LinkedIn ads server-side tracking setup guide

LinkedIn server-side tracking is a method to send conversion data from your website, CRM, or other business systems to LinkedIn using LinkedIn's Conversions API.

Instead of relying only on information collected in a user's browser, server-side tracking creates a more reliable connection between your first-party data (information that you collect directly from your clients) and advertising platforms like LinkedIn. This tracking helps you measure campaign performance more accurately and provide LinkedIn with better signals that can be used for campaign optimization.

In a nutshell, LinkedIn's Conversions API helps you get a more complete picture of your customer journey, and you can use this data to improve campaign performance in the future.

Important actions often can happen later in the customer journey. For a lot of businesses, such a workflow is possible before closing a deal:

With LinkedIn's Conversions API, you can send offline conversion data to the platform when it happens.

The business impact can be significant. According to LinkedIn's Conversions API beta study across 829 campaigns (which took place from July 1 to August 2023), advertisers who used Conversions API saw impressive results compared to campaigns that did not use it:

✅ 31% increase in attributed conversions 

✅ 20% decrease in cost per action

In addition, online data (like interactions with your website, purchases) is collected more precisely with limited impact of ad blockers and browsers' restrictions (such as ITPs). That's a problem that heavily impacts your data quality if you stick to client-side tracking only (have implemented just the LinkedIn Insight Tag). Below, we explain in detail how it works.

• Improve campaign performance. LinkedIn's Conversions API provides LinkedIn with more complete conversion data. It helps LinkedIn ad platform better understand which campaigns, ads, and audiences drive real results. As a result, you allocate the ad budget more effectively toward users who are more likely to convert.
• Lower acquisition costs. With stronger conversion signals, you can make more informed optimization decisions with your LinkedIn campaigns – improving campaign efficiency and helping reduce the cost of acquiring leads, customers, and the cost per conversion.
• Reach higher-intent audiences. Conversions API helps LinkedIn build a more complete understanding of how people interact with your business throughout the customer journey. These insights can be used to improve audience targeting, retargeting, and campaign optimization.
• Improve conversion attribution. Conversions API helps create a clearer picture of the customer journey once it collects conversion data from multiple sources, including websites, CRM systems, and other business tools. This makes it easier to understand which campaigns contribute to conversions and business growth.
• Measure online and offline conversions. In addition to website actions, LinkedIn's Conversions API can be used to track offline events such as qualified leads, sales opportunities, purchases, and closed deals conversion data that traditionally lives in CRMs.

After a LinkedIn member clicks your ad and interacts with your business by completing an action (submitting a form, registering for an event, requesting a demo, or making a purchase), the conversion event is captured by your website (online conversions) or CRM (offline conversions).

Then, the event data is sent to LinkedIn through the Conversions API, and LinkedIn matches the conversion data with previous ad interactions. If the platform can match, a conversion is attributed to the appropriate campaign and becomes available in Campaign Manager reporting. LinkedIn can use these signals to improve campaign optimization and audience targeting.

In a server-side tracking architecture (when using LinkedIn's Conversions API), the server acts as a proxy between the website and external vendors (LinkedIn); the cloud server provides greater control over data processing, improves data quality, and reduces reliance on browser-based tracking mechanisms.

Client-side tracking (using only the LinkedIn Insight Tag) relies on code embedded in a website to collect user interaction data and send it directly to analytics and advertising platforms. Due to the absence of a "server-proxy," it is susceptible to ad blockers, browser restrictions, and cookie limitations, which reduce data accuracy.

Stape supports two ways to start sending conversion events to LinkedIn through LinkedIn's Conversions API:

• Via Stape's GTM integration with LinkedIn advertisers
• Via Stape's LinkedIn Conversions API tag

The right setup path depends on your current tracking infrastructure.

👉 If you already have a server-side GTM container

Use Stape's LinkedIn Conversions API tag.

The tag can be added to your existing server GTM container and configured to send conversion events to LinkedIn. This is the recommended option if you already have server GTM infrastructure configured and need to add one more platform (LinkedIn) to the list.

👉 If you don't have a server-side GTM container yet

Use Stape's GTM integration for LinkedIn advertisers.

This integration starts from LinkedIn Campaign Manager and automatically creates and connects a server-side GTM container hosted by Stape, making the initial setup much simpler.

It is a good option if you:

• are new to server-side tracking;
• do not have a server-side GTM setup;
• look for the fastest way to start using LinkedIn's Conversions API.

For more details on GTM integration with LinkedIn advertisers, see our overview guide.

✅ Configure LinkedIn Insight tag

Regardless of the configuration method you opt for, the configuration of the LinkedIn Insight tag is recommended to capture the most complete conversion data for your business. 

What's the LinkedIn Insight tag?

The LinkedIn Insight tag is a small JavaScript snippet that enables website retargeting, audience insights, and conversion tracking. It starts collecting visitor data immediately, but conversion tracking requires separate event tags. If you're using both client-side and server-side tracking, include an event_id to ensure proper deduplication (we'll cover this later).

The tag sets first-party cookies and a LinkedIn Ads ID to measure user activity and attribution. Features like enhanced matching and automatic website actions tracking help improve campaign performance while protecting user privacy through data pseudonymization and retention policies.

If you don't have the LinkedIn Insight tag configured yet, please follow LinkedIn's official documentation. 

If you don’t have configured sending events via the LinkedIn Insight tag, please click on the collapsed element below and follow the instructions:

Based on the approach you've selected (LinkedIn Conversions API tag or Stape's GTM integration with LinkedIn), click on the collapse element below to see the guidelines:

When you use both the LinkedIn Insight tag and the Conversions API (which is recommended to ensure you are capturing all relevant conversion events), the same action can be reported twice: once from the browser and once from the server.

To keep your reports accurate, LinkedIn applies deduplication rules. These rules decide when multiple events should be treated as one conversion and when they should be counted separately.

LinkedIn web + CAPI event reporting is designed in a way commonly called "redundant event setup." This means that a single conversion event can be sent through both the LinkedIn Insight Tag (web event) and LinkedIn's Conversions API tag (server event). To avoid double-counting, you must include a shared event ID across both methods. 

The web event has a higher priority and will be counted as a conversion, and if the same conversion with the same event ID is delivered via the CAPI tag, such an event will be discarded. Please be sure to handle this process properly for accurate LinkedIn Ads conversion tracking.

After you set up CAPI, you can use the conversion data to improve your LinkedIn campaigns in more advanced ways to improve performance and targeting. For example:

• Retargeting Audiences: Create a retargeting audience using Conversions API seed data based on their buying intent and journey stage.
• Predictive Audiences: Combine AI with your high-quality Conversions API seed data (online, offline, and CRM) to build audiences likely to convert using conversion CAPI data, so LinkedIn finds members/people who behave like your best prospects, and creates Matched Audiences to retarget visitors or contacts who have already shown interest.
• Qualified Leads Optimization: Deliver ads to members that are most likely to fit your definition of a "qualified lead."
• Conversion Value Optimization: Deliver ads to members most likely to return the greatest value per conversion, such as revenue or lifetime value.
• Conversion Lift tests: Measure the incremental conversions driven by your LinkedIn campaigns.
• Measurement Insights: See where people are in your sales funnel over the last 180 days.

Some examples of what you can track include demo requests, trial sign-ups, lead qualification updates, content downloads, and pricing information requests.

With LinkedIn's CAPI, you can report offline conversion events, which may significantly help in measuring the performance of your LinkedIn campaigns. See our related blog posts for more instructions on offline conversion tracking:

• Offline conversion tracking explained
• What are webhooks, webhook servers, and how to use them
• Debug incoming webhooks in the Google Tag Manager server preview

A user in Stape's community struggled with LinkedIn server-side tracking because the platform now requires connecting a Google Tag Manager account or using their API, and events only register if they include a click ID or email. The user didn't want to give full GTM access for security reasons, and their events weren't being verified. 

The solution was to create first-party variables for LinkedIn Click ID and/or email, pass them with each event, and optionally use a dummy GTM container to enable server-side tracking without exposing sensitive access.

As advertising platforms continue to rely more on first-party data, implementing LinkedIn's Conversions API is highly important for accurate measurement and effective campaign optimization. Whether you're looking to improve attribution, track qualified leads, measure offline conversions, or simply provide LinkedIn with more reliable conversion signals, server-side tracking can help you get more value from your advertising data.

With Stape's solutions for LinkedIn's Conversions API, you can choose the implementation method that best fits your current setup!