To Import LinkedIn Ads data to Google Sheets, download the LinkedIn Ads to Sheets add-on, connect your LinkedIn profile, select ad accounts, metrics, dimensions (or breakdowns), and date ranges, and schedule hourly, daily, or weekly data refreshes to monitor your LinkedIn Ads campaigns performance and automate your PPC marketing reports.
By the end of the tutorial, you’ll know:
- 2 free and paid ways to connect LinkedIn Ads to Google Sheets
- Schedule automatic data refreshes
- Free LinkedIn Ads report templates for Sheets
- Customize your LinkedIn Ads reports on Google Sheets
- Available LinkedIn Ads metrics and dimensions
Free and paid ways to import LinkedIn Ads to Google Sheets
LinkedIn Ads add-on for Google Sheets
To import LinkedIn Ads data to Google Sheets automatically, follow these steps:
Step 1: Install the LinkedIn Ads to Google Sheets add-on and open a new sheet.
Step 2: Go to Extensions – Porter Metrics – Launch.
Step 3: Choose the LinkedIn Ads integration and connect your LinkedIn profile. Porter will bring all the ad accounts associated to it.
Optionally, connect multiple LinkedIn personal profiles to retrieve other ad accounts’ data yours doesn’t have access to.
Step 4: name your query so you can save it for later and schedule automatic data refreshes.
For this example, we’ll call the query “Campaign performance”.
Step 5: Choose the LinkedIn profile and the LinkedIn Ads account(s) you’ll import to your report.
The Porter Metrics add-on lets you pull and combine data from multiple LinkedIn Ads accounts in a single query, quite useful for agency client monitoring or companies that manage multiple brands in different ad accounts.
Step 6: set a dynamic or fixed date range for your report.
Dynamic date ranges refer to “Yesterday”, “Last month”, “This week” that will vary based on the current date; fixed date ranges are about defining a specific start and end date.
Step 7: Choose metrics and dimensions.
Metrics refer to the numbers. Dimensions are the way we can break down our data (by).
As metrics, select Spent, Clicks, CTR, or even conversions.
As a dimension, break down by dates, Campaign name.
Access all the LinkedIn Ads metrics and dimensions available and suggested LinkedIn Ads KPIs.
Click on Create report and wait some seconds to load your data on the selected cell.
Downloading CSV files from the LinkedIn Ads manager
To import your LinkedIn Ads data to Google Sheets (free forever), download your LinkedIn Ads data as a CSV file from the Ads Manager and upload the CSV on Google Sheets.
However, this process is manual and you’ll need to repeat it every time you need a new query.
Schedule automatic data refreshes
Scheduling data refreshes on Google Sheets let you have your data automatically updated so you can monitor your LinkedIn Ads data hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.
Go to your saved queries and go to options – Schedule.
Enable or disable your schedule to turn on and off the automation.
Set a refresh frequency (e.g. Daily).
Set a start date (e.g. Now or Tomorrow at the same time).
Choose an option to refresh your data.
- Replace previous import: new data overwrites old data.
- Append to import: new data will display in rows underneath the current data, useful to log and store historical data.
- Create a new sheet for every refresh: create a new Google Spreadsheet for every single query refreshed.
Free LinkedIn Ads report templates for Sheets
Some LinkedIn Ads templates for Google Sheets include:
- LinkedIn Ads monthly report template (Soon)
- Budget and pacing monitoring template (Soon)
- LinkedIn Ads campaign monitoring template (Soon)
- PPC goal tracker (Soon)
- Internal client monitoring report for agencies (Soon)
Google Sheets templates help you speed up your marketing reports setup.
To download a Google Sheet template, go to File – Marke a copy, and name the new copy.
To use them, notice first that the templates have two types of sheets: backend and frontend sheets.
Backend sheets contain the raw data that you can import and automatically refresh
with the LinkedIn Ads to Sheets add-on. It’s like the database.
To sync your data correctly and keep consistency, make sure to create the query from the first cell (A1) that matches the metrics and dimensions suggested in the template.
Frontend sheets contain the user interface with the dashboards, charts, and text, meant to be accessed by your team or clients.
Just like in software, frontend sheets are fed by the backend sheets.
If you update your frontend sheets, make sure to keep the cells with the formulas calling up the backend sheets data to avoid breaking your report.
Customize your LinkedIn Ads reports on Google Sheets
We’ll share some tips to make your LinkedIn Ads data more useful for marketing data analysis.
Set alerts and notifications
Send notifications to your team via email or Slack when data updates for daily, weekly summaries.
With the refresh scheduling feature, you can automatically update your Google Sheets with your latest LinkedIn Ads data.
Then, use Zapier or Make and trigger a new automation every time a Google Sheets row is updated or created, and send its data to Slack or via email.
Suggested tutorials:
- Automatically send a Slack message for new Google Sheets activity.
- How to send an email when updates are made to Google Sheets rows.
Visualize Google Sheets data on other tools
Once your data is on Google Sheets, you can quickly connect it to other tools for further analysis and better reporting and presentations:
Data Visualization and Business Intelligence:
Best for client and team dashboards and reports or performance monitoring.
Data presentations and slides:
Best for weekly/monthly team or client presentations.
Data warehouses (for dev teams):
Best for engineering teams to centralize companies’ data.
Track LinkedIn Ads goals
Add context to your data by comparing it against goals or using conditional formats.
Suggested tutorials:
- How-To: Conditional Formatting Based on Another Cell in Google Sheets
- How to use conditional formatting in Google Sheets
For LinkedIn Ads, common use cases of goal tracking include:
- Ad pacing monitoring
- Agency client overview
- CPA monitoring + markups or commissions
- Campaign performance
- Cross-channel paid media analysis
Goals will help you add context to your data so your team and clients are aligned and they can tell if your marketing performance is good.
LinkedIn Ads metrics and dimensions
As reference, see the LinkedIn Ads fields list and suggestions for choosing LinkedIn Ads KPIs.
The LinkedIn Ads connector for Google Looker Studio offers all the +100 metrics and dimensions available on the LinkedIn Ads API.
LinkedIn Ads metrics
LinkedIn Ads metrics include:
- Conversion: Post View conversions, post click conversions
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Visibility: Impressions, reach
LinkedIn Ads dimensions
To monitor your LinkedIn Ads performance, break down your data by dimensions.
The most common ways to break down your marketing data are by:
- Over time: for hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting
- Account: break down by client, if you’re an agency, or by product, if you’re a business.
- Channel: channels correspond to the acquisition sources or mediums (SEO, ads, Facebook, etc) you get traffic and conversion from.
- Campaign: campaigns refer to a set of activities to sell products by defining a specific objective, offer, target audience, and content.
- Objective: break down your marketing efforts by funnel stage or objective, such as awareness, engagement, and conversion.
- Audience: to know to whom you’re marketing, you may break down data by geographic, demographics, and tech dimensions, such as city, gender, age, device, platform.
- Content: to analyze by best-performing post, article, creative, etc.
For analyzing LinkedIn Ads data with breakdowns, some popular use cases are:
- Ad spend and pacing (Hourly, daily tracking)
- Campaign and ad set monitoring
- Best-performing creatives
- Peak hours with heatmaps
- Audience analysis (Gender, age, location, devices)
