An exhaustive guide to LinkedIn conversion tracking (and 3 ways to set it up)

The thing about LinkedIn ads is that they often look like they're working. Polished creatives, promising impressions, and a cost-per-click that feels acceptable-ish. But impressions aren't leads, clicks don't pay the bills, and without conversion tracking, you're basically running a very expensive guessing game.

You're spending actual money on these ads. So naturally, you'll want to know if these ads are working or if you're just setting cash ablaze like some sort of Viking funeral.

In this comprehensive guide, I'll walk you through everything you need to know about LinkedIn conversion tracking—from basic setup to advanced automation techniques that will save you hours of work and help you capture more accurate data.

Table of contents:

• What is LinkedIn conversion tracking?

• Why conversion tracking is critical for LinkedIn Ads

• 3 ways to share data with LinkedIn to track conversions

What is LinkedIn conversion tracking?

LinkedIn conversion tracking measures what happens after someone interacts with your LinkedIn ad. Instead of just seeing how many people clicked your ad, you can track specific actions they take afterward.

This works by placing a small piece of code, called the LinkedIn Insight Tag, on your website. When someone clicks on your LinkedIn ad and then completes an action you've defined as valuable, the Insight Tag records this activity and reports it back to LinkedIn.

For this whole system to work, you need to tell LinkedIn what counts as a conversion. These actions should align with your campaign goals, which typically involve extracting some form of value from visitors before they regain their senses. Are you running a lead generation campaign? Track form submissions or newsletter signups. Selling products? Track purchases or account creations. Desperately seeking validation from strangers on the internet? That's what Instagram is for. Stay focused.

Why conversion tracking is critical for LinkedIn Ads

Aside from the obvious thrill of watching your conversion rate increase, there are some real benefits to tracking LinkedIn conversions.

• Results-based optimization: Once you know which ads are working, you can spend more on those and less on the ones that are performing about as well as I did in high school gym class. This is how you avoid throwing good money after bad.

• Leverage LinkedIn's job-based targeting: The thing that makes LinkedIn different from other social media platforms is that it knows what people do professionally beyond job titles. When you track conversions, LinkedIn learns which specific professional traits correlate with high-value actions. Without it, you're just guessing which operations managers are worth $100 vs. $10.

• Unlock objective-based bidding: You can't bid for lead generation conversions or qualified demo requests unless you track them. With conversion tracking set up, you can use objective-based bidding that trains the algorithm to find people who actually do valuable things instead of chasing vanity metrics.

• Actionable segmentation: LinkedIn's segment reporting lets you drill down conversion performance by job function, seniority, industry, skill, and interests. You might discover that your CMO-targeted ads are converting at $50 but director-level ads cost $300, which is information you can use, unlike when my Apple Watch tells me I didn't hit my stand goal because I spent the entire day horizontal on my couch watching "30 Rock."

• Surface hidden influencers in long B2B journeys: In enterprise buying committees, the person who clicks an ad may not be the buyer, but they often influence the buyer. Conversion tracking connects those dots between online interactions and offline conversions, revealing that maybe the executive assistant you've been ignoring is actually the gatekeeper to the CEO's calendar.

• Feed conversion data into Matched Audiences: Once you have tracked conversions, you can build Matched Audiences based on converters, not just visitors or list uploads. That data powers stronger lookalikes and retargeting, and ensures your next campaign focuses on people who behave like your best customers, not just look like them on paper.

• Diagnose funnel leaks: With Insight Tag events set up across your funnel, you can isolate where LinkedIn traffic is dropping off. If 80% hit your landing page but only 5% submit the form, you've got a UX or offer issue. If no one lands at all, your ad's not resonating. It's like "CSI" for marketers, except the victims are your leads and the murder weapon is probably your design team.

3 ways to share data with LinkedIn to track conversions

Before you can track and optimize your LinkedIn ads, you need a reliable way to send conversion data to LinkedIn. There are three main ways to set this up, depending on how much effort you're willing to put in and how technically savvy you are.

1. Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag

The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a lightweight snippet of JavaScript code that you place on your website, similar to the Meta Pixel or Google tag. When a LinkedIn member who has seen or clicked your ad wanders onto your site, the tag fires, allowing LinkedIn to match that visitor to their profile.

Once installed, the Insight Tag can track a variety of visitor behaviors like:

• Page views

• Form submissions

• Button clicks

• Content downloads

• Purchases

• Virtually any other meaningful action on your site

With the Insight Tag, this data can be traced back to the exact LinkedIn campaigns, ad formats, and audiences that lured the visitor to your site in the first place. It's also the engine behind website retargeting audiences and provides valuable demographics about your visitors.

Getting the Insight Tag up and running is surprisingly straightforward:

1. Log in to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Click Measurement > Conversion tracking, then create a new Insight Tag conversion.

2. Name your conversion, select a category, set a dollar value for the conversion, and choose an attribution window (how long do you give LinkedIn credit for someone's fleeting interest?).

3. Finally, specify whether you want to automatically track website conversion events, manually set up conversions, or use a tag manager like Google Tag Manager.

Once installed, the Insight Tag dutifully logs user behavior without requiring much attention. However, it can't track offline conversions or actions that happen after someone leaves your website. For those more complex, real-world scenarios, you'll need one of the other tracking methods we're about to get into.

2. Manually upload offline conversion data

Sometimes important business stuff happens offline, like when someone calls your sales team or signs a contract during an in-person meeting. LinkedIn can't automatically know about these events because it hasn't developed extrasensory perception. Yet.

LinkedIn's offline conversion upload feature lets marketers connect IRL business results back to their LinkedIn advertising. To manually upload conversions:

1. Export conversion data, like when a deal closes or someone becomes a qualified lead, from your CRM or system of choice into a CSV file.

2. LinkedIn requires specific formatting for your CSV file, including fields like conversion date, conversion value, and identifiers to match the conversion back to LinkedIn users. The platform offers a CSV template to ensure proper formatting.

3. In Campaign Manager, navigate to Measurement > Conversion tracking, select Create conversion, and choose CSV conversion. Then follow the prompts to upload your CSV and map the fields.

LinkedIn will attempt to map data like email addresses or company names to link offline actions back to the specific ads that influenced them. For example, if Juilliard-trained dermatologist Dr. Van Nostrand signed a contract with your sales team, and his email matches a user who, in a moment of weakness or curiosity, clicked your LinkedIn ad about deli slicers, LinkedIn will attribute that conversion to the ad.

This method is useful if you have smaller volumes of offline conversions, the typical customer journey involves multiple touchpoints, or you don't have a developer to help set up something fancier.

The downside is that manual uploads are, well, manual. This means you, a sentient being with presumably better things to do, will have to dedicate precious moments of your life to regularly preparing and uploading files to keep your data current. This is why larger advertisers eventually graduate to more automated solutions, leaving the manual uploads to those who enjoy a more...artisanal approach to data.

3. Automatically send data through an API or Zapier

If manual uploads sound tedious and old-timey, that's because they are, like whale oil lamps and printing out directions from MapQuest. Luckily, there's a third option: setting up an API integration.

The LinkedIn Conversions API creates a direct server-to-server pipeline between your systems and LinkedIn that continuously syncs conversion data.

There are two ways to implement the Conversions API.

Direct integration

This requires developer resources and technical expertise to set up but provides the most flexibility and control. You'll need to:

1. Set up server-side tracking on your end.

2. Configure the API to send conversion events to LinkedIn.

3. Ensure proper ID matching between systems.

4. Maintain the connection over time.

Zapier integration

If you don't have developer resources, you can use Zapier to create this connection without writing code. Zapier offers pre-built connectors that can:

1. Monitor your CRM, eCommerce platform, marketing automation tool, or database for new conversion events.

2. Automatically format the data to LinkedIn's requirements.

3. Send it to LinkedIn via the API.

Zapier's LinkedIn Conversions integration is ideal for scaling, automation, and precisely tracking high-value, post-lead activities. If you're dealing with lots of conversions or want to track complex customer journeys across multiple touchpoints, this is your best bet.

Learn more about how to automate LinkedIn Conversions, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Related reading:

• How to build a LinkedIn marketing strategy from scratch

• LinkedIn banner ideas + examples

• Send custom notifications for new LinkedIn leads

• How to add leads from LinkedIn Ads to Google Sheets