• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, September 8, 2016

LinkedIn on Thursday announced it will offer conversion tracking, a new feature that aims to make it easier for advertisers to track the results of their campaigns on the professional network and improve the ROI on their ad spends.

The conversion tracking feature exists within LinkedIn’s “Campaign Manager” tool, which launched a year ago. That tool was designed to help customers better understand the business impact of their sponsored content and text ads. Based on what they learn, advertisers can adjust features like audience targeting, campaign design, budget spend, and more.

Among the benefits of conversion tracking as described by LinkedIn:

• Advertisers will have visibility into the number of of leads, sign-ups, content downloads, and purchases that they’re receiving from their sponsored content and text ads campaigns.

• Advertisers will be able to to track conversions from desktop and mobile, including whether a member has clicked on, or just viewed an ad before converting.

In a blog post accompanying the news, Divye Khilnani, a company product manager, noted that “Conversion tracking has been a top-requested feature from customers looking for more insight into how their LinkedIn ads are helping them generate  leads..."

Russell Glass, LinkedIn’s head of product, also weighed in. “Our goal is to help advertisers easily understand the ROI of their LinkedIn campaigns without ever having to leave Campaign Manager to do so. At a glance, advertisers can now understand their conversion count, cost-per-conversion, and conversion rate,” Glass told Real-Time Daily via email.

Conversion tracking also provides more comprehensive data on conversions, according to Glass. One differentiator “is the ability for advertisers to see how many prospects are converting based on specific and relevant professional profile characteristics, such as industry, seniority, job function, company size. Advertisers can use this information to improve their campaign targeting and creative,” Glass said.

In the past, advertisers only had a partial view of their conversion volume. “Now, they can see a more complete picture of how their ads are driving leads for their business since they can track conversions from members who converted after clicking on one of their ads, or from members who just saw an ad but converted later on,” Glass said.