Linkedin Ads Audience Filters

Let’s get into a fun one here which is Linkedin targeting - the actual audience that you can target with your Linkedin ads and what filters you have to work with here. 

Linkedin’s targeting capabilities are probably one of the top 3 reasons people actually love Linkedin ads and one of the main reasons they are so effective. 

It’s also part of the reason the cost per click and cost per lead are a bit higher compared to maybe facebook because the quality is just better. 

Today I’m just going to quickly run through the basics so you know what’s possible. 

The two main sections of linked ads targeting are Audiences and Audience attributes. 

Audiences are those that you either import yourself or that are created through your custom audience functions like conversions, website visitors, or specific page visitors, company page visitors, lead gen form opens and so forth. 

This one is used heavily for retargeting. 

The Audience attributes is the main filters used to create a cold audience to target. Main subsections you have are:

Company

Demographics

Education

Job Experience

Interests and Traits

Let’s run through these next.

Company filters:

The main one used here is just industries.  There are also some others like growth rate, follower of, company connections, and category but Industry is really what most people use and very rarely does anyone use the others. 

Oops, I missed one here - Company size is under company and it’s one of the top 5 filters everyone should be using. 1-10-10-50 50-200 etc. Almost every business out there does way better when they know what company size they do best with. 

Demographics:

This is just member age and gender.

Education is the next one. 

Job experience. 

This is where you can target by job function, job seniority, job title, member skills, and years of experience. 

You have to choose between either function plus seniority or just job title as it won’t let you pair job title with seniority or function (which makes sense as the job title pretty much should tell you both of those as well). 

Interests and Traits

This one is kind of cool. It’s a bit like Facebook but better because you are combining this interest filter with all the other laser-like filters. 

So for example I could target financial advisors that have an interest in marketing automation and hit them with ads about an automated Linkedin outreach service. That extra insight as to which financial advisors are more likely to vibe with our offer can make a big difference in ROI. 

Some other cool traits/interests in here are - job seeker, job hopper, active on Linkedin, open to education, recently switched jobs, open to relocation, recently promoted, and then you can dive into either general interests (sales/marketing/health/business, etc) or product interests which would be like CRM software, health products, marketing automation. 

After you get the right targeting filters in place, you can create an exclusion list using the same filters or uploaded list, and then you are ready for bidding and almost ready to launch!

In the next episode, I’ll touch on bidding basics, and then we will actually do the ad setup and launch on of these bad boys. 

Keep listening after we get through the basics and I’ll walk you through more advanced strategies soon.