Following other marketing platforms, LinkedIn also began to support server-side conversion tracking. They also published an official LinkedIn CAPI tag in the Google Tag Manager gallery.
Unfortunately, for now, LinkedIn CAPI is a closed API available to qualified developers who meet additional criteria for access. LinkedIn is currently not accepting new applications. For more detailed information, please refer to the official documentation.
LinkedIn suggests advertisers use both the Insight Tag (web tracking) and the Conversions API (server-side tracking) to understand better how customers behave. But using both can lead to the same event being counted twice. In this case, deduplication is required.
First, you must create a conversion rule for each implementation method (Insight Tag and the Conversions API). To report identical events sent from the browser and server, you need to have the same event_id. The logic is highly similar to Facebook event Deduplication.
When Linkedin receives the same Insight Tag event and a Conversions API event from the same account with the same eventId, they discard the Conversions API event and keeps only the Insight Tag event for the reporting.
The tag itself looks simple and requires only four fields for input, two of which are optional.
Setting up the tag looks simple at first glance. The tricky part is that it will only work accurately if you specify the required fields in the tag. There is a list of criteria for user identification, and at least one of them should be passed with the event:
As you can see, you don't specify this data anywhere in the tag; the tag expects you to pass it in the sGTM event data.
This is the first version of Linkedind CAPI, and it will be updated in the future since the solution isn't ideal. Hopefully, LinkedIn will add an option to input data for specific parameters within the tag manually.
The Linkedin CAPI tag automatically maps the following parameters from sGTM event data:
1. ACXIOM_ID
User identifier for matching with LiveRamp identity graph.
The tag looks for it in the event data by the key ‘user_data.acxiomID’
2. ORACLE_MOAT_ID
User identifier for matching with Oracle MOAT Identity.
The tag looks for it in the event data by the key ‘user_data.moatID’
3. Currency
The tag looks for it in the event data by the ‘currency’ key.
4. LINKEDIN_FIRST_PARTY_ADS_TRACKING_UUID
First-party cookie ID. Advertisers need to enable enhanced conversion tracking from Campaign Manager to activate first-party cookies that append a click ID parameter li_fat_id to the click URLs.
Strangely, the tag doesn't use cookies from the headers as most tags do.
5. User data
Tag expects a user_data object in sGTM event data to contain:
Note!
The structure of the variable User Provided Data is taken as a basis, but custom fields are added to it. So you can't just use it like that, you will need to use transformation to add all additional data like jobTitle or companyName if you e.g. use UPD also for Google ADS.
Also, unlike all other tags, this one does not hash data if provided to the tag in its pure form.
According to the documentation, only email should be hashed, all other data is sent in a raw form.
Ideally, the Linkedin CAPI tag from you expects the following obj to collect all user data:
It’s great that more and more platforms are starting to support s2s tracking or hybrid tracking with deduplication, and Linkedin is among them.
However, the tag still looks raw (which is not strange for a beta) and raises a lot of questions, especially about passing user data to the tag and the need to send click ID manually (by the way, the tag also doesn't save the click id to a cookie yet - this also needs to be done manually). For now, customizing the LinkedIn server GTM tag requires deep knowledge of GTM and sGTM, a desire to understand other people's code, and the possibility of getting access to the LinkedIn CAPI beta.
We will update this manual as soon as the public final version is available.
We've got you covered! Click on Get help and we will send you a free quote.
Don't miss out on the benefits of server-side tagging for your WordPress site. Learn how to set it up with Stape plugin in this quick and easy guide!
Mar 10, 2023Learn how to easily set up and manage server-side tagging for your Shopify store using the powerful features of the Stape Server GTM app.