LinkedIn Sponsored Content can now be tracked via Google Campaign Manager

LinkedIn announced on Monday it is adding Sponsored Content to the available ad units that can be tracked by Google’s Campaign Manager.

Why marketers should care

Earlier this year, LinkedIn introduced an integration with Google Campaign Manager for a few of its ad formats. On Monday, the company added Sponsored Content to the list of available ad offerings integrated into the Google Marketing Platform, making it possible to track Sponsored Content in the form of video, carousel ads, lead-gen forms, text ads and “Spotlight” Dynamic ads.

The measurement integration with Google Campaign Manager “not only allows you to (1) see LinkedIn ad performance alongside the rest of your paid spend, but also (2) get attribution for your LinkedIn ads across all impressions and interactions, measured in a cross-device and cross-platform manner,” wrote Taylor Greason on the LinkedIn Business blog.

Adding Sponsored Content to Google Campaign Manager will offer marketers a wide-range view of their LinkedIn ad campaign performance, and make it easier to compare LinkedIn campaigns against ad campaigns running on other platforms.

To enable LinkedIn Sponsored Content tracking in Google Campaign Manager, marketers will need to click the “Manage tracking” option when they create a Sponsored Content campaign and add both the impression and click tags before clicking the “Save” button on their campaign.

Ian Chang, a supervisor with Zenith U.S., said his agency saw a significant reduction in Cost Per Visitors (CPV) once it began adding impression tags to LinkedIn Sponsored Content units.

“CPV decreased by 100 percent overall compared to pre-implementation,” said Chang, “The ability to add impression tags to each of the ad units has helped us achieve significant efficiencies across the platform.”

More on LinkedIn’s Google Campaign Manager integration

• LinkedIn recommends advertisers use click tags on their Sponsored Content versus “destination URLs” or landing page URLs for more accurate tracking, and to continue to use LinkedIn Insight Tag to optimize ad spend on its platform.
• LinkedIn says it is working on adding more metrics to Google Campaign Manager, but did not offer any specifics.
• In other LinkedIn news, Vimeo announced on Monday that marketers could now publish video to LinkedIn Company Pages directly from their Vimeo accounts.