Set up LinkedIn Ads

Introduction

Marketing organizations require insights into the performance of their campaigns, which can be measured in terms of cost-per-outcome (CPO) or ideally return on investment (ROI). Planful for Marketing's integration with LinkedIn Ads automates this tracking, providing visibility in Planful for Marketing.

To establish this integration, Planful for Marketing connects to LinkedIn Ads via a read-only integration with the LinkedIn Ads API, which pulls summary data. This integration automatically creates campaigns based on the campaign groups you have configured in your LinkedIn Ads account. Additionally, LinkedIn metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and leads are automatically mapped to Planful for Marketing metrics and associated with each newly created campaign.

Once the connection is established, Planful for Marketing automatically updates the current metrics and cost data for the LinkedIn Ads on a daily basis, directly from the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

Integration Process 

Integrating your LinkedIn ads with Planful for Marketing requires two steps (and an optional third step), assuming you have the role of Planful for Marketing Admin for your account and access to a LinkedIn Ads account:

• Connect Planful for Marketing to LinkedIn Ads.
• Assign Planful for Marketing segments for synchronized campaigns.
• Organize campaigns in a hierarchy (optional).

Once these steps are complete, your LinkedIn Ads from the Campaign Manager will automatically sync metric and cost data into Planful for Marketing, providing valuable insight into how your campaigns are tracking against your targets, as well as projected ROI!

Step 1 - Connect Planful for Marketing to LinkedIn 

To add LinkedIn Ads integration to Planful for Marketing, follow these steps (assuming you are a Planful for Marketing admin):

1. Log in to Planful for Marketing and navigate to the admin menu. Select Integrations > Enable LinkedIn Ads.
   
2. Select the Planful for Marketing budget you want to integrate with and the time of day for automatic updates of cost and metric data from LinkedIn.
   
   Note:

   The default timezone will be your local timezone.
3. If you need to update your LinkedIn Ads integration at any point, you can return to the admin menu and select Integrations > LinkedIn Ads Settings.
4. Click Save to proceed to LinkedIn.com for authentication. If you're not already logged in to LinkedIn, you'll be prompted to do so, and LinkedIn will authenticate you using the standard process.
5. Once authenticated, Planful for Marketing will create synchronized campaigns in the Campaign Manager that are connected to your Planful for Marketing campaigns (this may take a few moments to complete). Please wait for the process to finish and for the success message to appear before closing or refreshing your browser.

Map LinkedIn metrics to Planful for Marketing Metrics (Optional) 

Once the integration is successful, you will be taken to a screen where you can select which metrics from LinkedIn Ads you would like to make available in Planful for Marketing, and what they should be called. On the left side, you will see the LinkedIn Ads metrics that are available (impressions, clicks, conversions, and leads). On the right side you define whether or not to map each LinkedIn metric to Planful for Marketing and, if you choose to do so, which Planful for Marketing metric you would like to map it to. 

By default, these metrics map to metrics in Planful for Marketing called impressions, clicks, conversions, and leads but you do have the ability to change this mapping on this screen. For example, if you would like the conversions metric from LinkedIn to show up as Opportunities in Planful for Marketing, and you would not like impressions or clicks to be populated, then you would update the settings such as this in the example below:

You can return to this screen later to change your LinkedIn to Planful for Marketing metrics mapping by going to the admin menu, and selecting Integrations > LinkedIn Ads Mapping. 

Step 2 - Assigning a Segment 

Once your LinkedIn Ads campaigns are synced over to Planful for Marketing, they will be automatically assigned to a default segment. We recommend that you reassign these new campaigns to the proper segment within your budget. 

You can navigate to the homepage and find the Assign Segments to Imported Campaigns widget and easily make this update.

From the dropdowns in this widget, you can choose a segment for each campaign individually, or select multiple campaigns at once and assign them all to the same segment. Once all your LinkedIn Ads campaigns are assigned to a segment, this widget will disappear from the home screen. 

LinkedIn Campaigns in Planful for Marketing 

Once a campaign from LinkedIn has been created in Planful for Marketing, it behaves differently from other Planful for Marketing campaigns in two ways: 

1. The campaign name, type, and source can not be changed. If you need to change the name of a campaign, you can do so on LinkedIn, and it will reflect in Planful for Marketing when your data is received and updated from the LinkedIn integration. 
2. Expenses are automatically created every month within the campaign. When an expense is created, it will have a “planned” amount equal to your daily spending limit (as set in LinkedIn) multiplied by the number of days in the month. That expense will update daily with your actual spending, which manifests as your “committed” amount. At the end of the month, the expense closes with the total spend for that campaign (from LinkedIn) as the “closed” amount for that expense. A new expense will be created for the next month. 

Step 3 (Optional) - Assigning Campaigns to a Hierarchy 

In Planful for Marketing, you can define a hierarchy of goals and campaigns to track your team's progress. You can assign a campaign or goal to be the parent of another campaign, thereby creating what we call a parent/child relationship. When you do this, all the cost and metric data from children roll up to their parents, which then displays the aggregate cost and metric data.

This is especially useful for tracking LinkedIn campaigns in one place. For example, you might create a campaign called Demand Generation or simply LinkedIn Ads, and then make this campaign the parent of all the campaigns that came from your new integration. When you view the parent campaign, you can see the allocation, spending, and metrics of all your LinkedIn Ad campaigns combined.

If you see your LinkedIn Ads as more of a channel to your overarching campaigns that have a target audience with specific messaging, you can assign the integrated campaigns as a child campaign to the definitive parent campaign they are driving. This integration enables greater visibility in campaign management and better accuracy on effectiveness for ROI.

To achieve hierarchy and assign a campaign to a parent campaign (or goal), you can drag and drop a campaign in the budget hierarchy onto another campaign.

Or you can simply use the Parent field on the campaign detail page.