Best Practices for Ad Targeting

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Limited scale will hurt your initial campaigns, so we recommend not adding more than two to three targeting facets. A good rule of thumb when starting out is to keep the target audience over 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads, and over 15,000 for Sponsored InMail. Campaign Manager will show estimated reach and a suggested range while you’re building your audience.

This helps you cast a wider net and use testing to learn which content and targeting strategies are most effective for your business. Then, you can optimize campaigns to focus on your most valuable audiences.

By testing two similar campaigns with variations in targeting criteria, you can see which combinations are more effective. To perform an A/B test on targeting: create a campaign, duplicate it, and then slightly alter your targeting parameters.

Change only a few criteria at a time to isolate which part of your test impacted performance. Try testing Skills versus Job Titles, Industry versus Job Function, etc. Keep refining over time, and you will learn how to reach the people who matter most to your company.

Beneath the targeting facets, you have the option to enable Audience Expansion. If selected, LinkedIn’s algorithms will identify additional audience members similar to your targeting criteria. As you’re beginning to test and refine, this option will help you reach a broader (but still relevant) audience and generate more data to help you optimize.

Use Matched Audiences to customize LinkedIn targeting with your own business data. This set of targeting options helps you re-engage website visitors with Website Retargeting, nurture prospects with Contact Targeting, and run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns with Account Targeting.