LinkedIn Ads Buyer Groups

Key Takeaways

LinkedIn is currently testing a new beta audience designed to help advertisers reach people who are more likely to purchase products. These are going to be called buyer groups. And within those, you can simply check a box and you'll be able to target people who have influence over or are the indecision makers for purchasing specific products or services for companies. Now, this is a super enticing idea in my mind. I love the idea of being able to check a box and you're targeting all the people that you've been trying to with job titles and industries and all that stuff, but there are some limitations with these buyer groups when it comes to additional targeting and exclusions. So, they might not be quite right for everybody. So, in this video, let's talk about what buyer groups are, show you how to set them up, and discuss whether they might be a good fit for you. We're going to start by talking about how LinkedIn puts together these buyer groups. So for each of the different product categories, their AI models will analyze somebody's professional signals and the interests and behaviors that they've had to put them into one of two categories and then combine those to make a buyer group within a company. So the signals that they're going to use are around your member profiles, whether it's your job experience, company background, or your role. They're going to look at the sales and marketing engagement. So how similar are buyers at certain companies engaged by sales teams? Second, they're going to look at your sales and marketing engagement. Basically, how similar are you to people who are engaging with different sales and marketing teams at different companies and then the professional relationships that you have or the firstderee connections with a specific company or the influence networks around those companies can help inform these buyer groups. Now, depending on what they find when they look at the different aspects of your profile and engagement, they're going to put you into one of two categories if you fit. That's going to be decision makers and key stakeholders. Decision makers are pretty easy. These are going to be the people who have the final say about whether a company works with another company, whether they buy their product, enlist their service, whatever it is. Decision makers are the ones that either give the thumbs up or the thumbs down. Key stakeholders are anybody who has a significant influence or will be impacted by the decision that the decision maker makes. If we're thinking about software, maybe your boss is going to be the decision maker about whether you use software, but you are a stakeholder because you will actually be the one using the software. But not all stakeholders are below the decision makers. Many times a board of advises will be somebody who has a stake in whether or not a company uses some software or purchases a product, but they're not the decision maker. The CEO could be the decision maker or somebody in the finance department, what have you. Overall, those are going to be the two categories of users that make up these buyer groups. Now that we know how they're put together, let's start to tinker around in the interface and talk about how you can use these buyer groups in your campaigns. Just to get started, I've selected website visits as a campaign objective for this placeholder campaign. Buyer groups are currently eligible for all campaign objectives except brand awareness and video views. All others, you're able to target them if you have access. As you can see, we don't have talent leads, but that's okay. But now, all other targeting and everything else is going to stay the same. We're going to be in the audience section, you still have locations, your exclusions, but if we scroll down into this section around who is your target audience. If you have the buyer group beta, it's going to show up here, right below the header for who is your target audience. As of right now, they don't show up in the navigation down below. So, let's go ahead and just click add buyer groups and get started. And now we've got our list of 56 different buyer groups based on different types of solutions and software. Going alphabetically, we've got administrative support, agriculture, automotive. If we keep scrolling down, business intelligence, construction software, all of these different options are going to be buyer groups based on users who are either decision makers or key stakeholders within companies that are interested in this type of software. Whether it's legal software, marketing software, productivity, as you can see, there's quite a number. And as I said, there's 56. So, if we come all the way down, last one's going to be web applications and firewalls. Hopefully out of those 56, there's at least one that matches what you're looking at. But as you can see up here in the top, you can select up to three buyer groups for your individual campaigns. Now, LinkedIn does suggest that when you're putting together these campaigns to make sure that if you combine buyer groups that the messaging applies to both. It would be a little silly if you were trying to target agriculture software and automotive software, but then had ads that were geared either directly towards automotive or geared towards agriculture. What they recommend, and what I certainly think makes the most sense, is to make sure that your ads can apply to any of the three buyer groups that you apply to your campaigns. Now, you don't have to opt into three. You could select just one, but you'll see that the target audience size changes over on the side when you do so. So, if we added cloud management and business strategy, now we're up to 3.7 million. But obviously, all of these have quite a different size because that dropped it down about 1.2 million. If we take cloud management off, we're now down to 420,000 for just the agriculture software piece. But when you start using your buyer groups, it's going to impact the other targeting options you can use. If I uncheck this box, you can see that we still have the option down here below for narrow. And that's going to bring up this expanded list where we get to put in all of the audiences, audience attributes like normal. We'll also still have the exclude option which will bring up again that same box. And the enable audience expansion button is also down here. And I could opt into this if I want to. But as soon as I come up here and start to add individual buyer groups, let's just check the first one. Now, you'll see that everything down here has changed. Audience expansion is disabled when using buyer groups. In my mind, that's fine. I don't mind that. But something else that I find that's pretty clever is right away they exclude anybody who works at your company or at least the company that is being advertised in the ad account. This is an exclusion that happens automatically if you want to. You can remove that exclusion for your company, but in my mind that makes sense. You probably want to keep that. But if I open up the exclude option again, we have the option to exclude list uploads, retargeting audiences, and third party lists. If I go to audience attributes, you'll notice this list is much shorter than it used to be. We can only exclude people based on the companies that they follow, the industries they're in, their company names, so the exact company that they're at, or based on their company size. And for experience, we can only exclude based on functions, seniorities, and job titles. There's no member interest, member groups. All of the other types of targeting that we can normally use in a regular campaign. we cannot use as exclusions for these buyer group campaigns. But if you go one more, we go up to the narrow option, which usually means that we would target a buyer group and also other attributes. If we scroll down, you'll see the only option we have is audiences. There's no audience attribute window down here. You do not get to choose based on job title, company name, company targets, any of that. The only thing you get to add is a list upload or a third party list as your narrowing factor. And the same is true if we stay in the buyer group box and we add an or statement. Remember that narrow is an and statement. So if we're going to use an or statement, we can add a contact list, whether it's a list upload or a third party. And that's it. So every time you start using buyer groups, you do not have the option to narrow your audience by nearly as much. You only get a few audiences that you can opt into in addition to the buyer group and your exclusions are definitely limited. You don't get to choose nearly as many exclusions as you would for any other regular campaign. Now, knowing that LinkedIn is using AI to put these buyer groups together, I do think it's important for you to apply these to your campaign, but then review some of the additional information about those audiences over here on the right. By default, you can see the job function. So whether it's IT, business development, ops, sales or engineering, you can see the breakdown there. But you can also click this drop down and find other information in here. Whether it's their seniority, years of experience, company size, the industry, or the interests that they have. All of this can be really useful when you're trying to evaluate if a buyer group is going to make sense for you. And this is just during the setup phase. Once you're finished with your campaign and you've let it run for a little bit, I definitely encourage you to look at the demographics information about that campaign and try to make sure that they're the right fit. Let's hop into a different account real quick and I'll show you where that lives. Once your campaign with a buyer group has run, you can check the box next to it. Come up here to professional demographics in the upper right. And now you'll be able to see the same type of information, but not based on what the buyer group is made of, but based on the actual performance that you have in your account. So we already defaulted to job function but again you can see company size, job seniority here. You can actually see job title. So there's a little more information there. And now you can understand what's working and what's not out of these buyer groups in your campaigns. The last thing I want to talk about are a few notes to keep in mind before you start using buyer groups. And LinkedIn calls this out right in their help section. And I do think some of them are a good thing to remember. So currently there's 56 product categories that you can target for buyer groups. And if you want to learn any more about any of them individually, all you got to do is hover over the name and you'll get a little bit more information. Again, campaign objectives not available for brand awareness or video views, but you can target buyer groups in all other campaign objectives. Audience sharing and thirdparty APIs. Buyer groups can't be shared out of the ad account that you're in. So, you can't share it to another business manager and you can't share it to a different account through an API for the LinkedIn audience network. We cannot serve buyer groups on Apple iOS devices. So, if that's a key demographic for you, buyer groups probably isn't the right fit. As we saw when I opted into buyer groups, audience expansion and predictive audiences are turned off. You cannot use those in conjunction with buyer groups. And then any inclusions and exclusions are going to be far limited compared to regular campaigns. You'll only be able to opt into or add company lists. And there's a much more limited set of exclusions. Down here at the bottom, they've got a table that kind of shows you what each of those is going to be. So you can have a little bit of a reminder. But just don't forget that there are going to be some limitations around your other targeting options if you decide to opt into buyer groups. I personally think these buyer groups are a really interesting new targeting option and who doesn't want to try to find the right stakeholders and decision makers within a company. Maybe LinkedIn just made that drastically easier as long as your product fits into one of the existing 56 categories. But elsewhere in this help article, LinkedIn also says that they are constantly developing and testing new features within these audiences. And what's in here now and what I'm covering in this video might not be accurate in the future if they decide that they want to roll it out to new campaign objectives, give you more options for targeting, or if they decide to turn it off because they don't work. So, if any of these buyer groups make sense, maybe give them a test, see if they perform well for you. If you do, I'd love to hear about it. But if you have any additional questions around buyer groups or anything else on the LinkedIn platform, let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. If you really really liked it, you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button.