New LinkedIn Metric: Audience Penetration

What is Audience Penetration in LinkedIn?

Simply put, the Audience Penetration metric is the percentage of audience your campaign has reached relative to the estimated audience size of that campaign.

When building a campaign, LinkedIn displays an estimated target audience size, where the minimum recommended is 50,000 (target audience size is the number of unique member accounts that fit the targeting criteria).

Where can I see the Audience Penetration figure?

You can add Audience Penetration as a column, just as you would any other metric.

The metric is only available at Campaign Group and Campaign level.

Monitor audience penetration growth by comparing time periods within the platform.

How can I manually calculate Audience Penetration?

The calculation for audience penetration is: Reach / Target Audience Size

For example, if your target audience is 50,000, and your Reach figure is 10,000 over the course of your campaign, then your calculation is 10,000 / 50,000 = 20%

So, this metric has technically always been there to find, but having it available as a column makes it easier to see as a snapshot.

Why is my manual calculation different from the LinkedIn metric?

I just mentioned ‘this metric has technically always been there to find’, but, has it really? I have done multiple calculations comparing the manual calculation to the LinkedIn audience penetration metric, and sometimes they turn out pretty different.

The only reason I can think of is: Over time as you optimise your campaign, the target audience number changes. The audience penetration metric might take this into consideration, whereas a manual calculation will only use the current target audience size. Thus, making LinkedIn’s version of the metric more accurate.

How should I use the Audience Penetration metric?

• Use in conjunction with other metrics to understand how much of your target audience you are reaching and how frequently. For example, if your audience penetration was low, but your average frequency was high, that might suggest a large part of your audience is unattainable.

• Monitor the speed in which the metric increases. Once you see the percentage slowing down, you might conclude you have reached the majority of your potential audience.

• Use it to understand if you need to try other ad formats to reach your audience. For example, you might not be getting through with in-feed ads, so testing message/conversational ads could be a possible next step to increase this metric. (LinkedIn states: ‘As your campaign serves ads, the number of member accounts that you reach will be lower than the target audience size.’ - I think this is just LinkedIn’s way of saying you’ll never reach 100% of your target audience for whatever reason.)