LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms have been available to advertisers for just over a year now. Over the last year, we have tested Lead Gen Forms and offered several tips for making the most of this campaign type.

One very important detail about Lead Gen Forms is how you go about tracking these leads. It came to my attention recently when setting up several campaigns, that the tracking can be a bit muddled.

After talking to LinkedIn Support and doing some trial and error of my own, I wanted to share my findings with other B2B advertisers. Here are my tips for tracking these leads efficiently and properly.

Why Lead Gen Forms?

This campaign type allows advertisers to set up Sponsored Content and pair it with a Lead Gen Form. When someone clicks on your ad, their profile information automatically populates into the fields you have selected.

There are a few reasons Lead Gen Forms are worth testing:

• They eliminate the need for the user to enter any data manually, making the process nearly seamless.
• This feature also allows advertisers to potentially receive higher quality information on their users than with traditional landing pages.
• Lead Gen Forms are now available to add at the end of video Sponsored Content and in Sponsored InMail promotions.
• Advertisers tend to see higher conversion rates (“completion rate” is the language in the LinkedIn interface) and lower CPAs than with traditional Sponsored Content. Some of my clients have seen completion rates in the 18% range!

For the sake of ease, we’re going to assume that you know how to set up Lead Gen Forms. If you don’t know how to do this, check out this tutorial.

Lead Data

Lead data is stored in LinkedIn once users fill out the forms. You can find this data in the Account Assets drop-down > Lead Generation Forms.

In order to download this information, you need a “Lead Gen Manager” access level granted by the Company Page Admin.  As long as you have this access level, you’ll be able to download the leads associated with each form.

Currently, advertisers either have to manually download this data and add to their CRMs themselves or they can use an integration.

Remember that right now, LinkedIn does not deliver content on behalf of the advertiser, so an integration is the only way to have followup emails or content auto-delivered to members after they fill out the form.

There are limited integrations available, but my favorites are Zapier (especially when using Hubspot) and Marketo. Zapier offers plans that start at $20 per month and has great customer support if you have any problems.

In the event that you need to manually download the data, make sure you do this at least once every 90 days, as the lead data is only stored that long, due to privacy policy conditions. (Analytics data on leads will remain past the 90-day mark.)

Sponsored Content Tracking

My biggest tip for success with LinkedIn Lead Gen? Name your sponsored content and forms appropriately!

After setting up and selecting sponsored content, you’ll need to find the sponsored content by name and add the correct form and call-to-action. This can be confusing if you’re setting up several ads with similar names so be careful.

Below is an example of what it looks like with the image you selected for the sponsored content plus the ad name beside it. The form will be selected in the drop-down. Using accurate names for these items is very important and will save you a lot of time later.

Add ALL the UTM Parameters

When setting up your sponsored content, you can add a URL to scrape the image and then add the text & headline. I suggest adding the UTM parameters that you need to accurately track traffic to this URL. You can then either leave the URL there so that LinkedIn will shorten the link down or you can remove the link so that users are forced to utilize the lead gen form.

One thing to consider about the URL + UTM parameters is that if someone shares a lead gen form but falls outside of your targeted audience, it will appear as normal sponsored content and point to your initial landing page. That is when the UTM parameters on that could really come in handy.

Another place to make sure you have solid tracking is on the thank you page URL. I like to at least add UTM Medium and UTM Source if nothing else. If folks visit your site after submitting the lead form, you definitely want to be able to correctly bucket that traffic and be able to analyze trends later down the road.

Conclusion

LinkedIn continues to become more and more useful and valuable for today’s B2B advertisers. I hope these tips are useful for tracking your next lead gen campaign!

What tips do you have for LinkedIn lead gen campaigns? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments!