A few months ago, we participated in a beta for a brand new feature on LinkedIn Ads called Audience Insights. LinkedIn is starting to roll it out to the masses now.

Whether you already have access to it or are still waiting, this article is a great resource for those wondering where to find it and how to use it to improve their LinkedIn Ad performance.

In short, the Audience Insights feature is the Segment Breakdown feature on steroids. It’s a granular view of audience targeting criteria for matched audiences.

As LinkedIn Ads fanatics, we’re geeking out pretty hard over it. Let’s dive in!

A GUIDED TOUR OF LINKEDIN CAMPAIGN MANAGER’S AUDIENCE INSIGHTS

First off, let’s talk about where to find and how to navigate the Audience Insights feature.

WHERE DO I FIND IT?

You’ll want to access your matched audiences. To do that, click the Plan dropdown in the left-hand navigation and then click Audiences.

Then, select the matched audience you want to analyze and click Insights. Note that your matched audience needs to have a status of either Ready or Updating and must have a size of at least 300 members before being able to view Insights.

OVERVIEW

After clicking Insights, you’ll be taken here:

You’ll notice five tabs in the top left that you can navigate through. We’ll cover each one down below, but note that in the top right, there are options to Manage, Edit, and Create Campaign.

What these allow you to do is essentially create a campaign around your selected audience. This makes campaign creation pretty seamless, especially if you’re excluding or including specific criteria listed in your Audience Insights. You can do so through the Edit button and save or delete your audience through the Manage dropdown.

SUMMARY

In the Summary tab, you can view where your audience is located, audience attributes (like job function, level of seniority, years of experience, etc.), and company attributes (like growth rate, industry, and number of employees). This tab is also the default view when you first open Audience Insights.

CONTENT

In the Content tab, you can view subject matter that your audience is interested in.

LOCATION

In the Location tab, you can view where in the world your audience is located. You can filter by City, State, Country, and Continent.

MEMBER

In the Member tab, you can view criteria related to your audience’s job, such as their job function, level of seniority, years of experience, skills, and job title.

COMPANY

In the Company tab, you can view criteria related to the companies your audience works for, such as company name, size, industry, and growth rate.

IMPLICATIONS AND USE CASES

Now, with how much data we have access to here, there are a lot of useful things we can do. Here are four that stood out to us:

TARGETING AUDIT

If your matched audiences are based off of those who click and/or convert, the Audience Insights feature is great for conducting a targeting audit. You can already do this to some extent with the Demographics feature, but Audience Insights is so much more granular, especially because you can view criteria for matched audiences like Lead Gen Form Opens/Submissions, those who performed a chargeable click on your Single Image Ads, or those who visited certain pages in your conversion funnel, for example.

Use this feature to understand the criteria of those who are clicking and converting on your ads. This will help you know whether you’re targeting the right people or if you need to narrow your targeting more by layering on exclusions of criteria that’s unqualified.

INTEREST TARGETING

When interest targeting was introduced to LinkedIn Ads, we always kind of felt like it was a black box. It was unclear where exactly LinkedIn got its data from to deduce what a user was interested in and how accurate it really was.

But now, where we can see the interests LinkedIn is attributing to our matched audiences, we feel so much more confident in using this feature.

Use Audience Insights to understand what your audience is most interested in and which ones are worth targeting to ensure your ads are hitting the most qualified prospects.

OPEN UP NATIVE TARGETING OPTIONS

Creating campaigns around matched audiences is helpful in hyper targeting the exact people you want to reach. ABM is a great example of this.

But if you want to expand your targeting to reach those who fall outside your matched audience but would still be considered a qualified prospect, you can confidently do so now.

Use this feature to gain insight on what common criteria makes up your ideal audience. What are the top job titles, job functions, skills, and levels of seniority that they have? What are the common company sizes or industries? Use these criteria to create native campaigns to test alongside your matched audiences.

SEAMLESSLY CREATE MATCHED AUDIENCE CAMPAIGNS

We already alluded to this one earlier in the article, but the Audience Insights feature really makes it so seamless now to create matched audience campaigns that are layered to target your ideal prospects.

This doesn’t matter so much if you’re running a contact list, but this is a major quality of life improvement for any other matched audience.

For example, say you want to create a campaign revolving around those that visit a certain page of your website, but you only want to target those who fit within your target audience.

First off, you can now see the type of people that visit your website. Second, rather than going back and forth between the Audience Insights view and the campaign creation view, you can manage both in one view by clicking the Edit button in the top right. This allows you to layer on any exclusions or inclusions in your targeting without having to jump through multiple pages or tabs, making for a more seamless experience.

CONCLUSION

The Audience Insights feature is a welcome addition to LinkedIn Ads and one that will empower us advertisers to more effectively reach our ideal customer persona.

Have you gotten access to this feature yet? What are your first impressions? Is there anything else you’d add to our list of use cases and implications? Comment below!

And if you want to get more sales conversations with your ideal prospects, apply to work with our team at B2Linked. We’ll help you craft and execute a custom-tailored LinkedIn Ads strategy that’s fit to meeting your unique goals for the platform.

Written by Eric Jones

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