New "Audience Penetration" metric in LinkedIn Ads

A new metric has appeared in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager: it’s called “Audience Penetration” and can be found under the “Delivery” metrics category.

What does the Audience Penetration metric measure?

It measures the percentage of people you have successfully shown your ads to in relation to the total size of the audience you are targeting.

For example, if the Audience Penetration metric shows 40%, it means you’ve managed to reach 40% of your target audience. Simple, right? Simple yet very powerful, because this information is crucial for understanding whether your campaign needs to run longer to reach more people, or if it’s time to switch to a new campaign, pause it, change the messaging, etc.

How is the Audience Penetration metric calculated?

It is calculated by dividing the number of unique people you have reached (this information is provided by the "reach" metric) by the size of the audience you are targeting, and then converting this result into a percentage.

Below I show you an image of what the metric looks like in LinkedIn's Campaign Manager:

Example calculation of the "audience penetration" metric

Target Audience Size (TAS): imagine that you want to reach an audience that is defined as people with a management position in the finance area of pharmaceutical companies. Let's imagine that in the country where you are launching the campaign this audience has a size of 10,000 people.

People Reached (reach): imagine that we launch the campaign today, let it run for 3 weeks, and then we look at how many people we have reached, i.e. we look at the "reach" metric. Imagine that the system tells us that we have reached 5,000 unique people (note that the "reach" metric is a modeled metric, an estimate, but well, it gives us an idea).

% of people reached: How would we do it? Is the ratio of:

• 5,000 people reached
• of the 10,000 people we are trying to reach.
• This gives a percentage of 50%.

This is exactly what the new "Audience Penetration" metric calculates.

What is this metric useful for?

It helps you determine when you’ve reached your goal. And what’s the goal? To get your message to your target audience. That’s really what marketing is all about, right?

Imagine your message is: “The sky is blue.” If the “audience penetration” metric shows 100%, it means that your entire target audience has seen your message—in other words, with a bit of luck, they’ve grasped your message: that “The sky is blue.”

There’s another metric that, in my opinion, is crucial for understanding whether the message has truly resonated: the “average frequency” metric, which indicates how many times, on average, a person (from your audience) has seen your message. If this metric shows 4, it means that, on average, your audience has seen your message 4 times. If the frequency metric shows 1, it means that your audience has only seen your message once.

Combining metrics

Now comes the fun part: interpreting the metrics together. Remember, to see all of this, you need to select the "Delivery" metrics column.

On one hand, we have the metric that tells us how many people we’ve reached. That’s good, but until now, it didn’t mean much without knowing what percentage of these people are from the audience we’re trying to reach (in fact, some of us have been calculating this in a separate Excel sheet until now, so a big “thank you” to the LinkedIn development team for adding this metric).

This is where the new "Audience Penetration" metric comes into play, telling us the percentage of our target audience that we’ve reached.

Finally, the "Average Frequency" metric tells us how persistently we’ve managed to show our message. A very high frequency (e.g., 15) could be counterproductive because your audience might become annoyed by seeing your ads (and the same message) so many times.

The ideal scenario

Let’s assume your target audience is 10,000 people (this will vary depending on your campaign’s brief), but for this theoretical exercise, this number will work.

In my opinion, the ideal scenario would look something like this:

• Reach: 9,500 people
• Audience Penetration: 95%
• Average Frequency: 8

With these metrics, we could argue that we've done a good job of conveying the message to our potential buyer (though the actual message content is another matter). We could say:

• We have managed to reach almost the entire target audience we aimed for (e.g., finance executives in pharmaceutical companies in your country).
• And we have done so with an average of about 8 times, which in my opinion is a reasonable figure—a good balance between ensuring the message sticks and not becoming too repetitive or annoying.

What's next

With these ideal metrics, the next step would be to “change the script.” In other words, we can assume that your audience has already grasped your message, so the next task is to think about: What else do I need to communicate to my audience to make them consider my company or product?

This could involve launching a new campaign targeting the same audience with a different message, a new ad format (such as video, PDF, image, etc.), or whatever else might be effective. Essentially, it's time to switch things up (if you think of it like a TV series, it’s like moving to the next episode in the series that continues from the previous one).

Limitations

The “Audience Penetration” metric is very difficult to reach 100%, or even high percentages like 80% or 90%. Why? Because it's challenging to impact the entire audience you are targeting.

Reasons:

There are a few factors at play:

1. Infrequent LinkedIn Users: Some people only log in to LinkedIn very occasionally, perhaps once a month and in a very random manner. If these users are among the 10,000 people you're trying to reach, it’s challenging to impact them effectively.
2. Real-Time Auction: When a person does log in to LinkedIn, your ad needs to win the real-time auction to appear in their feed. This doesn’t always happen. There are many companies advertising on LinkedIn, each with their own products and services. Even if they aren’t direct competitors, they might share the same target audience. During the auction, another company might win by bidding higher, and as a result, your ad might not be shown.

The good thing about LinkedIn is that if a user keeps scrolling through their feed, ads continue to appear, similar to Instagram. This means that in the second, third, or fourth slot, you get another opportunity to show your ad.

My advice is to monitor the evolution of the “Audience Penetration” metric. Start with 0% at the beginning of the campaign. After a few days, it might be at 8%, after a few weeks at 34%, and so on. Keep an eye on it until you see it plateau, meaning it no longer increases. This indicates that you've reached the maximum level of what you can achieve. For example, if the cap is 60%, it means that out of the 10,000 people you aimed to reach, you've managed to impact 6,000. Considering the very specific targeting (e.g., finance leaders in pharmaceutical companies), this is still quite good.

One should be grateful in life and make the most of what each platform offers. I believe LinkedIn does a great job in this regard. Other advertising platforms often have poorer segmentation and less control.

I hope you enjoyed this article and found it helpful in understanding the “Audience Penetration” metric, and especially in learning how to interpret it for better marketing, whether B2B or not B2B (a bit like Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be” in its own way).

Thank you for taking the time to read this! If you found it helpful, you can find more articles like this on the Magnetica Blog .