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Customize your targeting for powerful results

Whether you want to nurture warm leads, sell to existing accounts, re-engage people who have visited your site, or find more people who match an audience already familiar with your business, customizing your ad targeting can help. Matched Audiences is a set of targeting options to combine your business data with LinkedIn’s professional data. This results in a richer marketing strategy that builds on what you’re already doing.

Matched Audiences includes Retargeting, Contact Targeting, Account Targeting and Lookalike Targeting. Read on to learn about each option and get useful tips.

Retargeting

Retargeting helps your brand stand out throughout the buying process with members who visited your website, engaged with your ads on LinkedIn or soon a LinkedIn Event. Setup is easy.

    1. If retargeting website visitors, start by installing the LinkedIn Insight Tag. This helps you track conversions, retarget and get real-time insights on the professional traits and content preferences of your website visitors.

    2. Define your audience by going to the account assets tab, click on Matched Audiences and Create an audience. You can choose to retarget by website, video ads, Lead Gen Forms or soon a LinkedIn Event. (Each audience must generate at least 300 people before ads can be delivered to that audience.)

    •  Compare the performance of different website audiences (like your blog vs. a lead generation page) to learn which types of content drive results.

Once you’ve created your Retargeting audience, use these tips to gather insights and optimize your campaigns.

  •  Tailor ad content based on what visitors viewed or what action they’ve taken. For example, remind prospects of a product or service they viewed on your site or saw in your video ad.

  •  A/B test the performance of different retargeting audiences (like those who visited your blog vs. a lead page) to learn which types of content drive results.

  •  Utilize a mix of ad formats tailored to where someone may be in the purchase process.

  •  Avoid layering on additional targeting options.

Contact Targeting

Contact Targeting helps you market to (or exclude) LinkedIn members who are part of your email contact lists. You can get started with a secure CSV upload or a data integration.

1) To upload a CSV list of email addresses, follow these steps or watch this video.

2) To connect to contact management platforms, follow these steps.


Here are some tips for using Contact Targeting:

• Deliver highly relevant ads to leads based on their stage in your sales funnel.

• Design targeted campaigns to win back churned customers.

• Exclude existing customers from prospecting campaigns. Just switch the action from Include to Exclude when setting the target audience for each new campaign.

• Divide your contacts into customized audience segments such as prospects, current clients, and churned customers. Target specific groups like prospects who never open emails.

Account Targeting

Account Targeting helps you run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns by matching your target companies against the 12+ million LinkedIn Pages on LinkedIn. 

The template will support relevant company information including website, stock symbol, and location. 


Follow these steps or watch this video to learn how to upload the CSV template of company names.


Here are some tips for using Account Targeting:

• Market to professionals who make or influence buying decisions at your target accounts. You can do this by combining a target account list with targeting facets (such as Job Title or Job Seniority).

• Don’t add too many facets, or else you’ll risk hyper-targeting. Keep your target audience over 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads, and over 15,000 for Message Ads (Campaign Manager will show estimated reach).

• Include at least 1,000 companies in your CSV account list. Going too small will limit the scale and delivery of your campaign.

• Segment your account list by including filters for Company Industry or Company Size.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences helps you find new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts.

Here are some tips when it comes to Lookalike Audiences:

• Test various audience types  - No two audiences will perform the same. Test a website audience vs an uploaded list of contacts to discover what performs best.

• Identify an audience for each phase of the funnel. Consider creating a lookalike audience from your website’s homepage visitors for brand awareness campaigns or one from lead page visitors for lower-funnel initiatives.

• Limit layering of additional facets (such as  job function, seniority, or company) to avoid hyper-targeting.

• Review campaign demographics to uncover top engaging list or website audience segments and create a lookalike audience using your best performing lists or website audiences.