LinkedIn Ads Audience Insights Tool

LinkedIn’s Audience Insights is an area within campaign manager where advertisers can learn more about which attributes make up the audiences that you have created within LinkedIn. In this video, we’re going to show you where you can find audience insights and there’s a couple ways to get there depending on which audiences you’re looking at and most importantly, we’re going to spend almost the whole time looking at what data you can find within audience insights. There’s not a ton of data but it’s extremely valuable information that can really help you optimize your campaigns. So, let’s not waste any more time. Let’s jump in to Audience Insights.

If we’re talking about looking at Audience Insights, we should probably head to the audience section. So, within Campaign Manager, head on over to the left navigation, you want to find the little compass icon, you’ll see this plan pop up. So, let’s click on this and the first option we have would be Audiences. If we look at the blue button, here we see, this is the area where you would create or manage your audiences. Right above the blue button, we see two tabs for matched and saved audiences. We already have a video about saved audiences. If you’re not familiar with those are, you could check out that video here, but I’m going to start with that tab first.

When you are building a new campaign, you selected all the targeting options that you want. You can save the combination of targeting and exclusions to use for any future campaigns. If you have a target audience that you are going to use over and over again, this is a very helpful feature to help you save time for any future campaign creation. So, to review insights for a saved campaign, you just need to go down to whichever saved audience that you want to see and just click on it and then you’re taken to the audience insights. Now, heading back, we are in saved audiences. This time I’m going to go over to matched. These are the main audiences that you can create within LinkedIn. You’re retargeting audiences, contactless uploads, company list uploads, all those sorts of audiences.

There are two ways where you can access audience insights. First is to go to the three dots next to the audience’s name. If you click on it, you will see the option to generate insights or the other option would be to select the audience. And as you can see, I’m selecting multiple audiences, so this would be the preferred route if you want to see multiple audiences combined and then you can click on Insights. Just for clarification, I went back unselected a few and just chose the audience that has the most members. In this case, it is a company list that we’ve upload to do some ABM targeting. Up above, you will see that have five options. Summary, content, location, member, and company. We will go into each of these tabs, but the summary tab which we’re on right now has a little bit of the remaining four tabs that we see content up top. There’s a summary of the audience, member attributes, and then companies.

The last portion on the bottom is just showcasing the audience that we have selected and the main audience stats that we could review on the match audience’s section. Pretty much a copy and paste. So, we go back up. Let’s start looking at these tabs one by one. First, we have Content, and there LinkedIn is telling us content is going to be general interest the audience has. If you’re keeping up with LinkedIn advertising, they did introduce interest targeting not too long ago. So, from this company list that we have uploaded, we can see which interest are most important to the users who make up this company list audience. LinkedIn says, “interest information is based on or inferred from actions and engagement that they take with content on LinkedIn”.

So, we see I’m only on page one, but the top 10 interest based upon the number of users within those interest starts with consumer electronics, electronics, business administration, robotics, and a few other ones down the line. This is an actual client account of mine and I’m glad I’m reviewing this audience in Audience Insights, because I can tell you right off the bat, there are few interests within the top ten that don’t really fit the target audience we’re going after. I may want to test out excluding some of these interests to see if I can better optimize the targeting for that particular paying to see if we can either lower our cost per lead or if not, make sure that the lead quality is better.

My client is okay having less leads if it’s making it easier for their sales team to close the leads that we do bring in. Like I said, I was only on page one. We can see I can just keep going right down the line until we get all the way to the end with a very low percentage. Not saying you have to look at every single one. I’d really just focus on the big ones. Next, we can go up and look at location. Where is the target audience in our list located? And yes, this client does have target locations across the world. So, the heat map that we’re looking at is pretty accurate and right now, we are looking at it on the city level. If we open this up, you can go to the state level. I understand not every area in the world calls it state but go back up, change it to country level and then one more time, we have continent. I honestly wish that they just colored in the exact state, country, or continent and just made the shades of blue darker than the other or possibly make the colors different.

Right now, this actually looks kind of silly and I actually do prefer the city level. I think it provides a better heat map but it all depends on where you’re targeting. For clarification, location is determined by what the user in your audience has chosen within their LinkedIn profile. Then, if we scroll down, we get the list of locations sorted by the most audience members within the chosen locations. Now, we are using this audience within the campaign and within our location targeting within the campaign, we’re only targeting specific countries. We’re not getting this specific with our location targeting like options you see. It’s just where the people say that they’re from.

Going back up again, I’m going to click on member and this is another option that we like to look at to give us more ideas for audience attribute targeting options as well as exclusion ideas. When you are building a new campaign, you’re choosing your audience attribute targets. Within the forecasting, there is an option for you to see certain functions that make up your current targeting selections, but LinkedIn is only going to show you the top 5 or 6. Looking at the Audience Insights based upon the specific audience can help you gain deeper insights and more options. After I have an audience built within campaign manager, I do like to come in and look at specific audiences and this is a perfect example why.

Within this company list which if you didn’t catch earlier was about 1.8 million users, we definitely don’t want to target everyone in there. So, when we review the audience insights, I can easily say, we’re not trying to talk to anyone with IT responsibilities. We don’t want to talk to anyone from a support team and when we add up just those two, that’s almost 200,000 people that we can potentially exclude from our target audience. Yes, it’s less reach, yes, it’s less engagement but we know people who have these job functions aren’t even influencers within the company to talk to the right people. We’re just potentially wasting our ad spend.

On the flip side, if you’re reviewing an audience like a company list that we’re looking at right now and you find out that that particular audience is performing very well. But certain contact and company list will have a ceiling unless you keep adding more contacts or company names to the list. So, we can come in and look at job functions, it could give us new ideas of a different campaign to create to help test expanding our reach. I can say for this example, the top four functions are definitely the core responsibilities of users we are trying to reach. So, I can create a different campaign targeting these functions and any other relevant ones that I feel are valuable and then layer on with other attributes like company industry. Maybe relevant member groups if they’re large enough. Maybe specific certifications if it makes sense and then I could test a higher-level audience to try to see if I can replicate that success if I feel like I’m maxing out my current list uploads.

Next, I’m going to go up to company which is the final tab in Audience Insights at least for now and here we see the companies that make up the audience. Now, this one’s kind of not fair because the audience we’re reviewing in audience insights is a company list upload. So, all the companies on here are the ones I had on the list. Let’s do something different. Let’s go back and select a different audience. There’s a company list one down there, 1.8 million users. I’m choosing anyone who’s visited the company page on LinkedIn within the past 365 days. This one has only 13,000 users right now. Let’s get insights. Head back to the company section and there we see the list of companies is different.

Now, I love this tab for reviewing any non-company target list audiences. Purely for the reason to give me new ideas to expand upon my ABM efforts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is flat out telling me out of the people who visited your LinkedIn company page, here are the companies that make a that audience. As I move around a little bit and hover over one of the employee names, you can see in the very lower left, there’s the LinkedIn page URL. One of the key components in your company list targeting options to match with people who work for this particular company. You can learn more about company matched audiences in this video right here, but I can just scrape all these.

If I feel that they are relevant to who I want to target, create a new company match list, upload it to LinkedIn, wait the 48 hours for it to populate, and then I could start testing out new ABM targets within my LinkedIn campaigns. We only created that company page visit audience a couple months ago. So, it only has like two months’ worth of data. I set the cookie length for that retargeting audience to be 365 days. So, I can keep coming back to Audience Insights keep checking which companies are making up this audience and then keep updating my company targets for the campaign. I know you can do the list upload or you can just hand select company names when building a new campaign.

If I scroll down a little bit more, we get more information than just the company name. Maybe company is important to you. We’re working with a different software client right now that only wants to reach enterprise companies. I understand this isn’t the same client but let’s pretend it is. If I was looking at this company page visits retargeting audience, I’d be able to see that a good percentage of people within this retargeting audience work for companies with 500 employees or less. Even if you toss in the 500 to 1000 employees. If I’m only trying to reach enterprise companies, this gives me good information that I should probably go back and exclude these companies. Yes, it’s something that you should probably proactively do before you even launch the campaign if you know you’re trying to reach enterprise but you get what I’m trying to say. And remember, when we were looking at job functions, how we said you can review them in audience insights, potentially find new ones to target with additional layers like industry.

Well, here we go. I see a few at the bottom like IT services that don’t apply to this account so I can go back and exclude that from my current campaigns but definitely almost all of them in the top 10 are very relevant to the target audience that we’re trying to reach. So, if I’m going and creating a new campaign to want to expand beyond the contact and company list audiences that we’re doing, I can take the relevant job functions that I’m seeing within Audience Insights, layer them in with the appropriate industries that make sense and start testing that new audience. And going down a little bit, we get the final information under the company’s tab and that is growth rate. Another fairly newer feature within LinkedIn.

For clarification, company growth is determined by the number of LinkedIn users that say they for this particular company. If we scroll back up and then I can look at editing this audience. So, we see this is the main core audience that we were looking at within the audience insights but remember we found a few functions and industries that don’t really fit who we’re trying to go after. So, I can choose to exclude these from my particular audience and I’m going to handle that right now. Now I’ve selected the options for now. I can always come back and edit it again. Here I can click apply.

Now my Audience Insights is updated. I can go back, review all of the information, review all the percentages and the amount of people within each of the different segments and if I want to, I can go to manage and choose to save this as a new audience. Quickly name the audience and then I can go and save it. There we see, I have a new saved audience. If I want to, I can just go and create a campaign right away to use this new audience. If I find something of value but for now, let’s just go back. Head on over to save audiences and there is the new audience’s name that we created after adjusting an old one with the data that we found within Audience Insights.

The initial company page saved audience was a little over 13,000 users. Now that I added the exclusions, it’s down to 9,400 users. While it’s not a ton of information that you get within Audience Insights, it’s still valuable information. For the accounts that we have with robust audiences, we’ve been able to find really good nuggets out of each of the audiences where we can take and either find certain areas that we need to exclude from our audience targets or more importantly, give us new ideas of different functions, company names, or a combination of a variety of targeting features for us to test. A lot of times there are areas that we’ve never tested within the account before. This has been a very welcomed feature within LinkedIn campaign manager to assess current audience performance and find new options. So, we recommend going in and reviewing all of your eligible audiences to see how you can improve them to better optimize your LinkedIn ad campaigns. If you have any other questions with audience insights, we’re happy to answer them so please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan