Question from Reddit user:
Hey guys, i recently started at a new company and everyone seems to believe that LinkedIn conversion tracking attribution is terrible. As such everyone just ignores conversion metrics and looks looks at the consumable metrics such as view rate, dwell time etc.
I was wondering why they think the attribution and conversion tracking is so bad?? I did a bunch of research and couldn’t really find anything that proved their point?? Idk, what are your thoughts?
I have set up my conversions through GTM and some of the ads are doing really well at bringing in these conversions but I have been told to ignore this? And I need to determine which ads are doing well based on CTR instead of looking at which ads are brining in form submissions which makes no sense to me?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Your company’s belief that LinkedIn’s conversion tracking is terrible stems from the common limitations of browser-side tracking (like GTM and the LinkedIn Insight Tag) which is highly susceptible to data loss from ad blockers, third-party cookie restrictions, and browser privacy features like Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).
This data loss leads to severe underreporting of conversions, making the reported metrics unreliable.
They are incorrectly favoring consumable metrics because they trust them more, but this ignores actual business outcomes.
The best solution to fix this is to implement server-side tracking using the LinkedIn Conversions API and a server-side container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, which ensures near-perfect data capture for accurate conversion reporting.
The long answer is:
The skepticism you’re encountering about LinkedIn conversion attribution is unfortunately well-founded, but it’s not entirely LinkedIn’s fault; it’s a systemic issue with how client-side tracking works across all platforms today.
When you set up conversions via the LinkedIn Insight Tag through GTM, the tracking relies on a small snippet of JavaScript code to fire from the user’s browser.
Modern browsers, especially Safari and Firefox, along with ad-blocking software used by many professionals, are specifically designed to block or severely limit these third-party tracking cookies and scripts.
When a conversion occurs, if the Insight Tag’s request to LinkedIn’s server is blocked or the session cookies are immediately deleted, the conversion is simply never recorded by LinkedIn, even though it successfully happened on your website.
This results in significant conversion underreporting in the LinkedIn Ads platform, leading to the impression that the attribution is “terrible.” Your team, seeing these low and inaccurate conversion numbers, defaults to metrics like view rate and CTR because those metrics are recorded closer to the ad impression and are less prone to browser-side interference.
However, these are vanity metrics and are a poor substitute for actual business impact like form submissions.
The solution is to switch from a reactive client-side approach to a proactive server-side tracking strategy using the LinkedIn Conversions API.
You would use Google Tag Manager on your website to capture the initial LinkedIn Click ID (li_fat_id) and the conversion event, but instead of sending this data directly to LinkedIn, you send it to your server-side container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
The server container then acts as a reliable middleman, taking the first-party data it received from your website and sending it directly to the LinkedIn Conversions API.
Because this data transfer happens server-to-server, it completely bypasses ad blockers and browser restrictions, ensuring that virtually every conversion that occurs on your website is accurately sent to and recorded by the LinkedIn Ads platform.
This will immediately resolve the underreporting issue, giving you the high-confidence conversion data you need to correctly determine which ads are truly performing well.
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