Measurable LinkedIn advertising: Optimize your campaigns and strategy with LinkedIn Conversion Tracking

If you are already an advertiser on LinkedIn, you have surely become familiar with LinkedIn’s various tracking options: LinkedIn Insight Tag, Conversion Tracking, Offline Conversions, CRM integrations and now also soon the Conversion API (finally!).
However, there are many things to keep track of, and it can seem complex at first. That is why we have created this guide to LinkedIn tracking, where you can be updated on best practice.

The first step is to get a handle on your LinkedIn Insights Tag.

LinkedIn Insight Tag

Like all other social media sites, LinkedIn has their own little piece of JavaScript code that can be inserted directly into your website or through Google Tag Manager.

This piece of code is responsible for sending data from your website back to LinkedIn, which can be used to identify website visitors and measure intended conversions. Therefore, it is also a must-have if you want to build remarketing target groups based on website traffic.

In other words, it allows you to measure what people do on the website after they have either seen or clicked on your ads.

The easiest way to install LinkedIn’s Insight Tag is through Google Tag Manager, as this can subsequently also be used to set up custom conversions.

The next step is to set up the conversions you want to track.

Online Conversion Tracking

LinkedIn Conversion Tracking is a tool that allows you to measure the impact of your campaigns on the actions that a person takes after clicking or viewing an ad, e.g. made a purchase, filled out a contact form, signed up for a newsletter or downloaded a whitepaper).

Conversion events currently have to be set up manually, which can be done in various ways. However, LinkedIn says they are working on a solution where the Insights Tag automatically goes in and collects every action people take on your site (clicks, fills out forms, etc.)

When you create conversions, you can choose how you want to define your conversions. How you define your conversion will depend on your website and the type of conversion you want to track:

First, select the type of conversion and the attribution period to track the conversion for both click and view conversions. Here you can choose between 90, 30, 7 or 1 day. Consider your customer journey and choose the option that makes the most sense for you. It can always be changed afterwards.

Click Conversion: Tracks actions users take after clicking an ad.

Impression Conversion: Tracks actions users take after seeing an ad, even if they didn’t click on it.

LinkedIn subsequently gives you the following options for defining your tracking method:

Page Load: This type of conversion is counted when LinkedIn members visit all or specific pages on your site. Can be defined with URL parameters.
Event specific: This type of conversion is counted when LinkedIn members take an action on your website, such as clicking a button or link.
Tag Manager: Select this option if you use a tag manager to deploy your Insight Tag and track conversions. The LinkedIn Insight Tag is currently supported by Google, Adobe, Tealium, Ensighten and Floodlight.

We do not recommend using image pixels as it only uses third-party cookies.

Our experience with the LinkedIn Insights Tag tells us that it is not always as good at capturing data and conversions after e.g. iOS 14. Therefore, we have some other options to create more complete and accurate data through offline conversion tracking.

Offline Conversion Tracking

With offline conversion tracking, you can measure conversions that happened both online and offline (read: physically). This means that we can enrich our online conversion data with a higher match rate than using only Online Conversion Tracking if we have the necessary customer information. At the same time, you will be able to attribute physical transactions, phone calls or e-mails to your campaigns.

The connection between one’s offline data and LinkedIn can be done manually or through a partner.

Manually: Upload a CSV file with customer information according to the LinkedIn CSV template (accessible here). This method is the most time consuming. It requires you to format your CSV file or manually enter your data and then upload the file to the Campaign Manager.

Automatic: Set up a data connection between a LinkedIn Marketing Partner (Adverity, Dreamdata, HubSpot, LeadsBridge, LiveRamp and Make) or Zapier. If you choose a partner, your data will be automatically uploaded and updated in Campaign Manager in near real time.

A combination of Online Conversion Tracking and offline conversion tracking will give you the clear best prerequisites for making the best decisions about optimizing campaigns, target groups and ads.

LinkedIn itself has many good guides for setting up and managing their tracking. Find more information here.

NEW! LinkedIn Conversion API

LinkedIn is coming soon with their version of the Conversion API via Google Tag Manager. It’s still in closed beta and there’s no official launch date yet, but we’re definitely looking forward to it.

On Meta’s platforms, for example, we have in some cases been able to track up to 40% more data, which gives better performance, lower price per action, more accurate attribution of conversions and more feedback to the algorithm.

Guide: Install LinkedIn's Insight Tag with Google Tag Manager:

1. In the LinkedIn campaign administrator, first select “Analyze” → “Insight Tag”. On the next page, select the “I will use a tag manager” dropdown:

2. Open GTM in a new tab and select “New Tag”. Name the tag and click “Tag Configuration”. Under Choose tag type, select LinkedIn Insight 2.0.

3. You must then find your Insight Tag ID, which can be found next to “Your Partner ID”.

4. Insert your ID in GTM.

5. Then click on Triggering and choose Choose a Trigger → All pages. Name the tag and save.

6. Submit and publish the changes in GTM.

7. Now we just need to check the installation. Go back to LinkedIn Campaign Manager, under “Insight Tag” and check that your domain is shown with a status of “Active”. Alternatively, you can use “Tag Helper” tools to verify that the tag is firing correctly on your site.

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