LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads is a comprehensive advertising platform that enables businesses to create, manage, and optimize advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Ads connector enables you to access LinkedIn Ads API endpoints to retrieve ad accounts, campaign data, ad performance metrics, and other advertising-related information. This connector is particularly useful for applications that need to extract advertising data, analyze campaign performance, integrate LinkedIn Ads data with other marketing systems, or build advertising analytics and reporting solutions.

Power end-to-end data operations for your LinkedIn Ads API with Nexla. Our bi-directional LinkedIn Ads connector is purpose-built for LinkedIn Ads, making it simple to ingest data, sync it across systems, and deliver it anywhere — all with no coding required. Nexla turns API-sourced data into ready-to-use, reusable data products and makes it easy to send data to LinkedIn Ads or any other destination. With comprehensive monitoring, lineage tracking, and access controls, Nexla keeps your LinkedIn Ads workflows fast, secure, and fully governed.

Features

Type: API

SourceDestination

• Seamless API Integration: Connect to any endpoint as source or destination without coding, with automatic data product creation
• Visual Composition & Chaining: Build complex integrations using visual templates, chain API calls, and compose workflows with data validation and filtering
• API Proxy: Expose curated slices of your data securely with a secure and customizable API proxy that validates and transforms data on the fly
• Request optimization with intelligent batching, retry, and caching to minimize API calls and costs

Prerequisites

Before creating a LinkedIn Ads credential, you'll need to create a LinkedIn app and obtain OAuth 2.0 credentials (Client ID and secret) from LinkedIn's Developer Portal. LinkedIn Ads API uses OAuth 2.0 authentication with specific scopes for accessing advertising data.

To obtain LinkedIn Ads API credentials:

1. Log in to your LinkedIn account and navigate to the LinkedIn Developers Portal.

2. Click Create app to create a new LinkedIn app, or select an existing app if you already have one.

3. In your app settings, navigate to the Auth tab to configure OAuth 2.0 settings.

4. In the Redirect URLs section, add the redirect URL that will be used for OAuth authentication. This URL should match the redirect URI configured in your Nexla credential.

5. In the Products section, ensure that Marketing Developer Platform or LinkedIn Ads API is enabled for your app. This product provides access to LinkedIn Ads API endpoints.

6. Navigate to the Auth tab and locate your Client ID and secret. These are your OAuth 2.0 credentials.

7. Copy the Client ID and secret. Store them securely, as you'll need them to authenticate API requests.

8. Note the required OAuth scopes for LinkedIn Ads API access. The default scopes are r_liteprofile, r_ads, and r_ads_reporting, which provide access to basic profile information, ad account data, and ad reporting data.

LinkedIn Ads API requires OAuth 2.0 authentication with specific scopes. Ensure that your LinkedIn app has the Marketing Developer Platform product enabled and that you have the necessary permissions to access advertising data. The OAuth flow will require user consent to access LinkedIn Ads data.

For detailed information about LinkedIn Ads API authentication and OAuth setup, refer to the LinkedIn Marketing Developer Platform Documentation.

Authenticate

Create a credential in Nexla

1. To create a new LinkedIn Ads credential, after selecting the data source/destination type, click the Add Credential tile to open the Add New Credential overlay.

New Credential Overlay – LinkedIn Ads

2. Enter a name for the credential in the Credential Name field and a short, meaningful description in the Credential Description field.

3. The LinkedIn Ads connector uses OAuth 2.0 authentication. When you click Authorize or Connect, you will be redirected to LinkedIn's authorization page to grant access to your LinkedIn Ads account.

4. Log in to your LinkedIn account and review the permissions being requested. Click Allow to grant access to your LinkedIn Ads data.

5. After authorization, you will be redirected back to Nexla, and your credential will be automatically configured with the OAuth tokens.

   OAuth 2.0 tokens may expire after a certain period. Nexla will automatically refresh the tokens when needed using the refresh token. If you need to re-authorize, you can delete the existing credential and create a new one.

6. Click the Save button at the bottom of the overlay. The newly added credential will now appear in a tile on the Authenticate screen during data source/destination creation and can be selected for use with a new data source or destination.

Use as a data source

To create a new data flow, navigate to the Integrate section, and click the New Data Flow button. Select the LinkedIn Ads connector tile, then select the credential that will be used to connect to the LinkedIn Ads API, and click Next; or, create a new LinkedIn Ads credential for use in this flow.

Endpoint templates

Nexla provides pre-built templates that can be used to rapidly configure data sources to ingest data from common LinkedIn Ads API endpoints. Select the endpoint from which this source will fetch data from the Endpoint pulldown menu. Available endpoint templates are listed in the expandable boxes below. Click on an endpoint to see more information about it and how to configure your data source for this endpoint.

Get Ad Accounts

This endpoint retrieves all ad accounts available in your LinkedIn Ads account. Use this endpoint when you need to extract ad account information, list available accounts, or get account metadata for further API calls.

• Optionally, enter the LinkedIn API version in the Version field. The default value is typically the latest supported version. LinkedIn Ads API requires a specific version header for all requests.
• This endpoint automatically retrieves all ad accounts accessible to your LinkedIn Ads account. The endpoint uses pagination with nextToken to handle large datasets efficiently.

This endpoint uses GET requests with pagination through nextToken. The endpoint automatically fetches additional pages using the nextToken from the response metadata. For more information about the Get Ad Accounts endpoint, refer to the LinkedIn Ads API Documentation.

Get Ad Campaigns

This endpoint retrieves all campaigns available in an ad account. Use this endpoint when you need to extract campaign data, analyze campaign performance, or get campaign metadata for further API calls.

• Optionally, enter the LinkedIn API version in the Version field. The default value is typically the latest supported version. LinkedIn Ads API requires a specific version header for all requests.
• This endpoint automatically retrieves all campaigns for all ad accounts accessible to your LinkedIn Ads account. The endpoint uses a two-step process: first fetching ad accounts, then fetching campaigns for each account. Pagination is handled automatically using nextToken.

This endpoint uses GET requests with pagination through nextToken. The endpoint automatically fetches campaigns for all ad accounts and handles pagination efficiently. For more information about the Get Ad Campaigns endpoint, refer to the LinkedIn Ads API Documentation.

Reports: Get Ad Analytics (Across All Campaigns)

This endpoint retrieves analytics data aggregated across all campaigns, with the ability to select a pivot category for customized reporting views. Use this endpoint when you need to extract campaign performance metrics, analyze advertising ROI, or build advertising analytics dashboards.

• Optionally, enter the LinkedIn API version in the Version field. The default value is typically the latest supported version. LinkedIn Ads API requires a specific version header for all requests.
• This endpoint automatically retrieves analytics data for all ad accounts and campaigns. The endpoint uses a multi-step process to fetch accounts, campaigns, and analytics data, with pagination handled automatically.

This endpoint provides comprehensive analytics data including impressions, clicks, conversions, and other performance metrics. The endpoint supports pivoting by various categories for customized reporting views. For more information about the Ad Analytics endpoint, refer to the LinkedIn Ads API Documentation.

Once the selected endpoint template has been configured, click the Test button to the right of the endpoint selection menu to retrieve a sample of the data that will be fetched. Sample data will be displayed in the Endpoint Test Result panel on the right, allowing you to verify that the source is configured correctly before saving.

Manual configuration

LinkedIn Ads data sources can also be manually configured to ingest data from any valid LinkedIn Ads API endpoint not covered by the pre-built templates, or to apply further customizations. Select the Advanced tab at the top of the configuration screen, and follow the instructions in Connect to Any API to configure the API method, endpoint URL, date/time and lookup macros, path to data, metadata, and request headers.

LinkedIn Ads API endpoints typically follow the pattern https://api.linkedin.com/rest/{resource} and use GET requests. Most responses require a Path to Data of $.elements[*] to extract the relevant records. Include the LinkedIn-Version:{version} and X-RestLi-Protocol-Version:2.0.0 request headers, as these are required by the LinkedIn Ads API but are not added automatically by Nexla.

Once all of the relevant settings have been configured, click the Create button in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the new LinkedIn Ads data source. Nexla will now begin ingesting data from the configured endpoint and will organize any data that it finds into one or more Nexsets.