LinkedIn Ads: Troubleshooting

LinkedIn Ads: Troubleshooting#

A campaign is missing from my data extract#

If a campaign is active in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and selected in your datastream, but no data appears for it, the cause is usually the relationship between the campaign’s schedule and your fetch date range rather than the authorization or the campaign filter.

Adverity does not collect a campaign in the following cases:

  • The campaign finished before the start of your fetch date range, and the Include completed campaigns checkbox is not selected. A campaign that is still listed as active in Campaign Manager can still fall into this category for an older date range.

  • The campaign has no start date. Campaigns without a start date are not collected, and there is no option to include them.

  • The campaign starts after the end of your fetch date range.

  • The campaign has the status REMOVED, and the Include removed campaigns checkbox is not selected. That checkbox only takes effect when Ad accounts and Campaigns is set to All and Campaign group is not one of the selected pivots — otherwise it is ignored without a message.

To resolve this issue:

  1. Check the campaign’s start and end dates in LinkedIn Campaign Manager against your fetch date range.

  2. Select the Include completed campaigns checkbox and fetch again.

  3. If the campaign has no start date, set one in Campaign Manager.

Note

None of these cases produce a warning, and the datastream completes successfully. Check the campaign schedule before investigating the authorization.

A name field is empty#

Names for campaign groups, creatives, conversions, companies and geographies are retrieved separately from the performance data. When a name cannot be retrieved, the row is still collected but the name column is left empty, and a warning is recorded in the fetch.

An empty name column therefore means the name could not be retrieved, not that the data is missing. The most common cause is that the authorization has lost access to that specific object, for example a creative belonging to an account that is no longer shared with the authorizing user.

To resolve this issue, check the datastream warnings of the fetch to identify the affected objects, then confirm that the authorization still has access to them. After restoring access, allow up to an hour before fetching again.

A field that used to be populated is now empty#

A name column that has worked for months can start arriving empty with no change to your datastream. This is the same behaviour as above: the lookup for those objects has started failing, usually because of a permission change on the LinkedIn side.

To resolve this issue, check the datastream warnings of the most recent fetch, then confirm the authorization’s access to the affected accounts and objects.

I see a 429 error or my fetch stays pending for hours#

LinkedIn applies a daily request quota that resets at midnight UTC.

When the quota is reached, Adverity does not fail the fetch. It retries for several hours and then waits for the quota to reset, so a datastream can remain pending for a long time and then complete on its own. A warning is only shown once several retries have already happened and more than three hours remain until the reset.

To resolve this issue:

  1. Wait for the fetch to complete. In most cases no action is needed.

  2. To reduce the chance of it recurring, schedule datastreams that use the same authorization at different times.

  3. Reduce the number of fields in each datastream. A larger field selection uses more of your quota.

My authorization fails even though the credentials are correct#

LinkedIn credentials are valid for 365 days and must be renewed manually. Adverity notifies the addresses configured on the authorization one week before it expires.

Re-authorizing does not resolve every fetch failure. If a fetch continues to fail after re-authorization, the cause is usually elsewhere — check the datastream warnings for the specific objects or accounts involved before re-authorizing again.

My conversions are all zero#

Empty metric values are recorded as 0 rather than left blank, so a column of zeros does not confirm that no conversions occurred.

To resolve this issue:

  1. Confirm that the conversion metric you need is selected in Fields. externalWebsiteConversions, externalWebsitePostClickConversions and externalWebsitePostViewConversions count different things.

  2. To report on individual named conversions, set Pivots to CONVERSION. This makes the conversion.* fields available, including conversion.name, and returns one row per conversion rather than a single total.

  3. Check that the conversion is enabled in LinkedIn Campaign Manager for the account you are collecting from. Conversions are defined per account.

I get an error when selecting three pivots#

You can combine up to three pivots, but a demographic pivot — one whose name begins with MEMBER_ — can only be selected on its own.

Combining a demographic pivot with any other pivot causes LinkedIn to reject the request with an error stating that the pivot is not a valid enum symbol.

To resolve this issue, move the demographic pivot into its own datastream. For more information, see LinkedIn Ads: Tips and best practices.

The campaign name in my data extract is not the campaign name I expected#

LinkedIn’s hierarchy is offset by one level compared with most other advertising platforms. campaign.name returns the name of what Campaign Manager displays as an ad set, and campaign_group.name returns what it displays as a campaign.

This is expected behaviour. For the full mapping, see LinkedIn Ads: Tips and best practices.

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