Breaking Down LinkedIn’s New Custom Ad Targeting Features
Bonnie Winter
Bonnie Winter
LinkedIn may be a little late to the custom ad targeting party, but they’re showing up in a big way. As the world’s largest social media network for professionals, LinkedIn has become the go-to for networkers, job seekers and just about every other work-related social networking activity. Though a bit behind Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn sets itself apart by having an audience of users already in the “let’s do business” mindset. Let’s take a quick look at their new custom ad targeting features.
Website Retargeting
Retargeting can be a great way to keep your brand top of mind to your website visitors. On average, users stick around a website for a paltry 59 seconds before moving on. That’s very little time to not only capture their interests and build brand awareness, but also make a sale. With retargeting, a simple cookie is dropped onto a user’s browser while they’re on your website. Once they move on, your ad magically appears on various sites they visit. Voila! The user is suddenly reminded of how amazing your product is and they’re now more likely (70 percent more, in fact) to convert.
On LinkedIn, marketers start by naming their audience and listing the URLs of the websites they’d like to be served to users navigating the social site. For example, a campaign audience might be “blog viewers” and the URLs would be of a landing page, call to action page or specific blog on your website. You can even add multiple URLs and use keywords to fine tune their audiences.
Email Contact Targeting
Marketers can also launch custom targeted ads based on their email lists or from lists saved in Eloqua, LiveRamp and Marketo. Custom ad targeting based off your email database may be more relevant to LinkedIn users because they’re usually current customers or leads ready to be converted. If you don’t have one of the integrated platforms, you can upload CSV files of up to 300,000 email addresses to target. LinkedIn suggests uploading lists of 10,000 contacts or more to achieve the best results.
Account Targeting
This aspect of Matched Audiences is great for B2B companies. Marketers simply upload a CSV file of company names to the LinkedIn database and name the audience accordingly. Up to 300,000 names can be listed and chances are, your clients’ accounts will be among the over eight million companies who have a LinkedIn presence. Business may want to utilize this feature for exciting new product launches or soliciting routine customers to reorder products from your business.
All three of these custom ad targeting options can be extremely helpful for companies because the audiences have already engaged with the business in some way. Whether through email contact, current or former accounts or website visitors, they’re probably more likely to convert and are further down the marketing funnel, since they’ve already interacted with your company.
At Pyxl, we have a team of experts ready to assist with your sponsored social campaigns and other marketing initiatives. Let’s start a conversation and discover how we can help you successfully reach your customers.
More details on their new custom ad targeting below
Updated: Apr 13, 2022
Kati Terzinski
Erin Murray