LinkedIn CAPI: the solution to improve your advertising performance
New brakes on tracking, Insight Tag less effective
Recent developments in user tracking, such as ad blockers, the end of third-party cookies and restrictions in browsers like Safari, have considerably reduced the effectiveness of the Insight Tag. This tag no longer enables optimal conversion tracking on LinkedIn. To overcome these challenges and enable advertisers to continue collecting reliable data, LinkedIn's Conversion API (LinkedIn CAPI) is an essential solution. Find out why adopting LinkedIn CAPI is crucial for your advertising campaigns, and follow our recommendations for a successful implementation.
Implementing LinkedIn CAPI has become a must for any advertiser. Today, it's the best way to optimize the volume of conversions attributed to your advertising campaigns. If the implementation of LinkedIn CAPI seems complex, rest assured, the tag created for you by Addingwell will make the task much easier! Follow our detailed methodology for effective LinkedIn CAPI configuration...
Expected benefits post set-up
After implementing LinkedIn CAPI, setting up ad-blockers bypass and Safari ITP bypass, your data will be more reliable and accurate.
Ad-blocker impacts
With the insight tag, some data is lost as ad-blockers block requests that are sent to LinkedIn from the browser. The implementation of LinkedIn CAPI makes it possible to bypass these ad-blockers. On average, bypassing ad-blockers yields between 5 and 15% more data.
Safari ITP impacts
Concerning Safari, its ITP feature limits the lifetime of cookies deposited by your tagging server to 7 days. This means that after 7 days, conversion attribution is jeopardized. To get around this, we provide 2 solutions in this documentation.
Generally speaking, our customers are seeing a higher number of attributed conversions in their LinkedIn Campaign Manager thanks to the implementation of CAPI!
Now you know why an advertiser should add the LinkedIn Conversion API, by opting for the server-side tag created for you by Addingwell. 🎉 Congratulations, you're now ready for the LinkedIn CAPI tag setup.
LinkedIn CAPI tag setup
Download tag
Click here (opens in a new tab) to download the LinkedIn Conversion API tag and click on the download icon to get the file.
Import tag into sGTM
Go to the Templates tab of the server container, then, in the Tag templates section, click on New.
Then click on the three small dots in the top right-hand corner, and select Import.
Save the new imported tag
Then select the newly uploaded template.tpl file, and click Save.
Configure tag
Create a new tag in Google Tag Manager Server-Side and select the recently created LinkedIn CAPI tag.
This tag includes two types of events:
- Page View
- Conversion
Page views (Event Type: Page View)
With the Page View event type, configuring the tag is relatively straightforward, simply trigger it on all page_view events.
When configured on page views, the tag doesn't send a request to LinkedIn but simply comes to drop the li_fat_id cookie if the user comes from LinkedIn advertising.
Conversions (Event Type : Conversion)
To configure the tag with event type Conversion, two pieces of information are required:
- Conversion Rule ID, which represents the conversion ID of the conversion you've previously created on LinkedIn.
- The Access Token enabling communication with LinkedIn's conversion API.
Once you've retrieved the access token and conversion ID, configure the LinkedIn CAPI tag.
This tag is to be triggered on the event(s) corresponding to your conversion(s) on LinkdedIn. In this example, the tag is triggered on the purchase event.
🎉 Now that you've finished configuring Addingwell's LinkedIn CAPI tag, it's time to check the received data.
Check data received
Once you've configured your LinkedIn CAPI tag, it's crucial to ensure that:
- your server container correctly sends conversions to LinkedIn
- the data is correctly received on the LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Check sent events
Preview GTM Server-Side
The first step is to ensure that the LinkedIn CAPI tag is triggered correctly for the page_view event and on your conversion events.
In the server-side container preview, make sure your LinkedIn CAPI tag fires on the page_view event (Event Type: Page View) and then on the purchase event (Event Type: Conversion).
In our example, the purchase event represents the conversion we're sending to LinkedIn.
Confirm that the tag appears in the Tags fired section and that the tag status is Succeeded.
Event Type : Page View
In the preview, click on the LinkedIn CAPI tag.
Note here that the tag doesn't send any requests. This is quite normal as on the page_view event the tag is only there to drop the li_fat_id cookie if the visitor comes from a LinkedIn ad.
Event Type : Conversion
In the preview, click on the LinkedIn CAPI tag.
LinkedIn CAPI returns code 201, your request has been processed by LinkedIn.
Potential errors
The conversion tag (Event Type: Conversion) is triggered correctly but does not send a request to LinkedIn.
Go to the GTM Server-Side preview console to find out why.
Two error messages are possible:
- You need to provide at least an email address.
- You need to provide both firstName and lastName.
As a general rule, we recommend sending the email address for each conversion. If you're sending other user data, you need to provide at least the last name AND the first name.
To learn how to send user data to the server, see our documentation on the subject.
Check received events
On LinkedIn side: check conversion activity
Access your LinkedIn Campaign Manager (opens in a new tab)
Then go to Measurement then Conversion tracking.
Check that the conversion you've set up via the LinkedIn CAPI tag is active.
Addingwell via Tag Health: successful requests
Click on the Tag Health tab in your Addingwell container. Start by checking the number of requests made to LinkedIn tags over a given period, as well as the percentage of successful requests. Click on your LinkedIn tags for more details.
This screen gives you details of the events sent by your server to the LinkedIn Conversion API, as well as the percentage of successful requests, which in our example is 100%.
If your requests aren't 100% successful, you can dig deeper by accessing the logs of these error requests. Click on the Logs tab and then click on the LinkedIn API Logs.
Addingwell side via Data Monitoring
Click on the Data monitoring menu in your Addingwell Container. This screen displays all user data processed by your GA4 client and made available to your server-side events. For example, you can see that email data is available in 23.4% of server-side events. To check the list of events where email is actually sent, click on the search icon for more details.
On this screen, you can see the percentage presence of email user data in your server-side events.
In our example, email is available in 100% of purchase events, but only in 38.3% of add_to_cart events. This is consistent with our purchase funnel, as email is not available to all users at the add_to_cart stage.
The data sent here is of high quality, as the events contain the desired and available user data.
Congratulations
You have now finished configuring LinkedIn CAPI, and have verified that your data is being sent to LinkedIn.
If you encountered any problems during these steps, please contact our support team.