Customer Journey Mapping: HubSpot + LinkedIn Ads
What do customers do before they call or book? askotter reads HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads together and answers it for your business, by text.
How does customer journey mapping with HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads work for a small business?
askotter reads HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads side by side so it can map the path customers take across your accounts. The whole path in one view, with every visit and decision point on it.
Read the full answerShow less
The owner asks follow-up questions by text.
- From HubSpot
- Contacts and companies, Deal pipeline and stages, Email campaign performance.
- From LinkedIn Ads
- Campaign performance, Audience demographics, Lead gen form data.
- Status
- LinkedIn Ads is on the integration roadmap, so the matching described here starts when that connector ships.
- Not for
- Replacing HubSpot or LinkedIn Ads. Both keep working exactly as they do now.
What do customers do before they call or book?
On paper the path is simple: someone sees an ad, visits the site and books. In real life they search twice, read reviews and come back days later on a different phone. Each tool sees only its own piece.
How askotter handles it
askotter reads HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads side by side, so it can map the path customers take across your accounts.
A person checks the result before it reaches you. This is part of our digital marketing services work.
LinkedIn Ads to HubSpot attribution, followed to the closed deal
LinkedIn Campaign Manager reports a conversion when a lead form is submitted or a pixel fires. HubSpot records the contact, the lifecycle stage changes and the deal that eventually closes. The two tools disagree on the number because they are counting different events at different times.
askotter reads both. Each LinkedIn campaign and creative is matched to the HubSpot contacts it produced, then followed through to closed-won deals and amounts. Each campaign line reads in dollars closed, so a campaign with cheap leads that never convert stops looking like the winner.
The match uses the LinkedIn click ID and the UTM values HubSpot already stores on the contact, with first-touch and last-touch fallbacks for contacts that arrived without either. The model is one setting, and changing it recalculates every report.
LinkedIn Ads is on the integration roadmap. Talk to us about your timeline and we will confirm the launch date before you commit.
Does this need the LinkedIn Conversions API or an offline conversions upload?
No. askotter reads campaign performance from the LinkedIn Marketing API and contact and deal history from HubSpot, then joins them on its side. If you want closed-won events sent back to LinkedIn for bid optimisation, askotter can build that upload file for you.
How far back does the attribution run?
As far back as HubSpot holds the contact history and LinkedIn keeps campaign data, which is typically two years. Historical deals are attributed on the first sync.
What happens when a deal also had a Google Ads touch?
Every touch is kept. The report shows the LinkedIn share under the model you picked, and the customer journey view lists the touches in order so you can see what came before and after the ad.
How HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads records line up
HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads both store the customer's email address. askotter lowercases and trims it on both sides before matching, so the same person shows up as one customer across the two tools.
HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads both keep a company record. The match runs on the company's web domain first and falls back to a cleaned company name.
Shared between the two: the customer email address, the company or account and the UTM campaign tags.
What customer journey mapping uses from each
Customer journey mapping needs the order of events for one person.
From HubSpot that means lifecycle stage changes with their dates. From LinkedIn Ads it means the campaign and creative each lead responded to.
LinkedIn Ads is on the integration roadmap, so the matching described here starts when that connector ships.
What each tool sees on its ownShow less
HubSpot on its own
HubSpot sees the contact and the deal. It cannot see money collected outside it, or ad spend on platforms it is not connected to.
Timing. HubSpot updates contact and deal properties as they change, and keeps the original source and first page seen on each contact.
Access. A HubSpot private app or OAuth connection with read-only CRM scopes.
LinkedIn Ads on its own
LinkedIn sees clicks, lead-form submissions and the companies it reached. It never sees whether a lead became a deal.
Timing. LinkedIn reports conversions under its own windows, thirty days after a click and seven after a view by default.
Access. The LinkedIn Marketing API with read access to the ad account.
Related guides
- LinkedIn Ads and HubSpot Attribution: Why the Numbers Disagree. HubSpot and LinkedIn are both reporting honestly. They just count different events over different windows.
- LinkedIn Ads to Salesforce: Why Your Attribution Is Broken. The gap between what LinkedIn claims and what your CRM shows is a measurement problem nobody set up correctly.
Services that use these connections
Other analyses: HubSpot + LinkedIn Ads
Questions about HubSpot + LinkedIn Ads
Do I need a developer to connect HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads?
How is askotter's Customer Journey Mapping different from what HubSpot shows on its own?
HubSpot + LinkedIn Ads is coming soon
Talk to us about your timeline, and we will confirm the launch date before you commit.
Self-managed is $99/mo and scales with the compute you use. Our team runs it from $600/mo.