinkedIn’s long overdue A/B testing capabilities will likely hold broader appeal.

Of course, A/B tests are an old classic that lets marketers design two ad campaigns that are the same – apart from one factor. Performance is measured against each campaign to find out which performed the best.

Privacy-friendly Group Identity

Group Identity is designed to help brands make the most of LinkedIn’s B2B data.

It uses first-party data to group members based on professional traits such as industry, company or job title. It allows advertisers to target, measure and optimise based on professional aims and eliminates the need for individual trackers across the site.

LinkedIn

“Group Identity then determines how an ad can be served while minimising personal information shared about a user across contexts.”

Group Identity is important because it gives users enhanced privacy protection while letting advertisers target and run campaigns without the use of third-party personal information being held on LinkedIn.

Introducing the snappy Recommendations Hub

Marketers who use LinkedIn frequently may be aware of the host of automated recommendations. Well, the platform reckons things have got a little difficult to keep track of – so it’s developed a space to house them all.

Gina Kleiner, Director of Product Marketing, LinkedIn

“To simplify things, we created the Recommendation Hub, a centralized experience that highlights the most relevant model-based recommendations to help you enhance data-driven decisions while cutting through campaign data to pinpoint the most impactful performance drivers. Optimizing campaigns has never been easier.”

Audience Network…. With Better brand controls

Finally, new Audience Network updates allow advertisers to upload custom publisher allow-lists and block-lists, download a list of Audience Network publishers and leverage third-party brand safety integrations via DoubleVerify to tailor suitability and targeting to your needs.

For the uninitiated, the Audience Network is designed to help advertisers expand Sponsored Content boundaries beyond LinkedIn and onto third-party apps and sites. Think the Google Display Network or Meta Audience Network.