Linkedin Paid Ads - Conversion tracking and Linkedin insights tag

Insights Tag + Conversion tracking set up

Under Account assets, you’ll also find the conversion tab which is where we can set up the different conversions to track with our ad campaigns.

The basic conversions that most companies track would be the submission of “contact us” forms on the website.

Let’s dive in.

Click “create a conversion”.

Here it will sort of walk you through the options but I’ll explain some of the thought processes behind each option.

Name your conversion - keep it simple for example - Website form submission

Next, let’s look through the settings.

There are lots of different options as to what best describes this conversion. The common ones would be lead or request quote for form submissions, phone call or book appointments for a booked call, and sales or purchase for a confirmed paying client type action.

Conversion Value
-We could go into a whole advanced calculation of what type of number you should use for conversion value but for the most part let’s just say for now, if you know what this action is worth, just enter it in, and if you don’t we can either just take an educated guess or leave it blank for now.

Ultimately you’ll want a conversion value assigned to help you make better choices down the road. If all conversions are the same value, you’ll end up chasing the conversions that are easiest to get vs the ones that are worth the most which is a dangerous path.

Click, views, and last touch.
I usually leave the clicks and views at the default settings of 30 and 7.

This simply sets the rule for how long after someone either clicks the ad or views the ad that a conversion would still be attributed to your ad.

The more important one here is the “last touch, each campaign” option which needs to be changed in my opinion from that default setting to “Last touch, last campaign” instead.

Here is the big difference.

Last touch, each campaign means that if someone views 6 ads in your retargeting campaign and then converts, it would give credit to each of the 6 ads in that campaign for the conversion. So each ad would get 1 conversion counted and you’d see 6 conversions showing in your reporting panel even though only 1 conversion took place.

The pros of this setting - It allows you to see the journey of a conversion. Often times a prospect will see or interact with multiple ads in various campaigns before converting and it is pretty helpful to have this understanding so that you don’t cut off assist ads.

An assist ad is one that basically tees things up and gets the prospect ready to convert and then another ad with a stronger CTA comes along and closes the deal. They actually work together and the closer ad all by itself would have lousy conversion rates and low conversions if not for that assist ad just getting them all ready to drop.

Now if you didn’t have this setting on and if you didn’t realize this is how ads can often work, you might just see the final ad getting all this credit and think that you should just run that ad and cut off the others..and then scratch your head as to wh the results dropped off.


Last touch, last campaign.

I think you get how this one works from the previous description but just so we are clear..in this one, the ad that they touch last gets the credit for the conversion and the other ads they interacted with that might have assisted will not get credit.

So the obvious con here is that you lose sight of the big picture of other ads they might have interacted with.

The obvious pro is that your conversions won’t be overstated and the number of conversions that the Linkedin dashboards show for form fills or booked calls will actually match what you are seeing on your end of actual form fills and booked calls on your calendar.

If you are using conversion value, it also then is giving you way more accurate information about your ROI so you can make better decisions.

Attach campaigns to this conversion.
Next, attach the campaigns you want associating with this conversion if you already have them set up. If no campaigns are set up, don’t worry, we can attach them to this later.


Define how to track your conversion
You have two options here. Event-specific pixel or Insights tag. I’ll cover the insights tag option here because its easier and doesn’t require google tag manager but I’ll come back to cover this option in maybe intermediate or advanced sections.

Insights tag option for tracking.
This is the option where the insights tag we have installed is letting us know what pages our visitor hit and then setting up certain URL’s as goal or checkpoint URLs to know how far they have gotten into our funnel.