Marketers know the pain of running top-of-funnel campaigns and having no idea what revenue, if any, they’re actually driving. Antonio Vidal, Senior Growth Manager at Ashby, faced this exact challenge. As a fast-growing recruiting software company serving customers from startups to enterprises, Ashby needed clarity on whether its LinkedIn ad investments were truly paying off.
With Zapier’s LinkedIn Conversions integration, Antonio found a seamless way to link top-of-funnel campaign data to actual revenue in their CRM, without relying on engineering resources to connect both platforms. The result? Better reporting, smarter optimization, and a lot less guesswork.
Before Zapier: limited visibility and manual work
Before Zapier, the team could technically connect LinkedIn ad performance to pipeline and revenue, but it took a ton of manual work to get there. Pulling data from their CRM, cleaning it, and uploading conversions back into LinkedIn was time-consuming and far from scalable.
“You can go from HubSpot to LinkedIn with a CSV of all your qualified deals or revenue,” said Antonio. “But if you’re doing that every week… that’s a lot of work you can automate.”
As a lean marketing team inside a growing company, that manual lift just wasn’t sustainable. They didn’t have hours to spend exporting and formatting data, or the resources to build and maintain a custom integration internally.
“Engineering is focused on scaling the product and has different priorities,” Antonio explained. “For marketing, Zapier lets us move fast without depending on other teams.”
By removing the manual work and the engineering bottleneck, Zapier gave the team a better way forward and paved the way for reliable, real-time insights.
Building the connection: automating conversion tracking with Zapier
Right from the start, Antonio turned to Zapier’s LinkedIn Conversions integration to automate the process. Because Ashby already used Zapier and HubSpot, it was an easy decision.
“It was a no-brainer. I knew Zapier could do this because of the trust I already had in the platform.”
He created three Zaps, each designed to send key conversion events back to LinkedIn:
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Deal Created – When a new deal is created in HubSpot, Zapier sends this event to LinkedIn.
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Deal Qualified – When a deal hits a qualified stage, another conversion is triggered.
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Deal Closed-Won – When a deal results in revenue, this final event is pushed to LinkedIn.
These Zaps enable LinkedIn to match ad engagements with actual conversions, which provides Ashby with clear visibility into which campaigns are influencing the pipeline.
And the beauty? Once set up, they require zero manual effort.
At the end of the day, you are just connecting the dots. You can run any campaign you want on LinkedIn, and the conversion data will be there.
Antonio Vidal, Senior Growth Manager at Ashby
💡 Tip: Learn more about Zapier’s LinkedIn Conversions integration here.
The results: better optimization, less guesswork
While Antonio didn’t have a traditional before-and-after dataset, since Zapier was part of their process from the beginning, the impact of automated conversion tracking quickly became clear.
1. Campaign Optimization:
“You can compare one campaign to another and say, ‘Okay, this one is driving X number of qualified deals.’ Without this data, it’s all guesswork,” says Antonio. By automatically sending conversion signals back to LinkedIn, Ashby can now evaluate campaign performance based on real outcomes, not just surface-level engagement. This data-driven approach enables faster, more confident decisions across their ad strategy.
2. LinkedIn Algorithm Learning:
“When you define what a conversion is, like a qualified deal, LinkedIn uses that to optimize your campaigns. You’re providing that feedback loop to LinkedIn,” said Antonio. Thanks to Zapier, this feedback loop now runs on autopilot. In just the last 30 days, Ashby has sent around 750 conversion events back to LinkedIn, giving the algorithm exactly the data it needs to fine-tune targeting and boost ROI.
3. Less Manual Work, More Meaningful Data:
Before Zapier, uploading conversion events would have taken about 1.5 hours every week, not to mention the risk of inconsistent data and delays. While the process isn’t real-time, it’s now fully automated, removing manual busywork and ensuring LinkedIn gets updated regularly with accurate conversion data.
4. Seeing the Full Funnel:
In B2B, sales cycles are long, and early-stage campaigns often go uncredited. With Zapier in place, Ashby can finally connect top-of-funnel efforts to pipeline outcomes.“Top-of-funnel campaigns are hard to measure. This setup helps us validate their impact, even if it takes months for the pipeline to show up,” says Antonio. Now, those early touchpoints have a measurable role in the buyer journey, helping the team invest smarter across the full funnel.
More than just data—marketing autonomy
Beyond the metrics, Zapier’s value to Ashby is about empowerment. In a startup, marketing can’t wait for engineering to make every integration happen. “Zapier helps go-to-market teams be more autonomous and productive,” shares Antonio. “With a few clicks, we connect APIs and send data, without needing engineering resources.”
This autonomy allows Ashby’s marketing team to move fast, test quickly, and focus on what matters most: growing the business.
Final Thoughts:
If you’re running LinkedIn campaigns and using HubSpot as your CRM, Zapier’s LinkedIn Conversions integration gives you what every marketer wants: proof that your ads are impacting your pipeline.
Zapier is the glue—but it’s also the unlock. Without it, we’re just looking at the surface.
Antonio Vidal, Senior Growth Manager at Ashby
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