LinkedIn ads can provide great value for businesses looking to reach a professional audience. To maximize the impact of your LinkedIn ads, it’s important to track their performance in Google Analytics. This allows you to see key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions generated by your LinkedIn ads.
In this guide, we’ll walk through how to connect your LinkedIn ads account to Google Analytics, so you can view all your LinkedIn advertising data alongside your other Google Analytics data. We’ll cover:
- Connecting your LinkedIn ads account to Google Analytics
- Setting up LinkedIn cost data in Google Analytics
- Viewing LinkedIn ad metrics in Google Analytics reports
Whether you’re new to LinkedIn ads or simply looking for tips to get more out of your account, this guide will help you seamlessly track the data that matters. Let’s get started!
Prerequisites
Before connecting your LinkedIn ads account to Google Analytics, make sure you have:
- A LinkedIn ads account
- Google Analytics installed on your website
- Administrative access to both your LinkedIn ads account and Google Analytics
You’ll need admin access to be able to connect the accounts and set up tracking appropriately on both ends.
Connect LinkedIn Ads to Google Analytics
To view your LinkedIn ads data in Google Analytics, you first need to connect your LinkedIn ads account. Here are the steps to make that connection:
Step 1: Get your LinkedIn Pixel ID
- Log into your LinkedIn ads account and go to the “Tracking” page under “Campaign Manager”.
- Copy the Pixel ID displayed at the top of the page. This is a 16-digit number unique to your LinkedIn account.
Step 2: Set up LinkedIn tracking tag in Google Analytics
- In Google Analytics, go to Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code.
- Click “+ New Tracking Code” and name it “LinkedIn Ads”.
- Select “Website” as the tracking type and paste your LinkedIn Pixel ID into the “Tracking ID” field.
- Make sure Enable Enhanced Link Attribution is checked to see attribution data for your LinkedIn ad clicks in Google Analytics reports.
- Click Save to finalize the tracking code.
Step 3: Install the LinkedIn tracking tag
- The final step is to add the LinkedIn tracking tag you just created to every page of your website.
- Copy the full tracking tag code provided on the Tracking Code page.
- Paste the code immediately before the closing tag on every page of your website.
Once the tag is implemented, LinkedIn ad data will begin flowing into your Google Analytics account within a few hours.
Set Up LinkedIn Cost Data
Connecting your LinkedIn ads account provides impression and click data in Google Analytics. To track performance metrics like cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend (ROAS), you also need to enable cost data.
Here’s how to set up LinkedIn cost data in Google Analytics:
Step 1: Turn on Auto-tagging
- In your LinkedIn Campaign Manager, go to Tracking > Auto-tagging.
- Toggle “Auto-tagging” on.
- This automatically appends cost data parameters like _li_cost and _li_id to your LinkedIn ad URLs so that Google Analytics can capture cost per click.
Step 2: Create a Data Import Definition
- In Google Analytics, go to Admin > Data Import.
- Click + New Data Import and select “Ad Costs” as the data type.
- Select “LinkedIn Campaign Manager” as the source.
- Choose your LinkedIn account and click Authenticate.
- Select your LinkedIn account currency, reporting time zone, and reporting date range.
- Click Save to create the data import definition.
This will import LinkedIn cost data like impressions, clicks, and spend into Google Analytics on a daily basis.
Once both tracking and cost data are flowing in, you’re ready to monitor LinkedIn ads performance in your reports.
View LinkedIn Ad Metrics
Google Analytics provides a variety of reports to analyze your LinkedIn advertising results:
Acquisition Reports
- Overview – Check overall metrics like sessions, bounce rate, pages/session.
- Campaigns – See metrics for each LinkedIn ad campaign.
- Channels – Compare LinkedIn channels to other channels.
- Referrals – Track clicks and conversions by ad creative.
Behavior Reports
- Site Content – See pages visited and goal conversions for LinkedIn traffic.
- Events – View event completions (if event tracking is implemented).
Conversions Reports
- Goals – View goal completions and conversion rate.
- Ecommerce – Analyze LinkedIn impact on product revenues (if ecommerce tracking is implemented).
Custom Reports
Create custom reports to focus on the LinkedIn metrics most important to you. For example, you may want to analyze ROAS by campaign, ad creative, audience age/gender, etc. Custom reports allow you to filter the data and visualize it using tables, graphs, etc.
Let’s look at some examples of reviewing LinkedIn ad results in Google Analytics reports:
LinkedIn Campaigns Report
The Campaigns report under Acquisition provides an overview of each LinkedIn ad campaign:
| Campaign | Clicks | Cost | Conv. Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 Product Launch Campaign | 1,200 | $2,500 | 2.50% |
| Email List Signup Campaign | 750 | $1,000 | 1.20% |
| Webinar Promotion Campaign | 2,100 | $3,500 | 4.20% |
This allows you to quickly compare performance across different LinkedIn campaigns. You can see which campaigns drove the most clicks and conversions to analyze what messaging and targeting performed best.
LinkedIn Conversion Funnel
For even deeper insight, build a conversion funnel to analyze the path your LinkedIn visitors take from ad view to conversion:
| Step | Visitors |
|---|---|
| Ad Impressions | 100,000 |
| Clicks | 4,200 |
| Landing Page Visits | 3,500 |
| Signups | 750 |
| Purchases | 180 |
You can identify drop off points in the funnel, like lower Landing Page Visits than Clicks. This means some landing page experience is causing visitors to leave. You can then optimize to reduce fallout.
ROAS by Ad Creative
Calculating return on ad spend (ROAS) for each LinkedIn ad creative helps identify your top performing ads:
| Ad Creative | Clicks | Spend | Revenue | ROAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ad With Image #1 | 320 | $350 | $2,500 | 7.14 |
| Ad With Image #2 | 227 | $250 | $1,800 | 7.20 |
| Ad With Video | 193 | $275 | $1,300 | 4.73 |
Here you can see that Image Ad #2 generated the highest ROAS. You’d want to allocate more budget towards this top performer.
Conclusion
Connecting LinkedIn ads to Google Analytics provides powerful insight into your LinkedIn advertising results. You can analyze campaigns, creatives, audience targeting, and more to optimize your LinkedIn spend for maximum performance.
Key takeaways:
- Use the LinkedIn Pixel and Google Analytics tracking code to connect accounts.
- Enable Auto-tagging and create a Cost Data Import to capture LinkedIn cost data.
- Check Campaigns, Funnel, and ROAS reports to monitor LinkedIn metrics.
- Customize reports to analyze other dimensions like audience, messaging, etc.
Tracking LinkedIn ads in Google Analytics helps unlock monetization opportunities from your LinkedIn ad strategy. With an accurate understanding of campaign performance, you can continuously improve LinkedIn ad targeting and creative for higher conversion rates and return on investment.