You’ve just added your LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website, and you want to see if it’s working. If you read Linkedin’s documentation, they will offer up this advice:
“You can check the status in Campaign Manager by navigating to Account Assets → Insight Tag. Once the Insight Tag is installed on your website and a LinkedIn member visits, your domain will appear “active.” Tag activation may take up to 24 hours, depending on your website traffic.”
What if you’re impatient like me, and you want to know if it’s working right now!?
There are two easy steps to see if your tracking code is functioning properly.
Step 1: Check the _linkedin_data_partner_id Javascript value on your site
If you’re unfamiliar with Javascript, this might sound intimidating but don’t worry. It’s not difficult at all.
First, go to your Campaign Manager Account and look at your Insight Tag code. You’ll notice at the top of the code snippet a line that looks like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
_linkedin_partner_id = "1234567";
… the rest of the code goes here …Take note of that numeric value corresponding to the _linkedin_partner_id value. That is the ID that LinkedIn uses to associate web traffic with your ads account.
Every time your LinkedIn Insight Tag fires, the user’s browser sends that value to LinkedIn with a cookie that associates a user with that website interaction.
It’s crucial that the value your website is sending matches the one in your LinkedIn Ads account!
Second, go into your Javascript console. In Chrome, you can type in cmd + option + j to open it up. Then paste in _linkedin_partner_id and press enter.
If everything is functioning as expected, the console should reply with the value that matches your tracking code. See below.
If you get an error, your tracking code wasn’t installed correctly, and the Javascript variable is not being set.
You’re all done worrying about Javascript for now!
Step 2: Check that your browser is sending hits to LinkedIn
Not to ensure that the browser is actually getting the hits to LinkedIn, you can check what your browser is sending from the Network tab in the Chrome developer console.
Since you should already be in the developer console, you can click on the Network tab at the top of the console.
Type in linkedin into the filter box (see below) and refresh your browser.
If your browser is sending the hits to Linkedin, you’ll notice one or probably two requests to Linkedin. With a query string that starts with collect?...
If the pid parameter (the value after pid=) matches the _linkedin_data_partner_id from your Campaign Manager account; everything is working just about as well as it can. You can rest assured that hits will appear in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account shortly.
Need help?
If they aren’t, or you are a B2B business having any other trouble with web analytics or B2B growth, contact me, and I can help you get up and running.