In recent years, LinkedIn has steadily surprised its users with new features.
In April 2022, they publicly released Build a retargeted audience Based on individuals participating in a single image ad.
This targeting option moves into video view and lead form retargeting as another way to reach visitors who interact with your ad.
These audiences are currently built at the campaign level and only include individuals who meet the targeting criteria in the campaigns you choose to be audiences.
Note that you can use stand-alone single image ads or sponsored content based on existing promoted posts.
There are several options for expanding or narrowing your audience.
You can choose to include everyone who interacts with your ad in any way, including reactions, comments, shares, and clicks, or you can strictly limit audience building to paid clicks.
These only include individuals who take the expected click action that your campaign settings charge you for, such as clicking on a landing page, opening a lead form, or viewing a video.
You can also choose a time frame for engagement to include people in your audience.
Options include 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days.
When deciding how long to choose, you may want to consider the potential size of the target audience in the original campaign and the length of the sales cycle.
You can also build audiences of various lengths to stagger various future retargeting messages based on the duration of their initial interaction with your ad.
Benefits of Engagement-Based Retargeting
You may have heard the acronym from progress to a cookie-free web – For example, GDPR, CCPA and ITP.
remember FLOC?
Pixel-based retargeting audiences continue to become less reliable as mobile operating systems and browser limitations reduce the ability to track users.
On the other hand, first-party platform data becomes more valuable.
By expanding opportunities to engage in retargeting within the platform, LinkedIn immediately provides a way to build audiences from individuals who might not otherwise enter a pixel-based retargeting.
Additionally, paid search has become more audience-focused, with looser match types and increased machine learning, rather than targeting very specific keywords.
It’s becoming increasingly valuable to supplement search with paid social to ensure you reach your target audience through multiple channels.
For B2B advertising in particular, LinkedIn allows you to reach these people with precise targeting, as identifying keywords can sometimes be tricky for niche industries.
By strictly limiting your audience to the people who interact with your ad, you can shape your audience into people who match your targeting criteria.
For example, if your initial campaign settings restrict people who work for a range of companies, you know that those narrower audiences who click on your ad should only include employees of those companies.
In effect, you’ve now built yourself a list of people associated with your primary target account who are also interested in your content based on their behavior.
You can also expand your audience by including multiple campaigns, or stick to segmenting different audiences by a single campaign, depending on how you want to set up future retargeting.
Omnichannel campaign approach
LinkedIn’s price has always made it a sophisticated channel to justify the cost of brand awareness advertising.
However, building an engaged audience can be more strategic top of the funnel ad Catch users who are interested in your brand and retarget them with more offer-focused messaging.
For example, a top-of-funnel campaign might contain sponsored content that links users to blog posts related to your industry.
You can build an audience from people who interact with these posts and then retarget lead ads that offer buyer guidance in exchange for their contact information.
Since you’ve already warmed them up with your initial content, you could theoretically pre-select individuals who have expressed some level of interest in your product.
At the very least, you can set up retargeting audiences anytime you’re setting up a single image campaign, even if you don’t have immediate plans to build future campaigns.
Then, if you want to use it in the future, you can get your audience ready to go.
Audience exclusion
Targeting directly using engagement-based audiences can also be used for exclusion.
If you want to avoid oversaturating users with your ads, you can exclude them from your campaign once they’ve engaged.
Especially when doing brand awareness/top-of-funnel play, you can make sure they don’t keep seeing the same post after they react or click.
Also, if you move people to offers in the funnel (like an asset), you can avoid walking by by continuing to show them higher funnel content and focusing on maintaining lead-focused messaging in their feeds Wire.
Exclude ad participants in the original campaign while targeting them in the lead-facing campaign.
Start aiming!
Now that you’re familiar with the ability to create a single image ad on LinkedIn to retarget your audience, start thinking about ways to implement it in your ad account.
Maybe you already have blog content that you can promote with sponsored content ads to start building your audience.
Think carefully about the persona you want to reach; you may want to cast a net wide enough to be cost efficient, knowing you can narrow it down to individuals who directly express interest.
Create your audience, let them start building, and start retargeting them for extra action.
I’m excited about this feature and looking forward to what else LinkedIn will roll out for advertisers over time.
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Featured image: Abel Justin/Shutterstock
