Although you place ads on LinkedIn and lead prospects into ActiveCampaign CRM, you lack a clear way to track the exact LinkedIn advertisement responsible for generating each lead.
After a lead is transformed into a paying customer, it becomes impossible to track which LinkedIn ad originally brought in the lead.
The tracking gap restricts LinkedIn ad management, leading to simultaneous spending on multiple ads without a clear understanding of which are driving leads and revenue.
A well-built tool would efficiently connect each lead with the precise LinkedIn campaign group, campaign, ad, and audience that generated it.
Let's get started!
How to capture LinkedIn ads in ActiveCampaign CRM
Step 1: Add Leadsources in the head tag of your website
Leadsources offers a user-friendly solution for tracking the origin of leads. After integration into your website, it collects up to 7 specific lead source details for each lead.
Create an account on Leadsources.io - it's free.
Insert the Leadsources tracking code into the head tag of your website by following this guide.
Step 2: Add the UTM parameters to your LinkedIn ads campaigns
Ensure the UTM parameters you wish to assess are added to your LinkedIn ad content.
For reference, you can track the campaign, ad, and audience with the help of these UTM parameters:
- UTM_source=linkedin
- UTM_campaign=campaign-name
- UTM_term=audience-name
- UTM_content=ad-name
Leadsources gathers all lead source information, from channel to landing page and subfolder, ensuring thorough tracking of every lead, with or without UTM parameters.
Step 3: Add the hidden fields in your form
Insert hidden fields in your form so Leadsources can automatically capture and store the lead source data for every form submission.
When a new lead submits the form, Leadsources captures LinkedIn ad information and automatically fills the hidden fields.
For an extensive walkthrough on adding hidden fields, refer to our guide.
Step 4: Capture the LinkedIn ads data in ActiveCampaign CRM
When users engage with your ads and subsequently visit your website, Leadsources captures suitable LinkedIn ads data, including information on the campaign, audience, and ad details.
Leadsources effectively fills the hidden fields in your form with data sourced from LinkedIn advertisements without manual input.
When the form is submitted, the integration with ActiveCampaign CRM ensures that LinkedIn ads data and your leads are sent automatically.
How does Leadsources work?
After setting up Leadsources on your website, it collects LinkedIn ads data whenever a visitor arrives.
The LinkedIn ads data is stored in the hidden fields of your form, and when the form is submitted, it is sent to ActiveCampaign CRM along with the associated lead details (name, email, etc.).
Leadsources aggregates the following information for each visitor:
- Channel
- Source
- Campaign
- Content
- Term
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
Without the presence of UTM parameters, Leadsources uses the referrer as a means to track lead source information.
There are moments when the use of UTM parameters is not feasible, particularly for traffic originating from organic sources:
- Google Search
- Instagram bio link
- Social media posts
- Etc.
In such scenarios, most lead source tracking tools find it challenging to capture lead sources, given their reliance on UTM parameters for data collection. In contrast, Leadsources is capable of collecting precise lead source information without the need for UTM parameters:
- Channel
- Source
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
Thus, Leadsources delivers detailed lead data tracking across all channels, distinguishing it from many other tools in the industry:
- Organic Search
- Paid Search
- Organic Social
- Paid Social
- Referral
- Affiliate
- Display Advertising
- Direct Traffic
Additionally, Leadsources systematically categorizes your traffic by channel, resulting in a clear and effective dataset.
In conclusion, Leadsources is an efficient and simple tool that gathers complete lead source data from each channel in a centralized manner.
Performance reports: Lead, sales, and revenue by source
Tracking LinkedIn ads data through ActiveCampaign CRM allows for the generation of diverse performance reports, including:
- Leads, sales, and revenue by channel
- Leads, sales, and revenue by campaign
- Leads, sales, and revenue by ad
- Leads, sales, and revenue by audience
- Leads, sales, and revenue by landing page
- Leads, sales, and revenue by landing page subfolder
As a result, you have the capability to adjust your LinkedIn budget according to the channel, campaign, ad, and audience that yield your leads, sales, and revenue.
Let us investigate the different categories of reports that you can produce.
1. Lead source reports
These reports present data on the leads generated by:
- Channel
- Campaign
- Ad
- Audience
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
Example #1:
Utilize the “Leads by Channel” report as your first step to identify the channel that yields the most leads.
Example #2:
By determining the most effective channel, like LinkedIn, you can dedicate your attention to analyzing leads from individual LinkedIn campaigns.
Example #3:
After identifying the LinkedIn campaign yielding the greatest leads, you can examine which audience or ad contributed significantly to this success.
2. Sales and revenue source reports
Recognizing which LinkedIn ads generate the most leads is important; however, we should also question their effectiveness in driving revenue.
Connect your leads with a CRM such as ActiveCampaign CRM to distinguish those that transitioned into paid customers, facilitating the monitoring of sales and revenue generated from various channels, sources, and landing pages.
This allows you to shift your marketing strategy to prioritize the channels, sources, campaigns, audiences, and ads that are proven to generate revenue.
To enhance our understanding of this idea, let’s look at the example below:
| Channels | Search Paid | Social Paid |
| Leads | 50 | 75 |
| Sales | 5 | 6 |
| Average order value | $150 | $100 |
| Revenue | $750 | $600 |
After launching advertising on Google and LinkedIn, the initial “Leads by Channel” report indicated that Social Paid ads on LinkedIn produced more leads than those derived from Search Paid ads.
After reviewing your sales and revenue data from your CRM export, you found that the Search Paid channel generated higher revenue with fewer leads than the Social Paid channel, indicating a possible need to boost the Search Paid budget.
It is possible to create several reports that emphasize the analysis of sales and revenue:
- Sales and revenue by source
- Sales and revenue by campaign
- Sales and revenue by content (aka. ad)
- Sales and revenue by term (aka. audience)
- Sales and revenue by landing page
- Sales and revenue by landing page subfolder
