How to Integrate LinkedIn Ads with Your Headless CMS

What is LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn’s advertising platform for running Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, lead generation forms, and matched audience campaigns across LinkedIn’s professional network. It’s commonly used by B2B marketing teams that target by company, job title, seniority, industry, skills, and account lists. Campaign Manager handles budgeting, targeting, creative review, reporting, and lead capture, while the LinkedIn Marketing API lets approved apps create and update campaign assets programmatically.

Why integrate LinkedIn Ads with a headless CMS?

If your team runs 20 LinkedIn campaigns a quarter, the slow part usually isn’t buying media. It’s keeping campaign copy, landing page URLs, hero images, UTM parameters, legal disclaimers, and regional variations aligned across your website, ad creative, and reporting spreadsheets. A disconnected workflow means someone publishes a landing page, someone else copies text into Campaign Manager, another person updates UTMs, and a fourth person checks whether the ad still matches the page. That works until a headline changes after launch or a compliance note gets missed.

Architecture overview

A typical flow starts when an editor publishes a `linkedinAd` document in Sanity Studio. A webhook filtered with GROQ, for example `_type == "linkedinAd" && defined(linkedin.campaignUrn)`, sends the document ID to a Sanity Function or your own webhook endpoint. The Function uses `@sanity/client` to fetch the latest approved fields from the Content Lake, including referenced landing page data, image asset URLs, UTM values, and the LinkedIn sponsored campaign URN. It then calls LinkedIn’s REST Marketing API with OAuth, usually `POST /rest/posts` to create Direct Sponsored Content for the organization and `POST /rest/adCreatives` to attach that post to a sponsored campaign. The response IDs, such as the post URN and creative URN, can be written back to Sanity for audit and reporting. The end user sees the approved Sponsored Content in their LinkedIn feed, clicks through to the landing page, and lands on a web experience powered by the same structured content.

Common use cases

Step-by-step integration

1. 1

   Set up LinkedIn Ads API access

   Create or use a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account, create a LinkedIn Developer app, associate it with your company page, and request access to the Marketing Developer Platform if you don’t already have it. Configure OAuth 2.0 and request the scopes your integration needs, commonly `r_ads`, `rw_ads`, `r_organization_social`, and `w_organization_social`. You’ll also need the sponsored account URN, campaign URN, and organization URN.

2. 2

   Install the integration dependencies

   For a TypeScript webhook or Sanity Function, install `@sanity/client`. You can call LinkedIn’s Rest.li Marketing API with `fetch`, as shown below, or use LinkedIn’s Rest.li client package if that fits your stack. Store the LinkedIn access token, organization URN, Sanity project ID, dataset, and Sanity token in environment variables.

3. 3

   Model LinkedIn ad content in Sanity Studio

   Create a schema such as `linkedinAd` with fields for `title`, `introText`, `description`, `landingPage`, `heroImage`, `utmCampaign`, `linkedinCampaignUrn`, `targetStatus`, and `linkedinCreativeUrn`. Keep LinkedIn-specific fields separate from your landing page content, but reference the landing page so GROQ can join them when syncing.

4. 4

   Create the publish trigger

   Add a Sanity webhook or Function trigger for publish events on `linkedinAd` documents. Use a GROQ filter so only ad-ready documents trigger the sync, for example documents where the campaign URN exists and the status is `approved`.

5. 5

   Call the LinkedIn Marketing API

   In the handler, fetch the current document from the Content Lake with GROQ, validate required fields, create a Direct Sponsored Content post through `POST /rest/posts`, then create an ad creative through `POST /rest/adCreatives`. Save the LinkedIn IDs back to Sanity so editors can see what was created.

6. 6

   Test the full path before activating spend

   Start with a test campaign or set new creatives to `PAUSED`. Confirm the LinkedIn post preview, landing page URL, UTM parameters, image crop, and legal text. Then test the frontend page, analytics tags, and lead form routing before switching creatives to active.

Code example

import {createClient} from '@sanity/client'

const sanity = createClient({
  projectId: process.env.SANITY_PROJECT_ID!,
  dataset: process.env.SANITY_DATASET!,
  apiVersion: '2025-01-01',
  token: process.env.SANITY_WRITE_TOKEN!,
  useCdn: false,
})

async function linkedInPost(path: string, body: unknown) {
  const res = await fetch(`https://api.linkedin.com${path}`, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.LINKEDIN_ACCESS_TOKEN}`,
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'LinkedIn-Version': '202501',
      'X-Restli-Protocol-Version': '2.0.0',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify(body),
  })

  if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`${path} failed: ${res.status} ${await res.text()}`)
  return {id: res.headers.get('x-restli-id'), body: await res.json().catch(() => null)}
}

export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const {_id} = await req.json()

  const ad = await sanity.fetch(`*[_id == $id][0]{
    title,
    introText,
    description,
    linkedinCampaignUrn,
    "url": landingPage->url,
    "imageUrl": heroImage.asset->url
  }`, {id: _id})

  if (!ad?.linkedinCampaignUrn) return Response.json({skipped: true})

  const post = await linkedInPost('/rest/posts', {
    author: process.env.LINKEDIN_ORGANIZATION_URN,
    commentary: ad.introText,
    visibility: 'PUBLIC',
    distribution: {feedDistribution: 'NONE', targetEntities: [], thirdPartyDistributionChannels: []},
    content: {article: {source: ad.url, title: ad.title, description: ad.description}},
    lifecycleState: 'PUBLISHED',
  })

  const creative = await linkedInPost('/rest/adCreatives', {
    campaign: ad.linkedinCampaignUrn,
    intendedStatus: 'PAUSED',
    reference: post.id,
  })

  await sanity.patch(_id).set({linkedinPostUrn: post.id, linkedinCreativeUrn: creative.id}).commit()
  return Response.json({postUrn: post.id, creativeUrn: creative.id})
}

How Sanity + LinkedIn Ads works

CMS approaches to LinkedIn Ads

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