Intimacy: The key to improving your relationship with LinkedIn Ads

About intimacy and relationships

Many times I have written about how trust is the basis of any relationship.

Today - I want to take this concept one step further - and talk about intimacy.

According to Wikipedia: Intimacy (from the Latin word intimus which means innermost) is a deep closeness between people, and it involves trust and willingness to reveal myself to another person.

When we are ready for intimacy, we are ready to reveal our innermost parts to the other, in exchange for a closer and more rewarding relationship for both parties.

Although it is acceptable to talk about intimacy in the context of interpersonal relationships, I think this matter is true for any relationship, including the one between supplier and customer, and between an advertiser (or the advertiser's CRM) and an advertising platform.

And it works both ways.

The more a supplier is willing to reveal to the customer, the more he agrees to talk about both successes and failures, and the more the customer does the same with the supplier, the more intimacy between the parties will increase and with it their chances of succeeding together.

The best product is the one whose inventors did not imagine what uses people would make of it

You know the saying that the most successful product is the one whose actual uses are such that even its inventor did not imagine?

So the story begins in the way I used the new conversion import feature of LinkedIn Ads - CAPI: not as planned.

Not long ago I wrote about the CAPI, in a post in which I described the power of importing offline conversions from Hubspot into LinkedIn, and to quote the post:

"This (FREE) Zapier connector acts like a conversion superhero. It ensures every HubSpot form completion made by a LinkedIn user gets sent back to LinkedIn.

What does that mean for you?

?? More accurate attribution, finally! ?? "

After I finished implementing CAPI conversion import for all my clients - I saw an increase of about 30% in conversions attributed to LinkedIn campaigns, either directly (after a click) or indirectly (after viewing an ad).

With this success, my appetite grew larger, and I started thinking..

"What else can be done with CAPI import?"

And I continued thinking:

"If I could find a way to import progress in life cycle stage back into LinkedInand mark it as a conversion - I could see in my advertising account information about SQL conversions, MQL and even sales!"

I do this thing in Google Ads, and even more so: I assign a higher value to more advanced stages (conversions), so that eventually my bidding relies on the quality of the conversions and the actual optimization takes place for conversions that have become sales calls or actual customers.

And if I do it on Google Ads - then why not on LinkedIn?

I set out to investigate the matter myself, and found the way.

And the result? They say a picture is worth a thousand words - so I'll start with a screenshot of the Looker Studio report that I share with a client of mine:

As you see - at the end of the process there is a count of all stages of the customer’s life cycle as Linkedin conversions, and for each stage there is also a division between post-click (direct) conversions and view-through (indirect) conversions.

And all of this is done through the following steps:

• Identify the life cycle stages that we want to import as conversions
• Define a new CAPI conversion for each relevant life cycle stage
• Setting up a dynamic Hubspot list with all the customers who are in or have entered the life cycle stage that we want to import to LinkedIn.
• Create a ZAP in Zapier that uses LinkedIn's offline conversion import connector (its use is free), and which imports the details of the new customers in the list we created to LinkedIn every time a new customer is added (ie passed a life cycle stage)

If you want to prepare for the next evolution of LinkedIn's advertising system, I suggest you also assign a value to each life cycle stage, a value that reflects the importance of the stage to the advertiser.

Please note that if you want each conversion to be measured only once as is done in Google Ads - you must set a conversion attribution model of ‘last touch - last campaign’ in the conversion setting in LinkedIn Ads.

And for those in the know - who also have a marketing representative on behalf of LinkedIn for the account - know that there is now a beta that you can request to join which is called “LinkedIn Qualified Leads beta” and if you are accepted, it will allow you to carry out a lead-gen campaign whose actual optimization is for Qualified conversions.

Thus - if you mark the CAPI conversions you created for life cycle stages as Qualified conversions, and if you manage to enter the beta in question - you can publish a lead-gen campaign optimized for MQL or SQL or any other stage you determine as qualified.

See the following screenshot where I have marked:

• A Qualified lead conversion - green square
• Conversion value of $1000 which expresses its quality for the customer - red square
• And an attribution model of ‘last touch - last campaign’ - which prevents double measurement - yellow square.

And one final note - an addition to this post:

After publishing this post, I received an email from my LinkedIn rep. who notified me about a new feature available to those who implemented CAPI conversion - the ability to build predictive audiences based on your CAPI leads import.

Combining this new ability with the CAPI lifecycle stage I wrote about here - allows the advertiser to optimize for audiences based on those who converted to higher lifecycle stages, SQLs for example. This is a powerful combination I intend to use as soon as my audiences reach the minimum limit of 300 profiles.

Any questions? Feel free to ask!

Good luck!