Earlier this month, LinkedIn rolled out perhaps the most important update to its advertising platform to date – conversion tracking. This update finally puts the social channel of 450 million users in the company of Facebook and Twitter as advertising with conversion tracking abilities.
Prior to the addition of conversion tracking, there was no way for LinkedIn advertisers to understand how many conversions (i.e. leads, transactions, etc.) ads were generating without using a third-party analytics tool like Google Analytics. Conversion tracking within the LinkedIn platforms will now enable advertisers to easily optimize audiences and ads to maximize ROI.
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What Makes LinkedIn Conversion Tracking Different?
We’re excited for LinkedIn to be able to cross-reference internal data to report on conversions by industry, job function, job seniority, company size and more. This nuance to conversion tracking is unique to LinkedIn and is certainly not a level of information that Facebook or Twitter is able to provide. Understanding conversion activity by industry, seniority and other audience characteristics will enable advertisers to invest in the audiences most likely to convert.
Let’s say your institution is promoting its Professional MBA program in the Greater Chicago Area to users of all industries with 5+ years of experience. After enabling conversion tracking and collecting a few months of data, you notice that a large portion of your leads are coming from users with an engineering background. After making this discovery, you may want to consider creating a separate campaign for users in the engineering industry, tailoring copy to this audience and allocating a larger portion of budget to this new campaign. Prior to conversion tracking, you would not have visibility into this trend until following up with each lead to uncover their professional backgrounds.
LinkedIn also breaks down conversions that result directly from an ad click (post-click conversions) and from only an ad impression (view-through conversion) into two separate metrics. Facebook and Twitter do account for post-impression (view-through) conversions, but these channels lump post-impression conversions with post-click conversions as one general ‘conversion’ metric. This approach makes it more difficult to understand how users are converting.
How Do I Get Started?
To add conversion tracking to your LinkedIn campaigns, simply navigate to the ‘Conversion Tracking’ tab in the top right corner of your LinkedIn Campaign Manager dashboard. From there, LinkedIn will generate a lightweight JavaScript tag you will want to add across your domain before the end of the <body> tag. Once the code is installed, you will be prompted to set up a conversion event by defining the URL you would like to trigger a conversion. For example, if you are generating leads for a program via a landing page, you will want to use your landing page’s confirmation page as the URL that triggers a conversion.
Not using LinkedIn for your institution? Here are a few tips to start using LinkedIn for Higher Education.
