Connect LinkedIn Ads to ChatGPT with MCP

Before you start

Three things: a SourcetoMCP account with a brand created, a ChatGPT account you can use on the web, and a LinkedIn login that has been given a role on an ad account in Campaign Manager. That last one is the usual sticking point, so it is worth checking before you start rather than discovering it halfway through.

Viewer, Creative Manager, Campaign Manager, Account Manager and Billing Admin all work. Being an admin of the company page is a different thing entirely and grants none of them, which surprises people often enough to be worth stating twice.

What you will not need is a LinkedIn developer app, an API key, or any approval from LinkedIn. The free LinkedIn Ads MCP servers you will find on GitHub all require you to register an app of your own and wait for LinkedIn to approve it for the Advertising API before anything works. That approval already sits with SourcetoMCP, so signing in is the entire setup.

Connect LinkedIn Ads to SourcetoMCP

1. 1In your dashboard, open Connectors and choose Add a connection.
2. 2Select Connect on the LinkedIn Ads card.
3. 3LinkedIn takes over at linkedin.com and asks you to approve access to your advertising accounts and their reporting. Your password stays with LinkedIn and is never seen by SourcetoMCP.
4. 4You come back to a list of every ad account you administer, each shown as its name plus its nine-digit ID. The ID is there because LinkedIn does not require account names to be unique, and agency logins routinely show several that read the same.
5. 5Tick the accounts you want and confirm. Each becomes its own connection and counts once against your plan.

Skip anything tagged [test]. LinkedIn returns no reporting data whatsoever for test accounts, so connecting one produces empty answers that look exactly like a broken setup while being entirely correct.

Add SourcetoMCP as a connector in ChatGPT

1. 1In SourcetoMCP, open Connect an agent from the dashboard sidebar and copy your server address (it looks like https://sourcetomcp.com/api/mcp).
2. 2In ChatGPT, open Settings, then Security and login, and turn on Developer mode. Custom MCP connectors sit behind this toggle, and it only appears on ChatGPT on the web.
3. 3Open the Plugins menu and select the “+” button to create a developer-mode app.
4. 4Enter the name SourcetoMCP, paste in your server address, and pick OAuth as the authentication type.
5. 5Save. The app sits under Drafts in your app settings, where you can switch individual tools on or off.
6. 6The first time ChatGPT calls it, you'll be asked to sign in to SourcetoMCP and approve access. After that it reconnects on its own.

A developer-mode app stays off until you pick it. In a chat, open the plus menu, choose SourcetoMCP, and ask your question. Every LinkedIn operation here is read-only, so you can leave them all switched on without risk of anything being changed.

Ask ChatGPT about your LinkedIn ads

Pick SourcetoMCP from the plus menu first. A developer-mode app is off by default in every new chat, which trips people up more than anything else in this setup: the answer comes back sounding confident and generic because ChatGPT never called the tool at all. If a reply has no specific numbers in it, that is almost always why.

Start with something only LinkedIn can answer. Impressions and clicks you can get anywhere, and asking for those first tends to leave people wondering what the connection was for:

1. 1“What job titles did our ads reach last quarter, ranked by spend?”
2. 2“Which industries and company sizes are we actually reaching?”
3. 3“List the companies that saw our ads most, and flag any we never targeted.”
4. 4“Estimate the audience size for directors in healthcare in Australia.”

ChatGPT will show you the tool call it made and what came back, so you can check the period and the account it used rather than taking the summary on trust. That matters most on the demographic questions, where the shape of the answer looks identical whether it covered thirty days or ninety.

What it can and cannot do

Most of the LinkedIn tools read: campaigns, campaign groups, creatives, ad accounts, professional demographics, targeting lookups and audience sizing. Two of them write, and developer mode's per-tool switches are genuinely useful there. If you only want reporting, switch the create and update tools off and leave the rest on.

If you do leave them on, a campaign ChatGPT creates is always paused and cannot spend until you activate it, and the audience is checked against LinkedIn's 300-member minimum first so it cannot build something that will never run.

What you get is campaign and creative reporting, ad account details, campaign groups, professional demographics, targeting lookups and audience size estimates.

The demographic figures come with two caveats ChatGPT is told about and should pass on. LinkedIn perturbs them deliberately to protect member privacy, so they will not reconcile exactly with your campaign totals, and they arrive 12 to 24 hours behind everything else, which makes the most recent day or two look thinner than it was. Treat them as a way to compare segments against each other rather than as exact headcounts.

The yearly reconnect

Put a note in your calendar for a year from today. LinkedIn puts a hard ceiling on how long any app stays authorised without the member signing in again, and unlike every other source you can connect, using it regularly does nothing to push that ceiling back.

There is no renewal to buy and no setting to change, on our side or yours. Signing in again is the only thing that resets it, and it restarts the clock at a full year with your accounts, brands and history untouched.

You will be told well before it matters. The Connectors page starts flagging it around a month out, emails follow at 30, 7 and 1 days, and inside the final fortnight ChatGPT will mention it in the answer itself if you ask a LinkedIn question.

Troubleshooting

Developer mode is not in Settings. It only exists on ChatGPT on the web. Check on a desktop browser rather than the mobile or desktop apps.

The answer has no real numbers in it. The app was not selected for that chat. Open the plus menu, pick SourcetoMCP, and ask again. A developer-mode app never activates on its own.

No ad accounts appeared when connecting. You need a role on the ad account in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Administering the company page is a different permission and does not grant it. Whoever holds Account Manager or Billing Admin can add you under Manage Access.

Everything returns empty. Check whether you connected a test account, which never returns reporting data of any kind. Otherwise ask ChatGPT to list your campaigns first, since LinkedIn answers a period with no activity exactly the same way it answers one it cannot read.

A campaign looks active but has no spend. Ask why it is not serving. LinkedIn keeps its own verdict separately from the status you set, and names the reason: a spent budget on the account or the campaign, an end date already passed, or an audience under the 300-member floor it needs before serving anything. If the campaign itself checks out, ask about its creatives instead, because an ad rejected in review cannot serve and that never shows up in campaign reporting.

Revoking access

There are three separate switches, and it is worth knowing which does what. Deleting the app in ChatGPT stops ChatGPT reaching SourcetoMCP and changes nothing about your connected sources. You can also revoke that grant from the Connect an agent page in SourcetoMCP, which is the better option if you have lost access to the ChatGPT account.

Inside SourcetoMCP, removing a single connection stops one ad account being reachable while your LinkedIn authorisation stays in place, and disconnecting the platform removes the authorisation together with every account under it.

Finally, you can revoke SourcetoMCP from LinkedIn itself, in your account's data and privacy settings. That cuts access regardless of what anything else has stored, and the connection will then show as needing attention on your Connectors page rather than quietly returning nothing.

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] and tell us which step you reached and what you saw. Screenshots help, especially of the LinkedIn authorisation screen or the account picker.