LinkedIn Conversions: 7 Essential Steps to Get Them Right

Advertising on LinkedIn is a great way for many businesses to reach and engage with their target audience. However, evaluating campaign performance and measuring return on investment requires something more than just launching ads and hoping they will work – and that is, registering LinkedIn conversions.

Or in other words, from all the people who clicked on your ad, how many of them actually completed the valuable action that you expected them to do?

Today, we will learn everything there is to know about LinkedIn conversions. And we will see the 7 steps to get them right from the first time!

Step 1: Install the Insight Tag

The first and absolutely essential step that we will need to do before configuring any conversions is installing the Insight Tag. It is a piece of code that you will have to paste on all pages of your website.

This piece of code is automatically generated by LinkedIn, and it establishes a communication between your campaigns and your website. This will allow them to exchange data so that you can measure conversions and analyze the results from your campaigns.

From your Campaign Manager account, click on Account Assets – Insight Tag:

Click on Install my Insight Tag, and you will be taken to another window with options on how to proceed with the implementation of the code.

As we can see, there are three options:

Installing the tag yourself;
Sending the code to your web developer;
Or using a tag manager.

Depending on the option that you choose, LinkedIn will guide you on how to proceed with the next steps. If you decide to install the tag yourself, what you need to do is copy the code to your clipboard.

After that, just paste it below in your website’s global footer, right above the closing HTML <body> tag. This will enable you to track conversions, and gather cookies so you can make retargeting on any page across your website.

If you select the second option, the code will be sent to the email associated with your account, so you can easily forward it to your web developer.

And, if you decide to go with a tag manager, LinkedIn has prepared detailed instructions on how to do that step by step depending on your tag manager.

Once you’ve installed the Insight tag on your website, you will be able to:

Measure LinkedIn conversions, or the number of users who have converted from your campaign on your website. We will see what exactly this means in the next section.
Collect cookies so you can retarget LinkedIn members who already visited your website.
Receive data such as campaign performance and website demographics. This will allow you to analyze the results from your campaigns so you can make better decisions.

Step 2: Understanding LinkedIn conversions

Conversion tracking allows you to measure key actions performed by users coming to your website from your LinkedIn ads. This can be a purchase, a content download, a key page view, a form sign up, or any other action that is relevant to your business.

The thing is, LinkedIn doesn’t know what you consider a valuable action for your business. For some, it might be a person who installed their app. For others, it might be the download of a brochure with more information. And for somebody else – filling out a sign up form.

And this is where conversions come in handy. By creating a conversion, you tell algorithms what you consider a valuable action for your business. This way, when the person does this action on your website, LinkedIn will consider that he “has converted”.

For example, if you tell LinkedIn that you consider a form sign-up to be a valuable action, every time a user fills out a form on your website after clicking on your LinkedIn ad, he will be counted as a conversion.

Now, how do we do that? It is very simple:

Step 3: Setting up your conversion attributes

To start setting up our LinkedIn conversions, from your Campaign Manager account, go to Account Assets – Conversions. And then, click on Create a conversion on the right side of the screen:

You will be taken to a new window.

Keep in mind that, depending on the number of your products and how your website is configured, you might have to create multiple conversions.

To give you a simple example, let’s say that you are a digital company that has three different tools: one for Marketing, one for Sales, and another for Customer Service. And you want to create a conversion for every person who requests more information about your tools (form sign-ups).

If your plan is to create specific campaigns for each tool, with a specific landing page with its own and unique sign up form, you will have to create three different conversions.

However, if you are using the exact same sign-up form for all your products and landing pages, configuring just one conversion should be enough.

In the end, the number of LinkedIn conversions that you will have to configure will depend on the number of different goals you have, and how specific your campaigns are going to be (in terms of end URL).

However, do not worry about that as conversions are very easy and quick to configure.

If you remember, we left the configuration itself at “Create a conversion”, so let’s go back to it.

The first thing that you will have to do is give your conversion a name. Make sure that it is distinctive, in a way that you are not going to confuse it if you decide to configure more conversions in the future. And especially if you have multiple products.

In this example, I included distinctive elements such as:

The type of service (an Email Marketing tool);
The type of promotion (free trial);
And the year in which the conversion was created (2020).

Of course, what details you decide to include will be up to you as all businesses and products are different, and will require the corresponding adaptations.

The next step is to choose the action that you want your visitors to complete once they click on your ad. As we already mentioned, this could be a purchase, a download, or a form sign up.

Step 4: Understanding conversion value

The next step of configuring our LinkedIn conversions, which is completely optional, is to give an estimation of how much a conversion is worth to your business.

What does this mean? Well, let’s say that you are an Email Marketing company that sells subscriptions to your service for 100€ every month.

If the average user remains your customer for 24 months, this means that you will earn 2400€ for the time of his “lifespan” as your customer.

This is also called Customer lifetime value, as it represents the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend in your business during their lifetime.

In other words, assigning a monetary value to your conversion means that this is the money that you are expecting to earn from a user if he converted from your LinkedIn ad.

To give you a more simple example, let’s say that you are Microsoft, and you are selling a license for Windows 10 for the price of 139€ (non-recurring).

This means that you could expect to earn 139€ from every user who purchased Windows 10 after clicking on your LinkedIn ad. So, you could assign your conversion the monetary value of 139€. Although this step is optional, I highly recommend it because it allows you to have a better control over your Costs per conversion.

For example, if it costs you to 150€ to generate a conversion, but you only earn 139€ from it, you are obviously not making any profits. So, you should either optimize your existing ads to try and lower the costs, or experiment with other LinkedIn ads strategies.

Step 5: Setting your conversion window

The next step to configuring LinkedIn conversions is to select your conversion window. Conversion window is the period of time that passes after a customer clicks on your ad, during which a conversion is recorded in LinkedIn.

To understand this better, let’s say that someone clicked on your ad, but didn’t convert right away. Instead, he saved your landing page so he can go back to it later.

For example, imagine someone planning to buy the brand new iPhone 11 Pro, which costs 928€. Because this is a high-ticket product, it is unlikely that the user converts in the same day of seeing your ad.

Instead, he spends a whole week researching the retailers that offer the best prices for the iPhone, and then goes back to your website to purchase it from you because you have the best offer.

Setting a conversion window of 30 days means that a user who clicked on your ad and converts within the next 30 days will still be attributed to your LinkedIn ad.

The same thing happens with Views, with the difference that it will take into account people who viewed your ad, but did not click on it.

The default conversion windows are:

30 days for ad clicks,
7 days for ad views.

I highly suggest that you stay with these values. If you reduce your window to 7 days or 1 day, any conversions that might have happened from your ad after this period will not be counted. And, consequently, will not appear in your reports.

Of course, you could increase it to 90 days, but with such a long period of time, you risk messing up your campaign results and your costs per conversion. Because old LinkedIn conversions might get assigned to your new campaign budget, and you will not be able to distinguish them precisely.

Step 6: Attribution Model

Another step to configure your LinkedIn conversions correctly from the very beginning is to have a clear understanding of the attribution model.

The purpose of attribution models is to give you a better understanding of the journey that users undertake through your channels before finally converting.

And what was the last impact that made them actually convert on your website.

Let me explain.

Today, people will probably visit your website multiple times before making a purchase. Or before finally deciding to fill out your sign up form, or download the brochure that you are offering. Whatever the conversion action is for your business.

In other words, a user will be impacted multiple times, and on different channels, before converting on your website.

For example, let’s say that someone clicked on your social media publication to read the latest post in your blog. A few days later, he clicked on your LinkedIn carousel ad.

He did not convert, but your company caught his attention. So, on the next day, he went on Google, made a search, and your ad showed up for that search.

He clicked, landed on your website, and finally performed the conversion action you were hoping for all this time.

Awesome! However, now comes an important question. How do we know which marketing channel gets the credit for this conversion? Was it the social media post because the user got to hear about your company for the first time?

Or maybe it was the blog post that further spiked his interest? How about the Carousel ad on LinkedIn? He looked you up on Google on the next day, so maybe it was that ad which made him want to learn more.

But in the end, he ended up converting after clicking on your Google ad. In that case, should Google take all the credit? You get the point! The thing is, it is not easy, nor fair, to attribute LinkedIn conversions to a single channel when it was quite possibly a group work.

The concept of attribution is complex, especially considering the fact that it becomes even more difficult to assign an attribution correctly when you add offline channels.

Such as someone who picked up the phone and called your company. Or directly visited the shop after seeing your ad. These actions are not as easy to track and measure as digital channels.

For this reason, there are multiple attribution models, each one with a different approach on attributing a conversion to one or multiple Marketing channels.

However, not all advertising networks acknowledge all attribution models. For example, LinkedIn only supports two of them – Last touch for each campaign, and Last touch for last campaign:

Let’s see what this means for have a better understanding of LinkedIn conversions:

Each campaign – if you are running multiple campaigns on LinkedIn at the same time, and a user interacted with several of them prior to converting, each of these campaigns will get credited with a conversion.
Last campaign – if you are running multiple campaigns at the same time, and a user interacted with several of them prior to converting, only the last campaign that he interacted with will get credited with the conversion because the algorithms assume it was the one that made him convert.

As far as Last touch goes, it simply means that it will always be the last interaction a user has with a campaign that will get attributed the conversion.

In other words, if a user started their journey on LinkedIn (first touch), but their last interaction with your business prior to converting was with a campaign on Google, the campaign from LinkedIn will not get credited for the conversion.

However, if the last interaction (last touch) of the user was with a LinkedIn campaign prior to converting, the LinkedIn campaign will be the one getting credit for the conversion.

Which one should you choose for your LinkedIn conversions? Well, this one will depend on you. If you are running many campaigns at the same time and want to get clear data on which was the exact one that made the user convert, choose Last campaign.

However, if you want to get a better understanding of the whole journey and see how campaigns help each other, choose Each campaign.

Selecting your campaigns

The next step of setting up your conversions, which is entirely optional, is to select the campaigns to which you want to add your conversion tracking:

If you don´t have any campaigns yet, do not worry. You can skip this step, and add your LinkedIn conversions during the creation of the campaign. Also, the campaign does not have to be active in order to add the conversion.

It can be archived, cancelled, completed, in draft, etc. No limitations on that!

Step 7: Defining your LinkedIn conversions

The last step before finishing the creation of our conversion is letting LinkedIn know how we want to track it. There are two methods:

Using the site-wide Insight Tag

The default way, and the most recommended one, is by using the Insight tag that you installed earlier on your website.

Because we already did that in the previous step, there will be no further code-related action. Just selecting the option is enough to configure your LinkedIn conversions.

This conversion method allows you to track actions on specific pages of your website.

Usually, this will be a “Thank you page“, or a confirmation page that loads once the user has completed the desired key action that we indicated earlier in the set-up.

For example, submitting a form or making a purchase.

Because we already installed the Insight Tag on our Thank you pages, once the user get there, the code will be triggered and will register the conversion.

Next, you will have to paste the URL (or URLs) on which you want to track your conversions:

There is no need to include http:// and https:// upon pasting. Only “www” if it appears in your URL as a site visitor would see it.

Right above the space for entering your URL, you will notice a drop-down with more specific options to help you track your conversions.

Have this exact URL

Select this option for your LinkedIn conversions if you have a static website URL. In this case, LinkedIn will only register a conversion when the user visits this exact page. For example, if you entered yourwebsite.com/shoes, and a person registered on yourwebsite.com/shoes/nike, LinkedIn will not count a conversion because it is already a different page.

Start with this URL

Choose this option if you want LinkedIn to count conversions from all pages that start with a certain URL pattern. For example, if you entered yourwebsite.com/shoes and a user converted on yourwebsite.com/shoes/nike, LinkedIn will count the conversion, as opposed to the previous case.

Have URLs that contain the specified text

Use this option if you want to target multiple URLs that contain certain words or characters. For example, you can type /category/ to target URL such as:

yourwebsite.com/category/
yourwebsite.com/category/pricing/
landings.yourwebsite.com/category/

In other words, LinkedIn will look for all URLs within your website that contain this text. And will count a conversion for every one of them, provided that all of them have the Insight tag installed.

Event-specific pixel

he purpose of event-specific pixels is to enable you to track LinkedIn conversions in those cases when you don’t have a landing or an associated page.

For example, if you wanted to measure conversions on sign-up forms that lead to a pdf, or are simply not followed by a thank you page. This method will require an additional code-related action.

When you select this method, LinkedIn will generate a unique piece of code for you, based on the goal that you chose when you started creating the conversion. You will have to install this code in the appropriate place for each conversion event that you would like to track.

For example, a Submit button on your page form. Having said that, we are now ready to click on Create, and now we have our first conversion!

And that was all from me, folks! I hope you enjoyed this article. As always, thank you for taking the time to read my blog post, and I hope to see you in the next one!