LinkedIn Upgrades Audience Targeting 

LinkedIn has just pushed live several new tools to help marketers on its platform bolster the effectiveness of their targeting, in keeping with similar launches from earlier in the year

The most notable update of the recent release is perhaps the new audience forecasting information which sits within the Campaign Manager dashboard.

The improved campaign forecasting panel enables you to view the make-up of your target audience right from the dashboard.

It is possible to customise the panel to surface specific professional characteristics, like top industries, years of experience, or company sizes for your audience. 

The new feature ties in well with LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences (think Facebook Custom Audiences). Since once you have uploaded an email database, it is possible to overlay it with demographic insights on the audience. A feature which Facebook does not allow.

In addition, Advertisers will now be able to create targeting queries using Boolean logic.

Abhishek Shrivastava, Director of Product at LinkedIn

“For example, let’s say you wanted to target people using Director job seniority and the Finance job function. Previously, within a campaign, you could only do so by targeting Directors in Finance roles.

Now, with Boolean targeting, you can use a single campaign to reach people who are Directors at any job function, as well as people in Finance roles of any seniority.

This gives you greater flexibility to determine the kinds of professionals who see your ads.”

Booleans have been a popular LinkedIn feature with recruiters for years, helping head-hunters drill down into user profiles using and/or search queries.

Being able to use them for marketing campaign targeting will allow marketers to build larger audiences for campaigns as they can target multiple profile characteristics.

Improved Demographic Audience Insights

Alongside targeting improvements LinkedIn’s also introducing new demographic reporting metrics that will begin rolling out to all advertisers in the coming weeks.

LinkedIn already offers pretty decent demographic reporting.

However, the latest update will allow markers to understand which audiences are:

1. Watching video ads
2. Filling out Lead Gen Forms
3. Opening Sponsored InMail messages

With this data, you can demonstrate to your exec team or clients what kinds of professionals are becoming quality leads for your business or engaging with your content.

Something which is no doubt helpful, especially for organisations with long lead or sale cycles.

LinkedIn Get’s Serious About Targeting

The platform’s latest targeting updates build upon improvements rolled out earlier this year, including lookalike audiences, interest targeting with Bing search insights, and audience templates.

LinkedIn has also invested heavily this year in improving the smarts of its targeting with the acquisition of advertising tech business Drawbridge in June.

Alongside expanding its big data footprint with a tie-up between Adobe and parent company Microsoft, accelerating account-based marketing for their joint customers.

Again, think Facebook Custom Audiences if you’re unfamiliar with the account-based marketing term.

2019 has been a massive year for marketing innovation at LinkedIn.

While communicators have started to wake up to the potential for organic LinkedIn activity locally, focusing on corporate comms, the paid side of things has yet to hit it’s stride.

However, with an ever expanding marketing feature set and strong user engagement figures 2020 will surely see a steep uplift in budgets.