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LinkedIn Insight Tag: The Ultimate Guide Watch Overview

LinkedIn Insight Tag: The Ultimate Guide

It’s odd to think that LinkedIn only introduced conversion tracking (via the Insight Tag) for their advertising in 2016.

Before then, you somehow had to track conversions independently, which wasn’t particularly easy to achieve or efficient, and put many advertisers off from advertising on the platform.

But how do you actually use it? That’s what this ultimate guide to LinkedIn’s Insight Tag shows you.

Ultimate guide to #LinkedIn's Insight Tag—how to create one, install it, verify it, use it for tracking conversions, and more...Click To Tweet

You’ll discover:

  • What the LinkedIn Insight Tag is…
  • How to create your own
  • How to install it and check it’s working…
  • How to then use it for advertising, including using it to create audiences to advertise to, to track conversions and to gain useful demographic insights about your visitors...

What Is the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

In brief, the LinkedIn Insight Tag (or pixel) is a bit of code you add to your site that helps you:

  • Determine the results of paid ad campaigns on LinkedIn, so they can be optimized accordingly.
  • Build audiences you can then retarget—in other words, show ads to people who have taken a certain action on your website.
  • Learn more about who is visiting your site—by installing the tag, LinkedIn will give you demographic insights.

Adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your site gives you valuable demographic information about your visitors (source: LinkedIn)

Adding the tag is completely free. Even if you’re not intending to advertise on the platform just yet, it’s worth doing to:

  • Understand more about who is visiting your site to help target your messaging.
  • Build audiences to potentially advertise to in future when you’re ready to do so.

Related: How to Create a Paid Ad on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Insight Tag Conversion Tracking

As mentioned, the tag helps you track how your LinkedIn ad campaigns are performing, including conversion tracking such as measuring how many leads were created from a campaign.

In other words, you can track how a particular ad led to actions on your website such as someone:

  • Signing up to an email subscription
  • Leaving contact information
  • Buying something
  • Downloading content.

This also includes people who took action after seeing your ad, but didn’t click on it directly.

LinkedIn Insight Tag conversion tracking

This is useful for people who have perhaps previously visited your website, or are still on it, and see the ad as a useful memory jolt and return to your website directly, including via a different device.

Follow the instructions below to find out to use the LinkedIn Insight Tag for conversion tracking.

Create Your LinkedIn Insight Tag

Before adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website, you need to create it.

To do so, head to LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, click on the Account you want to use, and click the button to set up your tag.

Create your LinkedIn Insight Tag via Website Demographics in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager

You’ll then be asked to choose how you want to install the tag, so let’s look at that now…

How to Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag

You can either install the tag manually, install it using Google Tag Manager (GTM), or install it in WordPress via an appropriate plugin.

We’ll look at each of these in turn.

Install Manually

If you’re adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your site via the raw code, click the top option, ‘I will install the tag myself’ (or the second option if you’re handing it off to a developer).

Adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your site manually

This gives you the code you need to add—here’s an example:

LinkedIn Insight Tag example code you need to add to your website.

This should be added to the footer of your website.

Your site likely has a common file that’s used as the footer across most of your pages. Open this in your usual code editor, and add the LinkedIn Insight Tag code just above the closing body tag.

Add the LinkedIn Insight Tag code just before your closing body tag

Deploy to your live website in the usual way. Set up conversion tracking on LinkedIn by adding their Insight Tag, and then creating a new conversion via LinkedIn's Campaign Manager.

Set up conversion tracking on LinkedIn by adding their Insight Tag, and then creating a new conversion via LinkedIn's Campaign Manager. #linkedinmarketingClick To Tweet

Skip to the Verification section below.

Install via Google Tag Manager

To install the LinkedIn Insight Tag via Google Tag Manager, click the last option, ‘I will use a tag manager’.

Get your partner ID to install the LinkedIn pixel in Google Tag Manager

This will give you the LinkedIn tag ID needed in the next step.

Log into GTM, and click through to your container.

To install LinkedIn’s pixel, click through to your container in GTM

From the Tags page, click to add a new tag.

Add a new tag from within GTM

Name the tag LinkedIn Insight Tag or similar for your future reference.

Rename the tag in GTM

Click to choose the LinkedIn Insight tag type. Then click to copy your LinkedIn partner ID (or tag ID) and paste into the Insight Tag ID box in GTM.

Install the Linkedin Insight Tag into Google Tag Manager by copying and pasting your Insight Tag ID

Under Triggering, choose the All Pages trigger.

Save your tag, and you’ll see it appear in the list of tags.

Save your LinkedIn Insight Tag in the list of tags

Finally, don’t forget to publish your changes in GTM.

Remember to publish your changes in GTM so that your pixel is installed on your website

Continue to the Verification section below.

One of the easiest ways to install the #LinkedIn Insight Tag is via Google Tag Manager. Once in GTM, use the tag type 'LinkedIn Insight'.Click To Tweet

Install in WordPress

Adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to WordPress is really straightforward.

First, grab the partner ID in the same way as above for GTM.

Get your partner ID to add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to WordPress

Then from within your WordPress dashboard, click to add a new plugin, and search for linkedin insight tag.

Click to install the top one (from Pagup) as shown:

Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on Wordpress via the plugin from Pagup

Click to activate the plugin, then click the switch provided to enable the LinkedIn Insight Tag, and paste in your partner ID.

Paste in your partner ID to install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on Wordpress

Click to save the changes, and that’s it. Now all that’s left is to verify that it’s working as follows…

Verification: How to Check Your LinkedIn Insight Tag is Working

How can you check if the tag is working okay and able to collect data?

Check back on the Website Demographics page (see above) within LinkedIn after 24 hours or so, and you should see something like the following to confirm the tag has been verified.

This means it’s working okay.

Check the Linkedin Insight Tag via the Website Demographics page in LinkedIn

However, before it starts to collect demographic information, you need to create your first website audience—see the section below for info on how to do this.

What If the LinkedIn Insight Tag Is Not Working?

If, after 24 hours, your LinkedIn Insight Tag is not showing as verified, do the following:

  • Double check you have selected the right account in LinkedIn, matching the pixel you’ve installed.
  • Run through the relevant steps above again to install the tag, ensuring the code matches what LinkedIn has supplied or that you’re otherwise using the correct information.
  • If you have installed the tag via Google Tag Manager, ensure that you have submitted and published the changes, otherwise the pixel won’t show on your site.
  • Once you’ve corrected any issue that might have stopped it working, leave another 24 hours or so before checking again.

Create a Website Audience to Start Collecting Demographic Data

Before the LinkedIn Insight Tag starts collecting any data, you first need to create an audience.

Click the button provided from the Website Demographics page in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager.

Collect data through the Insight Tag by creating an audience

For example, to create an audience of all visitors to your website:

  • Name the audience All pages
  • Under the URL targeting, change it to match a URL that contains, and then enter your domain name.

Create a website audience on LinkedIn of all your visitors by selecting ‘contains’ and then entering your domain

Click the Create button—your new audience will then be listed.

The new audience created from the LinkedIn pixel

Check back after 24 hours or so, and you should start to see data coming through.

However, in terms of advertising, while useful for the overall demographic insights it will give you, this audience is a little broad.

Consider creating additional audiences you can target based on actions on your website, such as:

  • Purchasing something—use a thank you page or post-checkout URL. You’ll then be able to both target your customers to sell them additional products and services, as well as create a lookalike of this audience to target people with similar interests and characteristics.
  • Opting in—similarly, use the thank you page someone sees after opting in.
  • Viewing content—for example, you may have specific pages on your website or blog that indicate someone’s interest in a particular topic.

Before starting to advertise however, it’s essential to to first set up conversion tracking using the LinkedIn Insight Tag.

Here’s how

How to Use Your LinkedIn Insight Tag for Conversion Tracking

Of course, you need to be able to track the effectiveness of your LinkedIn advertising to help determine whether it’s working, and to be able to optimize it.

To do so, navigate to the Conversion Tracking page in LinkedIn.

LinkedIn pixel conversion tracking

Click to create a new conversion.

Create a new conversion in LinkedIn

Start filling in the details requested, including:

  • The name of the conversion for your reference
  • The type of behavior you want to track—for example, to track a customer, you would select Sales > Purchase from the list. Note you can also track things like when someone starts to checkout, when they add their billing information, and so on.

Define key conversion behavior from the LinkedIn pixel

  • The value of that conversion for your business.
  • The timeframe for when the conversion can be counted (after clicking through on or seeing your ad).
  • The attribution model.

Fill in all the details to track conversions from your LinkedIn Insight Tag

Click to move to the next step.

If you’ve yet to add a relevant advertising campaign, ignore the Campaigns page, and click the Next step button again for the final Sources page.

This is where you tell LinkedIn how to recognize a conversion, and is where your Insight Tag comes in—essentially, it can track when a visitor reaches a particular page on your website.

Provide the details of the page in question, and click Create.

Track conversions using your LinkedIn Insight Tag by providing details of the relevant URL

You may have noticed that the Sources page also has an Event-specific pixel tab.

Sometimes you want to track specific events on your website that may not correlate with someone visiting a particular page.

For example, you may have a dynamic opt-in form where someone can opt in but the page’s URL never changes.

How do you track this kind of event-specific conversion?

Track Event Conversions with the LinkedIn Insight Tag

Using the event-specific pixel is no longer recommended, instead you can track events too via the LinkedIn Insight Tag.

First, check that enhanced conversion tracking is enabled for the tag. For new tags, this should be turned on automatically.

To check:

  • After ensuring you have the right account selected, click Account Assets > Conversion Tracking from the Campaign Manager menu

Click Account Assets > Conversion Tracking

  • Click the Manage Insight Tag button top right, and then Settings.

Click settings for your Insight Tag to check you have enhanced conversion tracking turned on

  • If the Enable enhanced conversion tracking checkbox isn’t on, turn it on and click Save

Enable enhanced conversion tracking on your Insight Tag

Then, when creating a conversion, select the Event option instead of the default Page load option in the ‘Track conversions by’ dropdown.

Track event conversions using the LinkedIn Insight Tag

This provides you with a Javascript snippet to add to your page. Ask your developer to make sure it fires only when the required action that you want to track actually occurs.

This can be achieved via Google Tag Manager, or via bespoke Javascript code on your website.

Track event conversions via the LinkedIn Insight Tag by adding the Javascript snippet they give you to your page, firing it when the event happens. #onlinemarketingClick To Tweet

Finally, let’s ensure we cover all bases—here’s a common question that comes up in relation to the LinkedIn Insight Tag

Can You Install Multiple LinkedIn Insight Tags?

There’s the odd comment online that suggests this might be supported by LinkedIn, but in practice it doesn’t appear to be.

This was tested by installing two different Insight Tags, for two different LinkedIn accounts, in the same way via Google Tag Manager.

On checking back in LinkedIn after a couple of days, only one of them was receiving data. The other showed it had yet to received a signal.

Conclusion

With this ultimate guide to the LinkedIn Insight Tag to hand, you can now create, install and use such a tag in your own advertising with confidence.

Even if you’re not ready to advertise just yet, install the tag anyway to learn useful insights about the demographics of who’s visiting your website.

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@bySteveShaw

Steve Shaw is the founder of EverywhereMarketer, and has ran online businesses for over 20 years, serving over 13,000 customers in 137 countries. EverywhereMarketer helps you grow online visibility, attract more customers and grow your business across multiple channels.

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