If you are in B2B marketing, you’ve probably tried running LinkedIn Ads campaigns (which are crazy expensive in my experience). Running the campaign is one thing, reporting on the results is another thing. You may want to present your campaign results in Google Data Studio.
In this article, I will show you how to get LinkedIn Ads data into Google Data Studio with Supermetrics for Google Data Studio, specifically with their “Ad Data and Google Analytics” add-on.
Note that Supermetrics for Google Data Studio is a paid product but you don’t have to pay upfront – there is a 14 day trial which is good enough to evaluate whether it’s worth paying for the product or not.
The Process
Okay, let’s start the setup process. Click the button below:
Then start the free trial:
You’ll be taken to a Google Data Studio page where you need to click this link to initiate the authentication process. Disregard the terrible design of the page – it’s quite limited what can be created there.
After you click the link, a new tab will open. Find LinkedIn Ads and click +Add new account. Then proceed with authentication with LinkedIn.
You will notice that this page allows you to authenticate with multiple services (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and so on). You can learn more about data blending options of the Supermetrics connector in this article.
If you authenticated correctly, you will see the below. Then click the Done button at the bottom of the page.
A confirmation message will be shown and you can close the current tab. Then go back to the original tab with the Google Data Studio page.
In Google Data Studio, scroll down a bit and configure the newly created LinkedIn Ads connection.
We should stop here for a while . First of all, you need to select the accounts from which you need to pull the data from. That’s easy.
Secondly, you need to decide whether you want to allow “select accounts” to be modified in the reports. This depends. You may want to, you may not. If you are an agency which shares the final dashboard with your clients who have edit rights for the report, you certainly want to keep this option disabled so your clients cannot see all the accounts you manage.
When you are done with LinkedIn Ads settings, scroll further down on the page. You can convert UTMs to something else (helpful if you are combining the data with Google Analytics). You can also choose to create a report from an existing template – I will go with this option because I need to show you something fancy at the end of the article. When you are done here, click the CONNECT button.
Since I’ve allowed parameter sharing, I’m prompted again and I need to confirm again:
Then another configuration page will load. I recommend to make no changes here unless you know what you are doing. I don’t think any changes are need here for average users. Click the CREATE REPORT button.
Confirm:
And your report will start loading. Be patient and wait a bit (a minute or two). You are data is being downloaded in the background.
The Result
After all the data is loaded, you’ll see something like this. Remember, I am using the preconfigured template so I get this fancy report right away:
If you need to add more visuals such as custom tables or charts, you can certainly do so. You are not limited by the template. You can simply create a new page within the report and start adding new visuals. I’ve created this ugly table containing a few basic stats about my LinkedIn Ads campaigns:
Conclusion
Did it hurt? I don’t think so. While the configuration process may not be the quickest (lots of clicking, lots of tabs), the end result is nice. The next time you’ll do it, you’ll be faster.
The “Ad Data and Google Analytics” connector currently sells for $199/month. It may sound like a lot but keep reading. With this connector, you are also getting access to:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Microsoft Advertising
- Twitter ads
- Pinterest Ads
- Google Analytics
What’s more the connector allows you to created blended reports across all these sources – basically you can fit all the data from all the networks into one nice table. I think that this connector can replace data analysts since it covers all the mainstream ad networks. So at the end, the $199/month price tag does not sound that expensive anymore.