Recently, LinkedIn released interest targeting a new way to reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests. With the breadth of content, conversations, and engaging moments shared every day across thousands of topics on LinkedIn, interest targeting makes it easy to translate this activity into audiences you can reach based on the content members share and engage with on LinkedIn, topics they follow, and professional searches done on Bing.
With more than 200 professional interest categories — such as artificial intelligence, global economy, customer experience, and more — you can leverage interest targeting to create more tailored campaigns and reach the professional audiences that matter most to your business.
How does interest targeting work?
Interest targeting enables you to reach people based on the topic’s members read, comment on, like, follow or share while on LinkedIn — plus their professional searches on Bing. LinkedIn also uses modeling to infer a member’s interests from a member’s job title and description.
With more than 30% growth in sessions year-over-year and record levels of engagement, our more than 610 million members and 40 million decision makers invest their time on LinkedIn to grow professional connections, learn new skills, and stay up to date with industry trends. Interest targeting makes it easy to leverage this rise in activity to help you reach the right people for your business.
How interest targeting can help reach your objective
The most important element to any campaign is defining your campaign objective. With an average of 11% lower CPC’s and 25% lower CPM’s (for campaigns run during our beta) interest targeting is ideal for awareness or consideration objectives. To help effectively reach these objectives, here are a few tips to consider:
- Start running a campaign to a broad interest category and narrow your targeting over time. For example, if you sell a CRM system you could start by targeting the customer experience interest category. After your campaign establishes a baseline, you can expand to test variations — like targeting those with a specific interest in customer relationship management. This approach will help you find the right balance between scale and performance.
- Though it’s tempting, don’t bulk your interests into a single campaign. Instead consider splitting each interest into a separate campaign. This will allow you to track the performance of each interest and provide you greater ability to set an allocated budget to each audience.
- When looking to reach a highly specific audience, add no more than one additional targeting facet (such as function or seniority) to your campaign. This will help avoid hyper-targeting. When in doubt, a best practice is to test a campaign over time to identify the right setup that will help reach your campaign objectives.
Identifying the right topics
So how do you get started? It’s as simple as choosing the right interests for your campaigns. If you’re not quite sure what interest topics to select — start by viewing content trending on your organization's LinkedIn Page or on your blog. If topics perform well on your blog or on your LinkedIn Page, odds are it’s a good topic your brand should consider for interest targeting.
With the right interests selected, you’re ready to launch campaign. Looking for a step by step walk through of the process? View our getting started deck.