LinkedIn ads allow businesses to reach their target audience and drive actions like website visits. When someone clicks your LinkedIn ad, they will be directed to the landing page you specified. If that landing page is your website, this click counts as a website visit from your LinkedIn ad.
What qualifies as a website visit on LinkedIn ads?
For LinkedIn ads, a website visit is counted when someone clicks your ad and lands on your website. This is true whether they land directly on your homepage or another page on your site.
Specifically, for a click to count as a website visit:
- The click must lead the user directly from the LinkedIn ad to your website URL.
- The user must reach and load the landing page on your website.
Just clicking the ad itself does not count as a website visit—the user has to click through and reach your actual website. Some things to note:
- If the user clicks your ad but bounces immediately, it does not count as a website visit.
- If they click but are redirected somewhere else before reaching your site, it does not count.
- If they click and land on your website but immediately hit the back browser button, it still counts as a visit.
How are website visits calculated?
LinkedIn uses browser cookies to track and attribute website visits from their ads platform. When someone clicks your ad, a cookie is dropped on their browser. If that browser lands on your website within a certain window of time, LinkedIn counts it as a visit.
Specifically, the window is 30 days.
So if a user clicks your LinkedIn ad on May 1st but does not actually visit your website until May 15th, it still counts as a website visit from the original ad click. This 30-day attribution window allows for more accurate visit counting.
Why measure website visits?
Tracking website visits is important for understanding your LinkedIn ad results and return on investment (ROI). There are a few key reasons to measure visits:
- Understand traffic sources. Monitoring visits lets you see how much of your website traffic is coming directly from LinkedIn ads.
- Optimize ads. You can experiment with different ad copy, audiences, and landing pages to increase visits.
- Gauge engagement. More visits signal that your ads and landing pages are resonating with prospects.
- Calculate conversions. Visits are often a step in conversions like sign-ups. Tracking visits helps measure this path.
Essentially, website visits let you assess how well your LinkedIn ads are capturing user interest and driving them to engage further on your own platforms.
How to check website visits for LinkedIn ads
You can check website visit metrics in the LinkedIn Ads Manager under the “Results” section. There are a few key stats to analyze:
- Website visits: The total number of visits driven from your LinkedIn ads to your website.
- Unique website visitors: The number of individual people (cookies) who visited your site from the ads, eliminating repeats.
- Website visit CTR: The percentage of total ad clicks that resulted in a website visit.
You can also view website visit trends over time, segment visits by campaign or ad, and compare performance across ads.
For more detailed analysis, consider linking your LinkedIn ads to Google Analytics or other tracking systems. This provides additional metrics on pages visited, engagement, conversions, and more.
Best practices for increasing website visits
Here are some top tips for boosting website visits from LinkedIn ads:
- Target your ideal buyer personas in ads using demographics, interests, company attributes, and more.
- Write compelling ad copy with a strong call-to-action driving to your site.
- Design ads that stand out in the feed with eye-catching visuals.
- Send traffic to targeted landing pages that align to each ad and audience.
- Continuously A/B test your ads, landing pages, audiences, bids, and placements.
- Set up conversion tracking and remarketing to capture more high-intent visitors.
Metrics to track beyond website visits
While website visits are important, they only tell part of the story. To fully understand LinkedIn ad results, also track engagement, conversions, costs, and ROI metrics including:
- Clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR): Total ad clicks and the click-through rate.
- Engagement rate: Likes, shares, comments generated from the ads.
- Conversions: On-site actions like sign-ups or purchases from ad traffic.
- Bounce rate: Single-page sessions indicate poor landing page experience.
- Cost per visit (CPV): The average ad cost to drive each website visit.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of ad visitors completing a conversion.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): The revenue generated per dollar of ad spend.
Analyzing this fuller picture helps determine an ad strategy’s true effectiveness.
Tools for tracking website visits
In addition to the LinkedIn Ads Manager, useful tools for tracking website visits and other conversion metrics include:
Tool | Details |
---|---|
Google Analytics | Connects with LinkedIn ads to provide full website visit and conversion analytics. |
Google Tag Manager | Makes it easy to add analytics, conversion tracking, and other tags to your website. |
Optimizely | A/B tests landing pages to increase website visits and conversions. |
Hotjar | Records visitor sessions to see user behavior. |
Mixpanel | Advanced analysis of user retention and on-site conversion funnels. |
Website visits as a vanity metric
One note of caution around website visits—they are considered a “vanity metric” that does not directly measure business results.
In other words, high website visits alone don’t automatically translate to success. You need to analyze further metrics like engagement, conversions, and ROI to determine if the visits are truly quality.
Many low-quality visits from irrelevant audiences can end up skewing website visit numbers without actually impacting your business goals. So while website visits are important to track, the key is tying them to concrete conversion and revenue metrics.
Conclusion
Website visits provide an initial indicator of how well your LinkedIn ads are capturing interest and driving targeted prospects into your sales funnel. By monitoring website visits and related metrics, you can continuously optimize your ads and landing pages to boost results.
But remember—focus on not just driving more website traffic, but driving high-quality, relevant traffic primed for engagement and conversion. This way, you ensure every website visit counts towards meeting your marketing objectives with LinkedIn ads.