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What is Interest Targeting and What’s New?

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At LinkedIn, we understand that B2B marketers need solutions to easily identify and engage professional audiences that matter most to help their businesses grow in this fast-changing digital environment.

With interest targeting, you can translate the breadth of content, conversations, and engaging moments shared every day on LinkedIn into targeting that enables you to reach potential B2B buyers with messaging that matches their professional interests. 

What Interest Targeting Can Do for Your Brand

Align relevant ads and content to potential buyers’ business needs or professional interests. 

Interest targeting can help you shape brand perception among professional audiences by aligning your brand with the topics that they care about. If you’ve created content featuring your product or service solving a problem, targeting adjacent interests means you’ll deliver your ad to the people it will appeal to the most. For example, if your messaging features your business solving a problem for a large banking client, try targeting interests such as finance and economy.

Deepen your influence with the buyer committee within your target accounts. 

Today, many of our customers use LinkedIn’s powerful account targeting to inform their Account-Based Marketing campaigns. You can use account targeting with interest targeting to reach an audience of potential buyers who have already expressed or are likely to express, an interest in the content that’s relevant to your business.

What’s New With Interest Targeting?

With 90K+ Product Pages, 6.1MM Service Pages, and interactions on Linkedin Pages increasing 48% year over year, we know brands and members are turning to LinkedIn to showcase their products and services, igniting interest and engaging with buying committees. We understand the importance of reaching your B2B audience with tailored content while their interest is still fresh, and to help you reach your audience with ease, we’ve broadened our interest targeting offering to include 20+ new service interest attributes and 120+ new product interest attributes. You may now fine-tune your campaign targeting with over 400+ professional interest categories across business technology, financial management services, cybersecurity software, and more.

Let’s take a closer look at interest targeting and how it can help you easily achieve your campaign objectives and grow your business.

General Interests

General interests include a wide range of categories like science and environment, technology, and health. For even greater precision drill down to specific interests within these broader categories to target with greater precision. 

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Product Interests

Wouldn’t it be great to serve ads directly to people who may be ready to learn more about your product? This category enables you to do just that. You can target buying committee members by the product they’re searching for and asking questions about on the LinkedIn platform. With an initial focus on software, there are 18 categories to choose from, each with subcategories that zero in on specifics like data visualization software, revenue management software, and sales analytics software.

Screenshot of Product Interests pulldown menu

Service Interests

Introducing our newest interest category, Service Interests. With 120% growth in page visits since its launch to all members in 2021, members are spending more time than ever engaging with Services Pages. You can leverage these activities and the LinkedIn Economic Graph to create more tailored campaigns and reach members interested in the services you provide. Our initial set of ~20 categories includes services such as real estate, environmental consulting, and application software development.

Screenshot of Services Interests pulldown menu

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 a campaign! Looking for a step-by-step walk through of the process? View our Get Started with LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager.

Learn more on our interest targeting page in the Help Center.