Learn tips for setting up your campaign’s target audience to drive results. The right target audience allows you to focus your campaign on the LinkedIn members most likely to take action on your ads.
Here's a tip
If you’re launching an Accelerate campaign, we automatically create an audience optimized towards your objective by using your product name and description, audience signals you select, and historical data from your account’s previous campaigns. Keep in mind, not all audience targeting facets are available for Accelerate campaigns. Learn more about targeting for Accelerate campaigns.
The Locations attribute is required to create a campaign audience. After selecting location(s) to include or exclude in your target audience, you can select optional targeting facets to expand or narrow your audience.
Learn more about the targeting facets available in Campaign Manager.
Below are recommendations about how to use targeting facets to effectively reach the best audience for your marketing goals.
Here's a tip
If you have a self-service account, we’ll also suggest a target audience for your campaign. You can use these suggestions, edit the suggested audience, or reset the audience if you’d like to choose your audience without suggestions.
Job Functions
Combine the Job Functions option with the Job Seniorities option to reach decision-makers with specific expertise. For example, if you’re looking to reach decision-makers in the IT function, try targeting the Information Technology, Engineering, and Operations functions and pairing that with Job Seniorities attributes of Senior, Manager, Director, VP, CXO, and Owner.
Job Titles
Avoid limiting your audience by targeting only a few job titles. When you begin entering a title in the tool, Campaign Manager will auto-suggest other relevant titles that you may want to add. Include all relevant job titles to ensure your campaign’s reach.
Broaden your audience by targeting both current and past holders of a given job title. These members may have changed roles but still have a skill set relevant to your business. Select current or past in the Job Titles dropdown.
Job Seniorities
For some campaigns, targeting by seniority can be an effective way to reach those with influence over a buying decision.
Member Skills
Skills include those explicitly added by members in their skills section as well as keywords and phrases mentioned throughout their profile and summary. LinkedIn uses modeling to infer skills from a member’s job title and job description.
Skills targeting is an alternative way to reach professionals with a specialized expertise when Job Title targeting may not be as effective. For example, if your business sells project management software, job titles may not be as effective given several roles may have a need for project management software. However, Member Skills targeting allows you to target specific competencies that may span a broad range of job titles.
When using skills targeting, consider pairing this with the Job Functions or Job Seniorities option. This helps to focus the reach of your offer on a more relevant audience. For example, we recommend targeting Member Skills with Job Seniorities to reach decision-makers that hold the desired skill set.
Company Names
You can target up to 200 different companies using the Company Names option. For those who’d like to target an even larger list of companies, Matched Audiences allows you to upload a list of up to 300,000 companies. Using the Company Industries facet allows you to target more broadly than specific company names. An organization may operate in many industries, however only the primary industry of operation as listed on their LinkedIn Page will be recognized.
Member Schools
Targeting by school may decrease your audience size since it isn’t a required field when creating a LinkedIn profile. Make sure you add all subsidiary schools when trying to reach an entire college or university. For example, when advertising to Harvard students, add Harvard University, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law, Harvard Medical, etc. as they have separate LinkedIn Pages for universities.
Degrees
Choosing to target by Degrees can sometimes limit your audience size because the Degrees profile field is not always populated by members.
Fields of Study
For some campaigns, Fields of Study can be used as a proxy for skills or expertise in a given field, especially for recent graduates.
Member Interests
Member Interests targeting is an effective way to reach a range of members based on topics or categories they’re interested in most and is most effective for campaigns with awareness and consideration objectives. Interest targeting can also help you reach a unique set of audiences when other targeting options are too narrow.
For example, if you’re looking to reach people with an Interest in business travel, Member Skills targeting may not be as effective as it would reach those who have that skill listed on their profile (e.g. Travel Agents). However, interest targeting allows you to reach an audience with an interest in the topic (e.g. Corporate Executives or Consultants who travel for work).
When using Member Interests targeting, consider pairing this with Job Functions or Job Seniorities to focus your content on a more relevant audience.
Learn more about Member Interests targeting options.
Member Groups
LinkedIn Groups are online communities where members who share interests or professional associations can gather, discover new information, and ask questions. For example, for those looking to reach finance professionals, relevant Groups may include the Finance Club (840,000+ professionals), Banking Careers (500,000+ professionals), or Finance Plus: Private Equity, Venture Capital and M&A news.
Important to know
Beginning on May 15, 2024, Member Groups will no longer be available as a targeting attribute for the European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland.
Reach for some attributes or audiences may be limited when targeting within the European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland (CH). We recommend the following when using certain audience targeting features:
- If you’re targeting Location, Member Gender, Member Interests, or Member Traits, we recommend you continue to use your selected option and explore other audiences or attributes to supplement your reach.
- If you’re targeting Member Age, we recommend adding job seniorities, years of experience, or job titles.
- If you’re creating a retargeting Matched Audience based on a LinkedIn Event, we recommend creating a scaled audience with our predictive audiences, using your events attendee list, and creating a new contact list as the data source.
For Member Groups targeting:
| Campaigns created before May 15, 2024 that target the EEA or Switzerland and Member Groups | Up to May 14, 2024 - Edits to campaigns can be made without requiring either the removal of Member Groups as a targeting facet or EEA or Switzerland targeting. On or after May 15, 2024 - Edits to these campaigns will require either the removal of Member Groups as a targeting facet or EEA or Switzerland targeting to save and activate your campaign. |
| Campaigns created on or after May 15, 2024 that target the EEA or Switzerland | Member Group targeting is no longer available. |
| Campaigns that don't target the EEA or Switzerland and target Member Groups | There are no changes to these campaigns. |
We recommend reviewing our targeting best practices and exploring and testing different targeting facets that fit your ideal audience profile. You can also use insights gained from your campaign demographics to see who interacted with your ads to optimize your targeting strategy.
Learn more about targeting options for LinkedIn Ads and how you can use AND-OR targeting for audience reach.
When you add attributes to the INCLUDE section of targeting setup, your audience size will increase. If you add attributes to the Narrow audience further section or the EXCLUDE section, your audience size will decrease.
As you select your targeting options, you can see an estimate of the audience size you'll be able to reach in the forecasted results window.
Learn more about best practices for target audience size and how to apply AND-OR logic to manage audience size in Campaign Manager.
In addition to building your audience by selecting attributes, you can use these features to target the right audience:
Once your campaign has launched, you can better understand who’s interacting with your ads through anonymized campaign demographic data. Use these insights to inform your targeting choices, ad content, segmentation, and testing.
You can run two similar campaigns with variations in targeting criteria to see which attributes are more effective for meeting your advertising goals.
To create test campaigns:
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Edit the targeting attributes for the duplicate campaign.
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Launch campaign.
Change only a few criteria at a time to isolate which part of your test impacted performance. Try testing Member Skills versus Job Titles or Company Industries versus Job Functions. Analyze the results of your campaigns to determine the best combination of attributes to reach the right audience and drive results.
Once you know more about your audience, you can begin to tailor content to be more relevant for each segment and test ad variations to learn what performs best.
For example, if you’re targeting C-level executives, deliver thought leadership content pieces that address the challenges they face. If you’re targeting senior individual contributors who can influence buying decisions, try more tactical content.
Learn more
- Explore our free, 45-minute learning course, Using LinkedIn's Ad Targeting.
- Learn more from our LinkedIn Targeting guide.