Best way to capture LinkedIn Ads data in Gravity Forms
Do you know if your LinkedIn ads are generating leads and customers? Learn how to track the performance of your LinkedIn Ad campaigns with Attributer + Gravity Forms.
Are you looking for a way to track how many leads you are getting from your LinkedIn Ads?
The default reporting in LinkedIn Ads can tell you how you many impressions and clicks you got, but to truly understand the ROI of your ads you need to be able to measure how many leads, customers & revenue you got.
In this article, we’ll show you how to do exactly that. You’ll learn how to use a tool called Attributer to capture LinkedIn Ads data in Gravity Forms (and send it to your CRM and other tools) so you can measure the exact amount of leads, customers & revenue you’ve gotten from your LinkedIn Add.
4 steps for capturing LinkedIn Ads data in Gravity Forms
Follow these 4 simple steps to capture LinkedIn Ads data with each submission of your Gravity Forms:
1. Add UTM parameters behind your ads
The first thing to do is add UTM Parameters to your ads to help tools like Attributer understand where your leads are coming from.
You can include whatever information you want in the UTM parameters behind your ads, but to give you an example, let’s imagine you work for a company called Olmo Software and are running a brand campaign on LinkedIn. The UTM Parameters you might use are as follows:
- UTM_Medium=paidsocial
- UTM_Source=LinkedIn
- UTM_Campaign=brand campaign
- UTM_Term= red ad
2. Install Attributer on your website
Attributer is a small snippet of code that you place on your website.
When a visitor lands on your site, Attributer looks at where they came from, categorises them into a Channel (the same ones you see in tools like Google Analytics, including Paid Wocial, Paid Search, Organic Search, etc) before storing this data in a cookie in the users browser.
Then when a person submits a Gravity Form on your website, it passes through this information on where they came from with the form submission.
It’s easy to install Attributer on your website and step-by-step instructions can be found on our help site.
3. LinkedIn Ads data is captured by Gravity Forms
Now that everything is set up, whenever a person clicks on your LinkedIn Ads and completes a Gravity Form on your website, information on where they came from (I.e. which LinkedIn Ads campaign they came from, which ad they clicked, etc) is captured in Gravity Forms alongside the data the lead entered into the form (I.e. their name, email, phone, etc).
4. See how your ads are performing
Now that the LinkedIn Ads data has been captured alongside each form submission, you can do a variety of things to help understand how your LinkedIn Ads are performing.
These include:
- View which campaign each of your leads has come from in the Entries section of Gravity Forms
- Include the LinkedIn Ads data in the email notifications that Gravity Forms sends, so you can see where each lead came from without ever leaving your inbox
- Send the LinkedIn Ads data to your CRM (like Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, etc) and use it to run reports that show the performance of your campaigns
- Send the data to a spreadsheet and use the built-in charting capabilities to create graphs, or connect to a reporting tool like Google Data Studio to build dashboards and advanced reports
Why Attributer is the best way to track LinkedIn Ads in Gravity Forms
There are other methods for capturing the UTM parameters you place behind your LinkedIn Ads in Gravity Forms, so why choose Attributer?
Here's why:
1. Captures all sources of leads
Attributer tracks the source of ALL your leads, not just those from your LinkedIn Ad campaigns.
This means that regardless of how a user lands on your website (whether through Organic Social, Organic Search, Direct, Referral, etc.), Attributer will gather data about their source and pass it through with each form submission.
2. Remembers the data
Other methods for capturing the UTM parameters you put behind your LinkedIn Ads only work if the user completes the form on the same page they landed on
To illustrate why this is a problem, imagine someone clicks one of your LinkedIn Ads and goes to your homepage. They then click your ‘Get A Quote’ button and are taken to a different page to complete your quote request form. This would mean that the page they complete a form on is not the same page they originally landed on, so the UTM parameters are lost.
Fortunately, Attributer takes a different approach. It stores the UTM parameters in a cookie in the user’s browser, meaning that regardless of what page your form is on the UTM parameters will always be passed through.
3. Captures landing page data as well
Ever wanted to know how many leads and customers come from your blog?
Attributer not only captures the UTM parameters you put behind your LinkedIn Ads, but it also captures the landing page (I.e. attributer.io/blog/capture-utm-parameters) and the landing page category (I.e. /blog).
This allows you to run reports that show how well certain sections of your website are performing (I.e. your blog) in terms of generating leads, customers & revenue, as well as drill down into which individual blog posts are performing best.
This chart helps you see how much revenue is coming from each of your specific ads.
Knowing this helps you to better understand which of your creatives are attracting the types of leads that convert into customers, and can also help make your ad creative more effective.
3 example reports you can run when you capture LinkedIn Ads data in Gravity Forms
If you capture LinkedIn Ads data with each submission of your Gravity Forms, and send that data to your CRM or a reporting tool, then there are a world of reports & dashboards you can build to understand how well your LinkedIn Ads are performing.
As someone who has been running these kinds of reports for over 15 years, there are a few I've found most insightful and thought I'd share with you.
1. Leads by channel
Because Attributer captures the source of all your leads (not just those from LinkedIn Ads), you can run reports like the one above which shows how many leads you’ve generated each month from each channel that brings people to your website (I.e. Organic Search, Paid Search, Paid Social, etc).
This report gives you a high-level overview of where your leads are coming from and can help you determine whether LinkedIn Ads is the right approach for you.
For instance, if you’re spending lots of money on LinkedIn Ads (I.e. Paid Social) but find most of your leads are actually coming from your Paid Search ads (which isn’t uncommon given the higher purchase intent search leads have), then it might be time to focus some of your efforts over there.
2. Customers by campaign
This report shows how many customers you have generated from your LinkedIn Ads, broken down by the campaign they came from.
It’s the ideal way to measure the effectiveness of each of your campaigns (seeing how many customers you got, rather than how many clicks you got) and can help you really understand which campaigns are working and subsequently which ones to continue to invest in.
3. Revenue by ad type
There are many different types of ads you can run on LinkedIn, including Sponsored Content (I.e. the ones in the newsfeed), Sponsored Messaging (I.e. InMail Ads) and Text Ads (I.e. the ads in the sidebar).
If you’re running multiple types of ads on LinkedIn then the above chart (which shows the amount of revenue broken down by which ad type the customer came from) can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t.
For instance, it’s not uncommon for sidebar ads to get lots of impressions and clicks but because they are small the leads tend to be less educated and convert to customers at a lower rate.
If you run this report and see the same thing, then it might be time to pause the sidebar ads and focus your budget elsewhere.
Wrap up
LinkedIn Ads are a great way to generate leads and customers for your business, particularly if you’re a B2B company.
But to ensure you’re getting the most out of it, you need to be able to track the exact amount of leads, customers, and revenue you are getting from each campaign so you can focus on the ones that are working and drop the ones that are not.
And that’s where Attributer comes in. It will pass into Gravity Forms which campaign, ad type, ad, etc brought that lead to you, so you can better understand what's working.
Best of all, it only takes about 10 minutes to set up and you can get started with a 14-day free trial. So start today!
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About the Author
Aaron Beashel is the founder of Attributer and has over 15 years of experience in marketing & analytics. He is a recognized expert in the subject and has written articles for leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Search Engine Journal, Buffer, Unbounce & more. Learn more about Aaron here.