LinkedIn Ads
Send LeadJourney offline conversions back to LinkedIn so its bidding optimises toward real outcomes – qualified leads, booked calls and won deals – instead of raw form fills, by training your LinkedIn Insight Tag with the conversions that actually matter.
LinkedIn's bidding only optimises toward the conversions it can see. The LinkedIn Insight Tag captures clicks and on-site actions, but on its own it usually sees a form submit – so LinkedIn finds you more people who fill in forms, even if those leads never qualify or buy. Training LinkedIn means feeding the real outcomes from your CRM back as offline conversions, so its algorithm learns who your good leads actually are and goes looking for more of them.
LeadJourney handles the whole offline-conversion part for you: it matches each CRM event back to the original ad click and sends it to LinkedIn through the Conversions API, enriching what your Insight Tag already knows – no manual uploads, no spreadsheets.
Before you start
Two things need to be in place first:
- LinkedIn Ads is connected and the ad accounts that run your campaigns are linked – see Connect LinkedIn Ads.
- Your events exist in LeadJourney and are receiving data from your CRM – see Events & the Events Manager.
How it works
- You decide which events should be sent back to LinkedIn.
- As soon as the first matching conversion comes in, LeadJourney sends it to LinkedIn via the Conversions API and creates a matching conversion for you.
- You associate that conversion with the campaigns that should use it – a conversion only counts and optimises once it's attached to a campaign.
- You point your campaigns at it by choosing it as the optimisation goal.
Step by step
Choose which events to send back to LinkedIn
Open the Events Manager in LeadJourney (Settings → Events). For every event you want LinkedIn to optimise toward, turn on Send back to Ads?.
Pick the events that represent real value – e.g. QualifiedLead, BookedCall or
WonClient – rather than every event you track. The whole point is to teach LinkedIn to find
quality, so send the milestone that best reflects a good outcome for your business.
Let the first conversion flow through
You don't need to do anything else here – once an event has Send back to Ads? enabled, LeadJourney sends each matching conversion to LinkedIn automatically through the Conversions API and registers the conversion behind the scenes.
In LinkedIn Campaign Manager, open Analyze → Conversion tracking. The conversion LeadJourney created shows up there, with its source marked as an API / offline conversion – that's how you know the connection is live and data is arriving.
Nothing in LinkedIn until you've actually had a conversion? That's expected. LeadJourney only sends an event once a real, matched conversion comes in from your CRM. Send a test conversion if you want to confirm the pipe end to end.
Associate the conversion with your campaigns
This step is important and easy to miss. In LinkedIn, a conversion is only counted and used for optimisation once it's associated with a campaign.
In LinkedIn Campaign Manager, open the LeadJourney conversion under Conversion tracking and make sure it's associated with the campaigns that should optimise toward it. Until you do, LinkedIn may receive the data but won't act on it.
Associate every conversion
Repeat this for each event you enabled in Step 1, and attach it to any new campaigns you launch – a conversion that isn't associated with a campaign stays invisible to that campaign.
Optimise toward the conversion
Now tell LinkedIn to actually use it. In Campaign Manager, open the campaign and set its optimisation goal to maximise conversions, choosing your LeadJourney conversion as the goal. From then on, LinkedIn optimises delivery toward people likely to trigger that outcome.
Roll it out gradually – don't flip everything on day 1
It's tempting to switch your whole account over to LeadJourney conversions immediately. Don't. Changing a campaign's optimisation goal restarts its learning, and you want proof it works before you bet the whole account on it.
Recommended: A/B test first
- Duplicate one campaign and set the copy to optimise toward your LeadJourney conversion, while the original keeps its current setup.
- Let both run as a clean A/B test until you have enough data to compare.
- Only if the results are positive, gradually roll the LeadJourney conversion out to the rest of your campaigns.
This way you validate the change with real numbers instead of switching blind.
Troubleshooting
Conversions not optimising in LinkedIn?
Work through the chain:
- Is Send back to Ads? enabled on the event in LeadJourney?
- Has at least one real conversion been received and matched in LeadJourney?
- Do you see the conversion under Analyze → Conversion tracking in Campaign Manager?
- Is that conversion associated with the campaign you expect to optimise?
- Is the campaign's optimisation goal set to maximise that conversion?
- Are your campaigns tagged so the ad click is captured? See Connect LinkedIn Ads.
Related articles
Google Ads
Send LeadJourney offline conversions back to Google Ads as your own conversion actions, so Smart Bidding optimises toward real outcomes – qualified leads, booked calls and won deals – instead of raw form fills.
Event Match Quality (Matching Score)
Understand Meta's Event Match Quality score, what a good score looks like and how LeadJourney automatically raises it by sending rich, hashed customer data back through the Conversions API.