LinkedIn Advertising is no longer cut off from the rest of your paid media strategy by its lack of analytics. A new update has added conversion tracking for both PPC display ads and sponsored content posts.

The social media hub for professionals (and top B2B marketing channel for advertisers) said the new conversion tracking tool had been a top-requested feature by brand managers for some time. Those folks should be pretty happy with the outcome. This is a nice dashboard that will measure the number of sign-ups, website content downloads, generated leads, and purchases coming from your display ad or sponsored content campaigns.

Tool Specifications

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager dashboard for advertisers now includes a new link to get started with conversion tracking at the top of the screen. The conversion tracking tool works similar to Google Analytics and other such metrics tools. Your webmaster will add the LinkedIn tracking code, called an “insight tag,” to the code of your website. This step is required for LinkedIn’s conversion tracking tool to be able to measure the conversions happening on your site and tie them back to your LinkedIn advertising campaigns.

Once your insight tag is set up, you can begin creating custom “conversion actions,” within the LinkedIn dashboard. These user-defined actions are how the tool will know a “conversion” has taken place on your website. Actions are highly customizable, with a URL, dollar value, and action type. Multiple actions, such as buying a product, signing up for a demo, or downloading a whitepaper, can all be added to a single campaign for more comprehensive tracking.  

New Intel

LinkedIn’s conversion tracking should give advertisers a whole new wealth of information on which to base current and future strategies for paid media, creative, and even business offers.

Before now, we were all kind of in the dark. We could see whether a display ad was getting clicks, whether a sponsored content post was getting the right engagement, but we had to guess when it came to whether a campaign was effectively targeting the right audience or converting the right leads. That’s not the case anymore.

LinkedIn’s new video debuting the tool says conversion tracking will give advertisers information on mobile and desktop conversions, intel about who’s converting, including “professional profile, seniority, industry, job function, company size, and more.” In short, the tool should help more advertisers see which ads are converting the right people into leads.

Optimizing Campaigns

Lastly, the tool should be a boon for advertisers when it comes to optimizing their paid media efforts to better serve clients and customers with better ads. Metrics, including ad-spend ROI, the number of conversions, conversion rate, cost-per-conversion, and audience segment performances, will help increase marketers their effectiveness with better targeting, creative, and even business offers.

VentureBeat notes that conversion tracking is currently available through LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and certified ad partners, AdStage and 4C, with more partners likely to offer support in the future. Both sponsored content and display ads work with conversion tracking. Sponsored inMail is not on board yet, but support is likely in the coming months.

Need advice on your next LinkedIn paid media campaign? Call us at 313-338-9515 or email hello@kaleidico.com to learn how our full-service digital agency can help.