22 Jul New LinkedIn Ad Targeting Capabilities

LinkedIn has been stepping up their ad targeting capabilities to better compete with the options of other platforms. They recently opened up Objective Based Advertising, updated their Campaign Manager, and will launch retargeting for engaged users. We conclude with some tips to improving your LinkedIn ad targeting.

LinkedIn Ad Targeting

Objective Based Advertising

LinkedIn recently announced that Objective Based Advertising (OBA) will be coming out of Beta and will be available to all advertisers. Objective Based Advertising will make it easier for advertisers to pick the objective that aligns best with their business goals. The step-by-step process to build your campaign starts with choosing a language, selecting audience location(s), then choosing your targeting perimeters. Targeting perimeters include: Company, Demographics, Education, Job Experience, and Interests.

The final step is selecting your objective. In addition to demographic targeting you can choose ‘Match Audiences’ which include:

• Website Retargeting: Re-engage your website visitors
• Contact Targeting: Cultivate prospects by uploading an existing contact list
• Account Targeting: Reach decision makers using account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns by matching your target companies against the 8+ million LinkedIn Pages

With the launch of OBA, LinkedIn has also redesigned the Campaign Manager. The updates to campaign manager include: an easier to navigate interface, a new forecasting panel with estimated results based on existing benchmarks, live ad previews, and a redesigned targeting experience.

Retargeting Engaged Users

Over the last few months LinkedIn has been prioritizing engagement with the introduction of LinkedIn Live and post reactions. LinkedIn is expanding that focus to ads by finally adding the ability to retarget users who engaged with ads on their platform. This feature is expected to roll out in 2020, but is a significant improvement since currently, advertisers can only see clicks that come from certain audience groups.

LinkedIn is being more transparent about the types of ads that perform best. They announced a monthly series called ‘LinkedIn Ad Review’ to highlight a top performing piece of content and provide tips and insights on why it performed well. The first review called out these takeaways:

Tips for Improving Your LinkedIn Ads

• Get specific– don’t be afraid to tailor your content to the audiences that will find it the most valuable
• Make it human– adding a relatable element to your content helps your audience seem themselves in it
• Don’t overthink it—keep it simple

Be sure to bookmark the Ad Review page and check back for new best practices.

Also, if you need help with your social ad targeting, be sure to check out our eBook for targeting best practices.