Connect LinkedIn Ads to Claude with MCP

Before you start

You'll need a SourcetoMCP account with at least one brand created, a LinkedIn account with a role on at least one ad account in Campaign Manager, and a Claude account. Custom connectors work on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, though Free accounts are limited to one at a time.

You do not need a LinkedIn developer app, an API key, or approval from LinkedIn. Most free LinkedIn Ads MCP servers ask you to register your own app and wait for LinkedIn to approve it for the Advertising API. SourcetoMCP hosts the server and holds that approval, so signing in is the whole setup.

Your LinkedIn role matters more than anything else here. You can only reach ad accounts where you are a Viewer, Creative Manager, Campaign Manager, Account Manager or Billing Admin. If you have no role on an account, it will not appear, no matter how the connection is set up.

Connect LinkedIn Ads to SourcetoMCP

1. 1From your dashboard, go to Connectors → Add a connection.
2. 2Find the LinkedIn Ads card and select Connect.
3. 3Sign in on LinkedIn's own screen at linkedin.com. It asks you to approve access to your advertising accounts and their reporting. SourcetoMCP never sees your LinkedIn password.
4. 4Back in SourcetoMCP, pick which ad accounts to connect. Each is listed as its name followed by its nine-digit ID, because LinkedIn account names are not unique and agency logins often show several similar ones.
5. 5Confirm. Each account you picked appears on your Connections page and counts as one connection against your plan.

If any account is marked [test], leave it alone unless you know you want it. LinkedIn returns no reporting data at all for test accounts, so connecting one and seeing empty results looks like a broken integration when it is working exactly as designed.

Add SourcetoMCP as a connector in Claude

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 Claude, open Customize, then Connectors.
3. 3Select +, then Add custom connector.
4. 4Paste in your server address. Leave Advanced settings alone, because SourcetoMCP runs its own OAuth and never needs a client ID or secret from you.
5. 5Click Add.
6. 6The first time Claude uses it, you'll be asked to sign in to SourcetoMCP and approve access. After that it reconnects on its own.

On a Team or Enterprise plan, only an Owner can add a connector, from Organization settings, then Connectors. Everyone else then opens Customize → Connectors and clicks Connect to sign in with their own SourcetoMCP account, so each person only ever reaches the sources their own account can see.

Ask Claude about your LinkedIn ads

Once the connector is added, Claude reaches LinkedIn on its own whenever a question calls for it. There is nothing to switch on per conversation.

The temptation is to ask for impressions and clicks, and it is worth resisting. Every ad platform reports those, and LinkedIn's own dashboard already does it well. The reason to connect LinkedIn specifically is that it is the only platform that knows what its audience does for a living:

1. 1“Which job titles clicked our ads last quarter, and what did each one cost us?”
2. 2“Break last month down by seniority, then by industry.”
3. 3“Which companies saw the most impressions, and were any outside our target list?”
4. 4“Why has this campaign stopped spending?”
5. 5“Compare LinkedIn and Google Ads on cost per click this quarter.”

That last question only works because LinkedIn shares a connection with everything else you have linked. With Google Ads, GA4 or Search Console connected, Claude answers across all of them at once rather than making you export from each.

Claude shows each tool call and its result inline, so you can expand one and check the date range and account it actually used. Worth doing on demographic questions, where a thirty-day answer and a ninety-day answer look identical once summarised.

What it can and cannot do

Most of what Claude does here reads: campaigns, campaign groups, creatives, ad accounts, professional demographics, targeting lookups and audience size estimates. It can also create a campaign and change an existing one's name, status, budget, bid or end date.

Two safeguards sit around that. A campaign Claude creates is always paused, so it cannot begin spending until you activate it yourself. And before creating one, Claude checks the audience clears LinkedIn's 300-member minimum, because LinkedIn accepts an undersized audience and then quietly holds the campaign rather than refusing it.

The professional breakdowns need one caveat carried into any report you build from them. LinkedIn approximates these figures deliberately, to protect member privacy, so they will not add up exactly to your campaign totals, and they land 12 to 24 hours later than everything else. Claude is told both alongside the numbers. Use them to rank segments against one another rather than as precise counts.

Expect companies you never targeted to appear. People change jobs, plenty hold more than one, and audience expansion deliberately reaches past your list.

The yearly reconnect

LinkedIn caps how long an app can stay connected without you signing in again. The limit is a year from the day you authorise, and using the connection does not extend it, so a connection that works perfectly still reaches the limit on its anniversary.

Nothing can renew it, from our side or yours. Reconnecting is the only reset, it takes about a minute, and it starts another full year with nothing lost. We warn you well before it happens: your Connectors page flags it about a month out, and you get emails at 30, 7 and 1 days. Claude will mention it too if you ask something in the final fortnight.

No other source you connect behaves this way. It is LinkedIn's rule, not ours.

Troubleshooting

Claude will not let you add the connector. On Free you can only have one custom connector at a time, so remove the existing one first. On Team or Enterprise, only an Owner can add one at all.

No ad accounts appeared when connecting. A role on the ad account in LinkedIn Campaign Manager is what grants this, and administering the company page is a different permission that does not. Ask whoever holds Account Manager or Billing Admin to add you under Manage Access.

Reports come back empty. Check whether the account you connected is a test account, since those never return reporting data. Otherwise ask Claude to list your campaigns first: LinkedIn answers a quiet period and an unreadable one in exactly the same way, so an empty result on its own tells you very little.

A campaign looks active but shows no spend. Ask Claude why it is not serving. LinkedIn keeps its own verdict apart from the status you set, and it will name the cause: an exhausted budget on the account or the campaign, an end date already passed, or an audience below the 300-member minimum it requires before serving at all. If the campaign itself looks fine, ask about its creatives, because an ad rejected in LinkedIn's review cannot serve and campaign reporting never shows it.

Revoking access

There are two separate things you can revoke, and they do different jobs. In SourcetoMCP, removing a connection stops that ad account being reachable while leaving your LinkedIn authorisation in place. Disconnecting the platform removes the authorisation and every account under it.

You can also revoke from LinkedIn directly, under your account's data and privacy settings, which cuts access no matter what any app has stored. If you do that, the connection will show as needing attention on your Connectors page rather than failing silently.

Removing SourcetoMCP as a connector in Claude is separate again: it stops Claude reaching SourcetoMCP, and leaves your connected sources untouched.

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.