Audience targeting and campaign planning
The audience targeting and campaign planning domain tests whether you can turn an ideal-customer profile into a LinkedIn audience that is narrow enough to be relevant and large enough to deliver. Questions focus on targeting facets, Matched Audiences, the boolean logic inside the targeting panel, and planning that respects audience size and frequency.
How targeting combines
LinkedIn uses AND between different facets and OR within a single facet. Job titles are OR-ed with each other, but titles AND industry AND company size must all match. Every added facet shrinks the audience, and the estimated size in the panel updates live as you build.
Facets to know
- Member: job function, seniority, title, skills, degrees, fields of study, member interests and traits, age and gender where permitted.
- Company: name, industry, size, growth rate, revenue, companies followed.
- Education, location down to metro or postal code, and language.
- Matched Audiences: contact lists, company lists for account-based work, website retargeting via the Insight Tag, lead form openers, event attendees, and lookalikes built from those seeds.
- Exclusions are the cheapest optimization available: suppress current customers, competitor employees and recent converters.
Worked example
A payroll vendor targets HR leaders at German manufacturers with 500+ employees: seniority director and above, function human resources, industry manufacturing, location Germany, company size 501-1,000 and 1,001-5,000. The estimate returns near 9,000, too small for reliable delivery. The fix is not to abandon precision but to widen deliberately: add the talent acquisition function, lower the size floor to 201+, and layer a Matched Audience company list of 300 named accounts. Exclude the 4,000-member customer list.
Traps
Stacking facets until the audience cannot deliver; reading the size estimate as reach; forgetting exclusions; using contact lists below the minimum match threshold; ignoring frequency creep in small audiences.