LinkedIn Advert stats not matching with my Google Analytics data

There's a difference between PPC clicks and the website visits reported in Google Analytics. A click gets logged as soon as LinkedIn redirects the user to your site. However, your page needs to load in the ga.js code from Google's servers and then send an image request back before the visit is recorded. This process sometimes doesn't complete. Here's a few reasons:

• The user leaves your site before the code is downloaded and run
• The user clicks on a link deeper into your site before it's run
• Other technical issues like the code just failing to download or people deliberately blocking it

The issue that your reporting is normal and happens with all PPC ad providers such as Google AdWords. However, 40% seems a quite high failure rate. Possible reasons include:

• Sometimes the HTTP referrer used to show where a visit is coming from get's blocked or lost before it's picked up by GA
• Your GA tracking code might not being installed properly
• It could even be that 10 clicks isn't really enough to make judgments about as the results you have so far might not be statistically valid

My advice would be to try out using the GA URL tracking parameters (utm_source, utm_content etc) instead or relying on the referrer. It's the way Google advises tracking PPC campaigns anyway and has the added benefit that you can check your server logs to validate what you seen in the LinkedIn reports.

LinkedIn's response sounds like a fair explanation of the difference you're seeing.

If you wanted a third datapoint to measure clicks on your ad, your could use bit.ly URLs in your LinkedIn ads to link to your site. Adding a '+' sign at the end of any bit.ly URL gives you a breakdown of the clickthrough. This has the added advantage that it doesn't require JavaScript, so it may prove a more accurate representation than what you're seeing in Google Analytics.