Despite placing ads on LinkedIn and channeling leads to Zendesk Sell, you do not have the ability to identify the specific LinkedIn ad that resulted in each unique lead.
After a lead is successfully turned into a paying customer, there is no way to associate that customer with the particular LinkedIn ad that initially brought in the lead.
This tracking gap makes LinkedIn ad management more challenging, forcing you to invest in numerous ads at once without a clear understanding of which ones are driving your leads and revenue.
An integrated tool would effectively link each lead to the exact LinkedIn campaign group, campaign, ad, and audience that generated it.
Let's explore!
How to capture LinkedIn ads in Zendesk Sell
Step 1: Add Leadsources in the head tag of your website
Leadsources offers an easy approach to tracking lead sources. After integration with your website, it records up to seven pieces of lead source information for each lead generated.
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
Add the UTM parameters you intend to analyze to your LinkedIn ad content.
As an illustration, these UTM parameters can help you track the campaign, ad, and audience:
- UTM_source=linkedin
- UTM_campaign=campaign-name
- UTM_term=audience-name
- UTM_content=ad-name
Leadsources consolidates lead source information, including channel, landing page, and subfolder, to provide thorough tracking for each lead, regardless of UTM parameters.
Step 3: Add the hidden fields in your form
Integrate hidden fields into your form so that Leadsources can directly capture and record lead source information for every form submission.
Upon form submission by a new lead, Leadsources captures and fills the hidden fields with LinkedIn ad details.
To access a complete walkthrough on how to add hidden fields, consult our guide.
Step 4: Capture the LinkedIn ads data in Zendesk Sell
Upon clicking through your ads and reaching your website, users enable Leadsources to collect data related to LinkedIn ads, including campaign, audience, and ad details.
Leadsources fills the hidden fields in your form with information obtained from LinkedIn ads.
When the form is submitted, integration with Zendesk Sell enables the automatic transfer of LinkedIn ads data along with your leads.
How does Leadsources work?
After Leadsources is integrated into your site, it automatically gathers LinkedIn ads data whenever a visitor arrives at your website.
This information from LinkedIn ads is retained in the hidden fields of your form, and once submitted, it is sent to Zendesk Sell with the lead's details, such as name and email.
Leadsources gathers the following information for every visitor:
- Channel
- Source
- Campaign
- Content
- Term
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
In the absence of UTM parameters, Leadsources depends on the referrer to monitor lead source information.
There are instances where it is impractical to apply UTM parameters, particularly when traffic comes from organic sources:
- Google Search
- Instagram bio link
- Social media posts
- Etc.
In these situations, most lead source tracking tools have trouble capturing lead sources because they depend entirely on UTM parameters for data gathering. In contrast, Leadsources effectively collects specific lead source information without UTM parameters:
- Channel
- Source
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
As a result, Leadsources delivers complete lead data tracking across various channels, unlike many other tools on the market:
- Organic Search
- Paid Search
- Organic Social
- Paid Social
- Referral
- Affiliate
- Display Advertising
- Direct Traffic
Furthermore, Leadsources organizes your traffic automatically by channel, providing a simplified and efficient dataset.
In conclusion, Leadsources is an effective and well structured tool that collects complete lead source data from every channel in one centralized location.
Performance reports: Lead, sales, and revenue by source
Monitoring LinkedIn ads data in Zendesk Sell allows for the creation of diverse performance reports, such as:
- 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
Consequently, you have the ability to modify your LinkedIn budget based on the channel, campaign, ad, and audience driving your leads, sales, and revenue.
Let's explore the various reports you can produce.
1. Lead source reports
These reports reflect the quantity of leads generated by:
- Channel
- Campaign
- Ad
- Audience
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
Example #1:
Start with the “Leads by Channel” report to assess which channel produces the greatest number of leads.
Example #2:
By determining the most successful channel, like LinkedIn, you can direct your attention toward reviewing leads from each LinkedIn campaign.
Example #3:
Once you have identifying the LinkedIn campaign generating the most leads, you can dive into which particular audience or ad contributed to this achievement.
2. Sales and revenue source reports
Although identifying the LinkedIn ads that yield the highest number of leads is important, we must inquire whether these ads are effectively driving our revenue.
By connecting your leads to a CRM such as Zendesk Sell, you can isolate those that have become paying customers, allowing you to monitor sales and revenue from different channels, sources, landing pages, and beyond.
This allows you to adjust your marketing strategy to concentrate on the channels, sources, campaigns, audiences, and ads that successfully contribute to revenue generation.
To better understand this idea, let’s examine the following example:
| Channels | Search Paid | Social Paid |
| Leads | 50 | 75 |
| Sales | 5 | 6 |
| Average order value | $150 | $100 |
| Revenue | $750 | $600 |
After initiating advertising campaigns on Google and LinkedIn, the early “Leads by Channel” report indicated that LinkedIn’s Social Paid ads generated more leads than those from Search Paid ads.
After examining the sales and revenue data from your CRM export, you discovered that the Search Paid channel produced higher revenue with a smaller number of leads compared to the Social Paid channel, suggesting an increase in the Search Paid budget.
Also, it is feasible to produce multiple reports that focus on sales and revenue metrics:
- 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
