Introduction
LinkedIn advertising offers a range of audience options, for use in your B2B marketing campaigns. These audience attributes are built using highly accurate first party data and can be used to build audiences tailored to your marketing objectives. In this article we will review the audience attributes available in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Job Experience
The first audience segment that we will look at is job experience, which is divided in several sub-categories. This includes, titles, functions, seniority, member skills & years experience. It is important to note that certain combinations of these parameters can not be used together. For example, you can not combine job title & job seniority attributes in the same campaign (in an “AND” statement).
Job Titles
This is the most granular level of targeting, allowing you to pick users with specific job titles to include in your audience. This can be useful if you have created ideal customer profiles that map to your product/service. There are ~25,000 different job titles that you can target. When searching for job titles the user interface will suggest ~10 titles based on your search however, using the LinkedIn API, you can get a complete list of job titles that are available for use.
At Digital Expanse, we have several custom tools built with this API and have put together a comprehensive list of job titles. You can find these in our LinkedIn targeting options spreadsheet.
Job functions
Job functions is a broader targeting parameter, with 26* different built in functions that you can use to narrow down your audience. This is a good approach if you have a function specific solution. For example, as SaaS company offering HR software could benefit from using function level targeting.
Job Seniorities
Job seniority targeting allows you to cast a broader net for you targeting options and is often used as an “AND” parameter. There are 10* different seniority levels available for targeting.
- Unpaid
- Training
- Entry
- Senior
- Manager
- Director
- VP
- CXO
- Partner
- Owner
*as of date of writing
Member skills
Member skill targeting allows advertisers to tailor their ad campaigns to LinkedIn members who possess specific skills that would benefit from their product or service. This feature leverages skills users have added to their profiles and ensures that your ads are displayed to professionals with the expertise and qualifications that are relevant to your product/service.
Years of Experience
This is best used as an “AND” parameter, and allows you to add a range of years experience from 1 - 12+.
Company
The second segment of targeting options relates to a company associated with a users profile. It’s important to note that some user profiles have multiple companies associated with there account
Company Name
The most direct form of targeting is targeting users with a specific company associated with there profile. This is common as part of an account based marketing (ABM) strategy). We’d recommend uploading a company list as an audience instead of individually adding companies to a campaign.
Company connections
This allows you to broaden the net of your company name targeting by also reaching first degree connections of users associated with given companies.
Company Revenue
This segment allows you to target companies within certain revenue brackets. These brackets are set in USD and are:
- Under $1m
- $1m - $10m
- $10 - $100m
- $100m - $1b
- $1b+
Company Industries
The company industry segment allows you to target members that are associated with companies in specific industries.
Company Size
Similar to company revenue, this option is bracketed by size thresholds. These thresholds are:
- Myself only
- 2 - 10
- 11 - 50
- 51 - 200
- 201 - 500
- 501 - 1000
- 1001 - 5000
- 5001 - 10000
- 10000+
Company Growth Rate
Company growth rate is specifically related to headcount growth and not revenue growth. This is a year on year comparison and there are 5 different brackets to choose from.
- Negative growth companies
- 0 - 3%
- 3% - 10%
- 10% - 20%
- 20%+
Demographic targeting
This is a small targeting option that allows you to target by gender and by age. The age brackets include:
- 18 - 24
- 25 - 34
- 35 - 54
- 55+
Interests & Traits
Interests and traits is split into 3 sub categories, groups, interests and traits.
Member Groups
Member groups, similar to companies is a search able list that can target any public groups on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, the UI does not provide group size, so it’s best to manually check this to determine if your audience size will be big enough.
Member Interests
This is further sub dived into general interests, product interest and service interests. The most useful of these for your B2B campaigns will be the product and service interest as you can align these with you product or service. Product interests a heavy on software, while service interests have a broader range of targeting options.
Education
This is the final option available for use in audience attributes. This is split into, degrees, fields of study and member schools. All these options are search only and are generally used for recruitment related ads.
