How to Test LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

Before you launch a paid advertising campaign, most likely you want to make sure that conversion tracking is set up properly to really evaluate all the efforts you’re doing within that particular campaign. Website-based campaigns are a lot easier because you’re sending users to a website. Odds are that conversion action is a specific confirmation URL, and those are pretty easy to set up as custom conversions in many of the PPC channels. 

But lead forms are different, because odds are, that user is never even going to your website. All the conversions are happening within the channel itself, and LinkedIn is no exception. There is a way to test out your lead form conversions on LinkedIn to make sure that the signal goes through. And you can record those lead form actions within your CRM before launching your campaigns. The feature is buried a little bit, but I’m going to show you where that feature lives today and how you can make sure your lead forms are working properly before your campaigns go live. 

Before we get to testing the lead form, I want to talk about a specific use case where this could be helpful. So let me jump into one example of a lead form. If I click into this form example, I’m going to open up the hidden fields option, and we have set up these hidden fields. For a lot of clients’ lead gen forms, the easiest way to describe the purpose of these hidden fields is that the account or the client wants to track specific information either for this particular form field, that particular asset that we’re promoting, or just specific information related to the campaign. 

It says it in the name. It’s hidden. So users aren’t going to see this. This is purely for the advertiser to collect information about the campaign that will better help us assess the quality of leads we’re getting from LinkedIn. Again, since the conversions are staying on LinkedIn, the majority of users will not go to our website. The hidden fields that we see in front of us right now are allowing us to capture the source of the lead. In this case, we’re calling it paid social. 

And then we can also capture within our CRM, what type of content we’re promoting for this lead gen campaign. In this example, I’m pretending it’s a newsletter. These hidden fields are going to be completely different depending on what CRM you’re using, and what information you want to track to really assess the value of your lead gen campaigns. So once you have all your tracking information set up within the lead form, all your form details are set, your hidden fields are created. Now we can go and test the form. And to do this, we need to go into the actual ad creative that is using the form. You’re not going to send a test lead within the original form. So let’s hop back into the main section of campaign manager. 

To make things easy, I created a lead gen campaign and have it saved in draft. I only have one ad. Odds are you’re going to create multiple different ad variations before launching to test out different messages or different images depending on which ad format you’re using. Now I know I just said you have to test out the ad within this specific ad, not the form itself. 

Just choose one ad that has the form attached to it. Click on these three buttons right here and select “Manage.” We’ll need to go over to the three dots or the “more” icon. And now we want to select “Preview.” Now there are a few different ad preview options. And just to be clear, you can preview and test out your lead forms whether you’re using the desktop or mobile feeds. 

Now you just have to go through the steps like you’re a user who would see your ad and want to fill out your form. I’m going to switch back to desktop so the ad preview is a little bit bigger. Okay, so we see the ad. If I scroll down a little bit, a call to action for this particular lead form is to sign up. Click on it.

We didn’t go through the lead form setup earlier. If you want to know how to do that, Michelle created a video where you can go over the entire lead gen form setup. So go check out that video if you’re completely new to LinkedIn lead gen forms. 

But in this particular case, all I’m asking for is an email address which I have blurred out. And the only two fields I asked for in this particular form are first name and last name. Those are going to be populated automatically based on whatever the user has filled out within their LinkedIn profile. And then all I have to do is click the Submit call to action button to send the test lead.

I’m on the confirmation portion of the forum. That is another step that you can create within the lead gen form. You’ll find that in the other video as well. But now our test is done. So we can close out of this, and then you’re going to want to make sure that the lead test went through to your CRM or your marketing automation system. 

There are a variety of integrations for lead gen forms that LinkedIn offers. I’m not going to go through every single one, but here’s a link to the LinkedIn Help section that will have information on how you can integrate LinkedIn with potentially one of the third party platforms that you may be using. Assuming you already have your CRM or marketing automation system connected with LinkedIn, all you would have to do is just go in your platform and make sure that all the fields that you set up within the lead gen form, as well as the hidden fields that you may have chosen to use, are showing up within your platform. 

A second way that you can test it is to go back to the account. And under account assets, we’re going to go to lead gen forms, which is where we were to start the video. It’s easy in this example, because I only have the one form that we created in this account. But find the one form that you just sent the test lead. Click on the “More” option again, and then you can download your leads. 

This is the exact same location and same steps you’re going to have to do if you ever want to manually download your leads from LinkedIn. If we click on Download leads, we’re gonna see the CSV downloaded on the bottom of my screen. If you open it up, we have all the columns here. This is the first time I set up the form. The form has never been lived on any active ads. So all I see is my test submission. If we look in column I it says test lead true. If it says true, I know my test leads went through. If for whatever reason that test lead option says false that indicates a real lead from a live ad. 

If we move over to columns J, K, and L, those are the three form field options that were part of the default lead gen form. There’s the first name. I asked for the last name as well as the email address. Depending on what type of form you created, those will also be within this document. And then to columns M and N, we see the hidden fields that I created. And those are the important ones that I wanted to set up for my CRM tracking. So there’s paid social for the lead source and the newsletter for the lead source content. 

Whatever hidden fields you have set up to really evaluate the performance of your campaign goals, those will show up within the downloads as well. I highly recommend doing both. Typically, I’ll go to the manual download first. Make sure that the test lead went through. Double checking that all the fields, both visible and hidden, are showing up within my download. Then I will go back into my CRM or my clients marketing automation system and verify that all the valuable information that’s part of this manual download is also showing up within the CRM system. If everything is good, then I’m completely comfortable launching these ads and campaign and start collecting leads directly from the LinkedIn interface. 

Hopefully, this gave you the confidence you need to know that your conversion tracking is working so you can launch your campaigns. I told you this feature is buried a little bit and maybe one day LinkedIn will create a test lead button right next to the form when you’re creating it. But in the meantime, this is what we have to do to make sure our lead forms are working. Best of luck on your LinkedIn lead gen campaigns. And if you have any more questions about some settings you would like to see reviewed by the Paid Media Pros, let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez