LinkedIn Ads Retargeting Options

[Video Transcript:]

For the longest time, website based URL audiences were the only type of retargeting audiences we can create within the LinkedIn interface. Well, a few weeks ago that all changed. LinkedIn announced that there are two new retargeting audiences we can create within the platform. We can now do retargeting audiences from video views, as well as lead gen form interactions. So this video is going to show you how you can create retargeting audiences for all three of those options. 

Before we talk about the retargeting options on LinkedIn, we need to understand that these retargeting options are audiences that we need to create within the channel and you cannot create an audience within LinkedIn unless you have the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website. So let’s just do a quick refresher and I can show you how you can install the Insight Tag if you haven’t done so already. 

First, we need to go up to account assets and then click on Insight Tag. I already have mine set up but if you go to Manage Insight Tag, and then click see tag, there are a couple ways that you can install the tag. You can add the code manually to your website. If you’re not familiar with how to do that, you can send an email to a developer who works on your website and they can implement it for you. 

The easiest route, which I’m going to go over today is how to install the inside tag with Google Tag Manager. And when I click on that option, I’m going to get my partner ID. If you click on your partner ID, it’s going to automatically copy to your clipboard. Now I’m going to happen to Google Tag Manager. I already have the LinkedIn Insight Tag created within my Google Tag Manager. So I’m just going to click on the option and when you’re setting up the tag, you need to select the LinkedIn Insight Tag type, which I have right here. Then we copy that tag from the clipboard, you would just need to paste that number or tag ID within the inside tag ID form field. 

Next, you need to tell Google when you want to fire the tag. The easiest option is to just add all pages, but you may have different ad accounts for different portions of your website, depending how large it is. We have seen that before. If that’s the case, you can change the trigger type to only fire on certain pages or whichever pages would apply to whatever LinkedIn account you’re using. 

Heading back a little bit, we always want to make sure the tag is firing properly. So before you submit the new tag that you created, click on Preview within Tag Manager. Now we’re in preview mode and then head over to your website which contains this Google Tag Manager container. You can see the third tag that was fired on this page was my LinkedIn Insight Tag, so I know it’s working properly. 

Now we can head back into LinkedIn and start creating some audiences to use for retargeting. We are back in the LinkedIn campaign manager and we’re also back in the main campaign performance section, which is going to be the main area you’ll see when you first log in. 

But to start creating some retargeting audiences, we need to go back up to account assets, and then click on matched audiences. We then want to go over to the right side, you’ll see the blue create audience button and right here we see the three options where we can create retargeting audiences. There’s lead gen form interaction, video views, and website. I’m going to start with the easiest one and the one that’s been around for a long time, and that is website. 

So with any audience that you create, you’re going to have to name it. You can see there are a few different ways we can create website based retargeting audiences for LinkedIn ads. Before you even enter your URL, look at how you want that URL to match with a user. By putting the main home domain, it’s pretty much going to capture any subcategory after my dot com. I have an about page, I have a guest speaking page, I have a contact page,and all of those will be collected within this audience. 

Now you can change it up and you could say match URL that equals this specific domain that I have entered into the field and this one is just going to capture my homepage. Anyone who lands on my about page, speaker page, contact page, they will not be included in this audience. 

Your last match option is to change it to contains. It’s been a long time, but my website does have a blog. Let’s say I want to capture anyone who reads any blog on my website, and also pretending that each blog I release will live underneath that blog subcategory, if any of the URLs contain this domain slash blog, it’s all going to be included in this website based retargeting audience. 

Now in addition to choosing how the URL will match, we can also add additional qualifiers to that URL. You can see under the field, I can click and also now I’m telling LinkedIn to build an audience off of users who visited any blog page and they have to visit my contact page. This is going to make your audience size a lot smaller as we start adding more of these qualifiers to your URL audience. If that’s too specific, you can get rid of that one option. And then we can add an or rule. 

Instead, I’m going to change this one again to contains typing in slash about. Now I’m telling LinkedIn to create an audience of users who either visited any blog page on my site, or they visited any about page on my site. And even when I have that or qualifier set up, I can still add additional and also to each of these URL options. 

So the advertiser does have the ability to create a lot of custom options based off of the website URL. I’m gonna get rid of these two really quick, but if I’m good with my audience, I can click Create. And that is how easy it is to create a website base URL audience for LinkedIn. 

Now let’s head into the second retargeting audience type. And with the two remaining we’re getting to the two new ones that were just announced. 

Now let’s look at lead gen form audiences. As it states right in the headline, we can create audiences from people who interacted with a combination of any of your lead gen forms. As always, we first need to name the audience and then you have to choose one option of how did they engage with your lead gen form. The default option is going to be anyone who opened your lead gen form including submissions. But then you do have the option to create an audience of only people who submitted your lead gen form. And this is where we kind of laugh at this as experienced PPC marketers, what we’re saying is the default option is that we’re going to remarket to users who interacted with the form but didn’t submit. But it’s also going to include the users who did submit the form. 

Typically, if someone just recently submitted a lead gen form, I don’t want them to continue seeing my ads. So it’s kind of silly for LinkedIn to lump anyone who submitted the form alongside any potential prospects who still need to be nurtured a little bit more. So most likely, what you’re going to have to do is create one audience based off of people who just open the forum and then you’re gonna have to create a second audience of users who submitted the form depending on what combination of forms you want to use, and then use your form submit audience as an exclusion for your campaigns. Again, it’s silly that they set it up this way, but it’s brand new. Hopefully they could fix it sometime soon. But in this case, I’m just going to stick with the default option. 

Next, you’ll choose when did the user engage with the form. When I started getting this audience, the default option was 90 days in the past. But as you can see in the totals in the example that I have here, I’m not going to hit that 300 minimum audience size that LinkedIn requires. So I can change that 90 days to be something bigger, potentially 180 days, and now I have a bigger audience size. It’s not going to be a ton, but I’m still going to be able to use it for retargeting in this account. 

Besides 180 days, you do have the option to expand that audience to an entire year, or you can go down to 30 days. The days that you want to pick is most likely going to be dependent on how much traffic you get with your forms, or what’s your typical buyer cycle with whatever campaign you’re trying to run. 

Next, you can select which campaigns you want to use to create the audience. If you look at the name of this audience, I said all lead form options so I have nine campaigns total. I can select on the first page again, silly that’s gonna make me go to the second page, and then I have to select the remaining options. So now all campaigns are open. You can see total right there, my lead form open is 620. And then it’s pretty obvious to see that besides just selecting all the campaigns, you can select a combination of a few or you can select just one. And again, it goes back to how much interaction your lead forms are getting, but also the original targeting types that you’re selecting for these campaigns. 

If I scroll down a little bit, I’m happy with my options and then I can click create and we see in this example that audience is still building. I’m gonna have to wait till I have enough users again, at least 300. As an advertiser, you’re just gonna have to keep checking the match audience sections until you can see the status that it’s eligible to use within any sort of campaign. 

And now it’s time for the third option, which is retargeting by video views. Let me name this one really quick. Again, the first option for this video audience is to select how did they engage with the video and let’s look at all the options. 

The first option is to create an audience of people who viewed at least 25% of your video ad. But as you can see right here, we can change that threshold to 50% 75% or close to completion at 97%. You can see the total right here for this one campaign, even though it’s paused was just over 4,000 people at the 25% threshold, if I change that percentage to 50% it’s just under 2,500.At 75%, it gets down to just over 1,700. And if I want to see near completion, we end at 1,358. 

Now this particular video I know was a minute long, and to me someone who sticks around on LinkedIn and watches a minute video is going to be much more qualified if they watched at least 97% of it, versus someone who only watched 25% of it. Knowing that all of my options for this video view audience will meet the 300 audience size for LinkedIn, I may want to create four different video view audiences and see which ones will perform the best in a retargeting campaign. 

But also we get to consider when did that user engage? Right now, we’re just looking at 90 days in the past, but did they view the video recently or was it almost a year ago? These are the same date options that we had with the lead form interaction audience. So right now, it defaulted to 90 days. But if I wanted to keep it as recent as possible and select 30 days, we can see that number dropped to six and I’m not going to be able to use this audience because I have this campaign paused. Again, a combination of how engaged was the user versus how recent the user engaged with the ad is going to give you a few different options. How specific you want this video view audience to be. 

And then the last step is that we have to choose which campaigns we want to create the audience from. Again, similar to the lead gen form audience creation, this account only had one campaign doing video so that option is easy for me, but this one’s good and now I can click create. 

If we decide to go ahead and create a campaign, I’m just going to select a campaign objective really quick, we can scroll down to our match audiences section. And now we see new retargeting options for our lead gen forms. And there it is still building as well as our video audiences. And here’s our second one. So now you can go through and finish your campaign setup, add your amazing creative which I know you have, and start using the three different retargeting options that we have within LinkedIn. 

Written by Joe Martinez