Best Practices for Matched Audiences

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

Website Retargeting helps you market to LinkedIn members who have visited your website. Setup is easy. Follow these steps or watch this video to learn how:

    1. Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website, so you can track your visitors.

    2. If you already have an Insight Tag installed for conversion tracking, you do not need to install another one.

    3. Create audiences to retarget by defining website audiences. (Each audience must generate at least 300 people before ads can be delivered to that audience.)

Once you’ve started with Website Retargeting, use these tips to gather insights and optimize your campaigns.

  •  Tailor ad content based on what visitors viewed. For example, remind prospects of a product or service they viewed on your site.

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

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

To upload a CSV list of company names, follow these steps or watch this video.

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 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.