Data insights
14. september 2023
Simple setup of tracking in LinkedIn
The basic options in LinkedIn for targeting and bid adjustments are very limited and revolve largely around the audience’s titles, job function, or background—not so much their behaviour. In this post, I will show you how you can reuse your Google Ads native tracking or your GA4 setup to track conversions directly in LinkedIn’s own…
You cannot say “B2B marketing” without also saying “LinkedIn” – that is just a fact.
By following my 4-step guide further down in this post, you can optimise your marketing efforts and gain valuable insights to significantly improve your LinkedIn campaigns.
Why reuse tracking from GA4, Meta, or Google Ads?
When it comes to conversion tracking, it can be time-consuming and cumbersome to set up separate tracking systems for each platform.
By reusing your tracking from GA4 and Google Ads, you can save time and resources. You can also achieve a more consistent and comparable analysis of your marketing campaigns across platforms.
You are also reusing something that you hopefully know works, so the likelihood that it will continue to work is, of course, greater.
Note: The options in LinkedIn are, broadly speaking, a “light” version of the options in Google Ads and Meta Ads. The few options
How to reuse your tracking from GA4 and Google Ads
To reuse your tracking from GA4 and Google Ads for LinkedIn, follow these steps.
Step 1: Create variables and triggers in Tag Manager
First, you need to create the necessary variables and triggers in Tag Manager. These variables and triggers will tell Tag Manager when a conversion has occurred on LinkedIn.
You can reuse the same variables and triggers you have already created for GA4 and Google Ads.
Step 2: Adapt tags for LinkedIn tracking
The next step is to adapt tags in Tag Manager to track conversions on LinkedIn. You can use the same tags you have created for GA4 and Google Ads and simply modify them to fit LinkedIn tracking.
Step 3: Implement tracking on LinkedIn
Now it is time to implement your tracking on LinkedIn. You need to add your Tag Manager container ID to the LinkedIn Insight Tag.
This will ensure that your tracking works correctly and that conversion data is sent to GA4 and Google Ads.
Step 4: Test and validate your tracking
Once you have implemented your tracking on LinkedIn, it is important to test and validate it. Run conversion tests to ensure that the data is recorded correctly in GA4 and Google Ads.
You can also use Tag Assistant or Google Analytics’ real-time reports to confirm that the conversion data is being sent correctly.
What do you gain by reusing your tracking?
By reusing your tracking from GA4 and Google Ads for LinkedIn, you can achieve several benefits:
- Ability to optimise your marketing efforts on LinkedIn based on valuable insights from GA4 and Google Ads.
- A more consistent analysis of your marketing campaigns across platforms.
- Ability to target your campaigns based on conversions on LinkedIn.
- Better comparability of results and performance across platforms.
When should you consider reusing your tracking?
Before you start reusing your tracking from GA4 and Google Ads for LinkedIn, there are a few factors you should consider:
Your marketing budget: It may be a good idea to spend at least DKK 5,000–10,000 per month on LinkedIn campaigns before it makes sense to start focusing on conversion tracking.
Possible conversion actions: You should also consider whether it makes sense to focus on specific conversion actions on LinkedIn.
For example, it may be more valuable for you to bid on:
- Users who have watched more than 1 minute of a video
- Users who have visited the contact page
- Users who have visited a showroom page
- Users who have added something to a cart.
- or similar, rather than only “hard” conversions such as contact forms and calls, if the volume of these is too low for a bidding engine to act on the dataset.
Example
An example of reusing tracking from GA4 and Google Ads for LinkedIn is, for instance, ‘Invest in Odense’, which uses LinkedIn Ads to find exciting startups and scaleups within technical topics.
By reusing their tracking from GA4 and Google Ads, they can identify companies that may be interested in setting up an office or collaborating in Odense in the long term, based on their interaction with Invest in Odense.
