LinkedIn’s Job Title targeting is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of digital advertisers but it contains a little known secret. In a recent podcast episode, our CEO, AJ Wilcox, shared the details of a research project our team conducted on Job Title targeting (check it out if you want to learn why LinkedIn Ads only understands ~55% of job titles).

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Though it was briefly mentioned in the episode, in this post, we’re shedding light on the concept of Super Titles and why they matter to LinkedIn advertisers. Let’s hit it!

WHAT ARE LINKEDIN’S SUPER TITLES?

First off, “Super Titles” is a term typically only used by LinkedIn and isn’t really talked about publicly. In fact, it’s a term pulled straight from LinkedIn’s API, so unless you have access to the platform’s API, this concept may be new to you.

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The gist of it is that LinkedIn has grouped similar job titles together under a single job title umbrella. It’s our understanding that these “umbrella” job titles are referred to in LinkedIn’s API as Super Titles.

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We assume the job titles available for you to target in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager are Super Titles. So if you’re targeting the job title “Director of Online Marketing”, for example, there may be other similar job titles rolled into this master job title that are being thrown into your targeting mix.

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The reason for this is because when you create a user profile on LinkedIn, your job title is a free-form field. You can literally put whatever you want as your job title.

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So with a job title like “Operations Overlord”, LinkedIn is going to do its darndest to categorize it within a related job function and then potentially a Super Title, as well.

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All this said, LinkedIn does a pretty spectacular job at categorizing job titles, for the most part. I wouldn’t be too worried about the idea of other job titles being thrown into my targeting mix because any job titles that fall under my selected Super Titles should still be pretty relevant.

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However, the challenge comes with not knowing which titles fall under any given Super Title. Because this information isn’t made public, there’s really no way to know for sure.

TREAD JOB TITLE WATERS CAREFULLY

Like we just mentioned, LinkedIn does a pretty good job at grouping titles under relevant Super Titles. We have noticed a few instances, though, where Super Titles were a hindrance.

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For example, we have a client who wanted to target Chief Marketing Officers, so we had one campaign built around this particular job title. However, we noticed that there were a handful of users who were filtering through as leads under the job title of Marketing Specialist.

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So, we excluded the job title Marketing Specialist from our campaign, only to find that our audience immediately became too small to run ads to. Our theory here is that somehow Marketing Specialist rolls up to the Chief Marketing Officer Super Title and, therefore, when we tried to exclude Marketing Specialist, we also excluded CMO.

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This is just one example. Though there are probably very few instances like this, we would recommend approaching job title targeting with this in mind.

STRATEGY & IMPLICATIONS

Job Title targeting is extremely valuable to digital advertisers. For many, it’s our go-to targeting type. Despite the fact that many titles are rolled up into Super Titles, Job Title targeting arguably remains one of the most accurate forms of targeting on LinkedIn Ads.

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That said, to ensure you’re fully capturing your intended audience, we suggest creating campaigns that utilize other targeting types, like Skills and Job Functions, and running them in tandem with your Job Title campaigns.

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This can also be helpful in testing which segments of your audience performs better than others. If your Skills campaign performs better than your Job Title campaign, you can make optimizations like bidding lower on your Job Title campaign and putting more budget into your Skills campaign, for example.

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Check out this podcast episode for more on LinkedIn Ad targeting strategy.

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Overall, it’s important to understand how these targeting types function. Doing so will help us as advertisers know how to use them as tools to effectively reach our target audience on LinkedIn Ads.

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What’s your favorite targeting strategy? Have you run into any issues while using Job Title targeting, like the scenario we mentioned earlier? We want to hear from you, so feel free to comment below!

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And if you’re ever in the market for qualified leads at lower-than-average LinkedIn Ad costs, then reach out to our LinkedIn Ads Management team at B2Linked. We’d love to partner with you to help you achieve your lead gen goals!

Written by Eric Jones

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