One of the biggest benefits of digital advertising is the ability to narrowly target specific audiences. On LinkedIn, that audience is already narrowed to business professionals, but with LinkedIn Profile Targeting through Microsoft Advertising, you can take it even further.
Outside of LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising is the only digital advertising platform to offer LinkedIn Profile Targeting. Available with Microsoft Search and Microsoft Audience Network native and search ads, LinkedIn Profile Targeting allows you to market to business influencers, decision-makers, and executives with content that aligns with their specific interests. This unique level of targeting often nets advertisers higher engagement and conversion on their ads—and you could leverage it too.
How you can use LinkedIn Profile Targeting with Microsoft Advertising
You can target highly relevant audiences using LinkedIn profile information in text ads, Dynamic Search Ads, Microsoft Audience Network, and Shopping Campaigns.
This partnership allows you to use real, member-generated demographic data to reach the right audience by targeting their company, industry, and job function.
LinkedIn data is differentiated because members have professional incentives to keep their profiles accurate and up to date, so you know you’re not just taking a shot in the dark at reaching the right audience.
With LinkedIn Profile Targeting, you can reach:
- +750 million people on LinkedIn
- 180 million senior-level influencers
- 63 million decision-makers
- 10 million C-level executives
Highly relevant audience available with LinkedIn Profile Targeting
The available LinkedIn profile dimensions can help you target the right audience. Narrow in on various details that no other platform can match: company, job function, and business industry are the targeting options available in LinkedIn that you can apply to your Microsoft Advertising campaigns.
- Company
Examples: Microsoft, Verizon, Adobe, and others.
- Job function
Example: engineering, sales, consulting, and others.
- Industry
Example: retail, banking, marketing, hospitality, and others.
There are currently 80,000 companies, 148 industries, and 26 job functions available to target in LinkedIn.
The ability to narrowly target your ads helps get you closer to the exact audience you need, so your ads are shown to people most likely to be interested. This way, you maximize your ad spend and incur fewer wasted impressions.
Achieve greater ad performance
Advertisers who apply LinkedIn Profile Targeting to their ads are seeing better results. Our internal data shows that ads targeted to LinkedIn audiences saw up to 16% greater click-through rates (CTR) than the same ads shown to non-audience targeted users.
Not only do advertisers see a great CTR, they also net better conversion rates. Ads using LinkedIn Profile Targeting see up to 64% greater conversion rate (CVR) than the same ads shown to non-audience targeted users.
How to apply LinkedIn Profile Targeting to your Microsoft Advertising campaigns
Targeting users based on the information in their LinkedIn professional profiles is quick and easy. You’ll use the same familiar campaign creation and management tools to set up your LinkedIn Profile Targeting in minutes.
Before creating a campaign or ad group, it's important to decide on the dimensions you'd like to target (company, job function, and industry) and the segments within those dimensions (Microsoft, marketing, consumer goods).
Just like with campaigns, you can edit existing LinkedIn profile targets or create new ones in ad group settings.
LinkedIn Profile Targeting options
You can target up to 1,000 companies per campaign. Still, you may want to target even more than that, and you can by creating up to 20 ad groups, each targeting 1,000 different companies. What’s more, each ad groups within your campaign can have up to 1,000 different LinkedIn targeting segments. That’s massive, highly targeted scale for your ad campaigns!
Reporting on performance
Of course you’ll want to see which of the many LinkedIn Profile Targeting demographics are working best for your campaigns, and you can in the reporting dashboard.
You can easily pull a report to help you evaluate how well you’re targeting professionals by viewing the “professional demographics” found under the “targeting” section in Microsoft Advertising under “reports.” This shows your performance segmented by company, industry, and job title.
Within those demographics, you’ll see various performance stats, including:
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
- Conversions
- Spend
- Impressions
- Clicks
These reporting stats help you understand specifically who and where your ads are impacting the most and those that you might improve to further optimize your performance.
Ultimately, LinkedIn Profile Targeting is another way to reach your audience with Microsoft Advertising unlike with any other platform. It’s a great way to enhance your current campaigns, to create niche audiences, and to test different types of creative for performance. Whatever your reasons are for trying this exclusive targeting feature available only with Microsoft Advertising, it’s likely to help you narrow in on an audience that will bring a higher return on investment to your advertising efforts.
*While this feature is available to advertisers located anywhere in the world, it can only be used on campaigns targeting the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany.
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