As a business account on LinkedIn, you may want to sponsor or boost certain posts, especially as a B2B company. You can do this by running campaigns to put your content directly on the feed of your target audience. While putting ads out may be great for building awareness, how do you know if they are actually generating clicks, conversions, and results? Well, that's where the LinkedIn pixel comes in.
Setting up Your LinkedIn Campaign
When you click on the “Sponsor Content” button in the top right corner of the post you want to promote, it will take you to a new window. Welcome to LinkedIn Campaign Manager where you will build, launch, edit, and monitor your campaigns! A LinkedIn pixel is a snippet of HTML code used for tracking campaign conversions. When building your first ad on LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you will need to identify which tracking method is best for your specific campaign.
Before deciding on a tracking method, there are a couple of factors to keep in mind. First, you need to know your goal. What is the purpose of your campaign? Whether it’s to increase awareness, website traffic, or lead generation, this will be identified in the first step of the campaign building process.
Additionally, you must know your conversion. Based on your objective, what action do you want your website visitors to perform? This may be a click to your website, a specific page view (i.e. thank you page), a form submission, survey response, etc. Creating a conversion is the last step in the campaign set up process.
Deciding Which Tracking Method to Use
Once you have decided on the above, you are ready to select a conversion tracking method. You will need to choose between a site-wide Insight Tag or an event-specific pixel. If your conversion involves a specific page view, LinkedIn recommends you use an Insight Tag to track conversions. Site-wide Insight Tags fire as soon as a user reaches your website, but only tracks when they reach a specific URL on your website. All you need to do is insert the URL you want it to track.
If your conversion action doesn’t involve a specific URL but does simple element visibility (i.e. pop-up message), you will need to use a LinkedIn pixel. This pixel is specific to an event, like clicking a submit button. For this method, you will need to install code onto your website for the specific action of the user. Luckily, LinkedIn auto-generates the code for you so all you have to do is copy and paste it into Google Tag Manager.
That said, we feel it’s important to note that even though event-based tracking is a little trickier to install, your advertising campaigns will really benefit from the detailed data, so we are going to take you through the process step-by-step. Let’s choose the event-based pixel method.
Configure GTM
Step 1: Open your Google Tag Manager account. You will automatically be put into the default workspace.
Step 2: Create a new workspace to avoid an accidental publish & disrupting the current site configuration while completing the rest of the task.
Click on Default Workspace in the upper left corner of the dashboard
Add a new workspace by clicking the + sign in the upper right corner
Name and save your new workspace. You can add a description if desired.
Step 3: Create a new Custom HTML or Custom Image tag. You can decide which best fits your specific needs, but for this tutorial, we will be using a Custom HTML template.
Select Add a new tag from the Overview dashboard
Name and choose your Tag Configuration by selecting Custom HTML.
Step 4: Paste the code from LinkedIn into the HTML box. Click Save.
*Note that both your Partner ID and Conversion ID are generated by LinkedIn. This is how the pixel knows where to send its data.
Step 5: Choose your Trigger Configuration. This can be a specific Page View...
OR pick an element that appears on successful form submission, for example:
*This step may require more configuration, please reach out through the link below if you need any additional help.
Step 6: Validate. Once you have saved your new tag, go to the website page where a conversion is to be completed.
Open up your Dev Tools by typing:
cmd + opt + j (if you are on a mac)
ctrl + shift + j (if you are on windows)
Complete a test conversion by filling out your form, clicking button, etc..
Navigate to the Network tab in your Dev Tools.
Type "LinkedIn" into the search bar. If the URL is there and has a status of 302 or 200, you're all set!
You have now installed LinkedIn pixels to track conversions on LinkedIn Campaign Manager! All happy dances are welcome from this point forward.
For more information, feel free to contact us directly here https://www.rhuxanalytics.com/contact. We would love to hear from you!