LinkedIn Ads Interest Targeting

Key Takeaways

in today's play media Pros video I'm going to talk about LinkedIn ads interest targeting you don't hear Too Many people talk about it that often because it's not as specific as something like job title targeting but interest targeting still has value we use interest targeting to really add additional layers to campaigns and try to squeeze as much juice out of a campaign as possible so in this video we will show you where interest targeting lives we'll show you the options that are available for interest targeting but most importantly we want to show you a couple ways we like to use interest targeting to find more information to better optimize our current campaigns I already went ahead and started to create a new campaign within LinkedIn campaign manager to start adding interest targeting to your campaign we need to scroll down to the section that says who is your target audience I will then go to the audience attributes section and there we see interests and traits when you go ahead and click on member interests we see that there are three options we're going to talk about each of the three options and then I will show you examples for each of the three options the first is general and it is appropriately named because the options within this category are going to be higher level you want to expand your reach broader categories if I click on it to open it up we see that there are a few options here so if I click on something like business and management we see that it shows us some subcategories so right now we're targeting everything under business and management but we can drill down a little bit further let me click on business administration because we can see there's a little arrow off to the right here if I highlight over any of these we see that the arrow on the right is gone in some sections if I go to business plan there's even another one and that brought up business loans and I can't drill down any further so you may have to do some digging there could be some hidden gems that are really buried in here yes you can go up and just start searching for something that will save you a lot of time but at least looking at some of the higher level ones that are important to you might put an interest in your head that you didn't think of something that you wouldn't have searched for so definitely recommend doing both tactics if I go back up to General interests let's look at one more uncheck that one of course we're in advertising might not care about any of these let's look at advertising strategies celebrity endorsement direct marketing native advertising targeted advertising and a few other options so that's so you can start adding some of those to your targeting options I'm going to go back to the general interest category and then we can look at the second interest option and that is going to be product interests when this category was introduced as a targeting option the main focus was software products and we can see it's pretty much the same so if you're out there trying to promote your SAS product you should really give this option A look whether it's the overall category or any of the subcategories this is going to Target users who have shown interest in content related to these main categories so if I'm looking at marketing software we see some options here and of course all of them can drill down further and let's add an email marketing software if I go back up to marketing let's look at account marketing management software and then I'll choose ABM I understand my target size isn't really getting any bigger instead of narrowing things down pretty much making it an and statement it's pretty much an or functionality if a user meets any of these options I'll be targeting them but of course you'll want to narrow things down that's going to best suit the Persona you're trying to reach if I go back to product interests we already talked about marketing software but then we see options for administrative business Computing data Science Education Healthcare HR and a few other ones again still sticking to just software and while I was introduced in 2021 service interest is the newest interest category service interest audiences are built from direct or inferred interaction with LinkedIn pages that fall Within These categories this could be visiting company Pages interacting with content on the feed related to companies that belong Within These Services the application software architecture I'm not going to read every single one of them career development financial management health insurance there's more HR it interior design Legal Services more marketing real estate more software options and web design and web development now from what I've seen from these none of them go down into deeper categories I'm sure breakdowns will start coming later on as they build more audiences but at the time of recording this video service interests don't go any deeper than the first list of options that are shown up above when I was creating this campaign I was targeting the entire country of the United States with that in mind and just looking at all the interest that I've added you could see how it's a very wider targeting option so typically when I am using member interest as a targeting option I'm using it as a layer with other mandatory targeting options I want to add to my campaign so if you go down to where it says narrow and then let me type in a different targeting option to add chose a job title I made it in and selection so we went from what was it 80 million honestly don't remember the number down to 1200 and I can already tell that the job function breakdown for this forecast is much more focused it's not even giving me the full five options yes in a campaign we would add much more than just one job title but even if we're using something like member groups which is a higher level targeting option than job title targeting there still could be a wide range of users that may join a LinkedIn group so adding member interest that will narrow in a little bit more to the products or services that you are trying to sell can better help you find the Persona that you are trying to reach so that's a pretty quick review of what options you have for interest targeting and how you can add them to a campaign there's a few other ways I like to use interest targeting to research a little bit more about how my campaigns are performing that may give you some ideas for optimizations and to show you this I'm going to jump into a different account since I'm in an actual client account there are certain things I'm going to blur out but I'm not going to focus on the actual target audience portion I want you to look over here to the forecasted results this campaign does not have any interest targeting layered onto it the targeting options are a combination of job functions member skills company Industries and a few other things but what we are using interest for are exclusions so when I have a campaign that's running for a while and I'm looking for ways to optimize it I like to come back to forecast the results and click on the show segments link it's going to open up some additional information that you should always be reviewing it's going to default to function so because of that it's showing us the top five job functions that makes up the target audience we're going after in this campaign you can switch the drop down to be a variety of things and yes one of the options is interest I will look and see if any of the main interests that show up really have nothing to do with my target audience and if they do maybe it's not the goal of this particular camp pain at the moment also you're going to have to take into considerations of potential double meanings people management doesn't always mean someone from the HR department if you're targeting a specific job seniority I'm thinking about managers directors most likely they're managing a team so they could have some sort of Interest signals about people management so it's not something I necessarily would want to exclude right away and if you have several campaigns that have different combinations of audience attributes that you're putting together to come up with a Persona these segment breakdowns are going to differ for every single campaign so see what interests you're initially seeing again and right now it's just the top five and you can potentially use this as an exclusion now there's another way that we can review interest breakdowns to potentially give you more ideas for exclusions or maybe on the flip side could give you ideas to possibly test for targeting layers let me show you how I am in the audiences section in campaign manager to find this go to the little Compass signal it says plan if you click on it there's audiences for now I just have it filtered on the audiences that we're using in active campaigns and you can also see that there's only one audience that I have not fully blurred out this is their key customer list that is pulling in from HubSpot so not only do we have this uploaded to use as exclusion so we're not showing our ads to people who are already customers we're using it to test out lookalikes within LinkedIn and we're also using this to gather insights about our key audience our best customers you may have noticed when I clicked on this selection the insights button lit up and by this point insights should be available within every account if the audience size is large enough if we click on this option we land on the audience Insight section I already have a video covered the vast majority of things that you could do within audience insights you can check out the video here covers all of the top sections but one of the sections within audience insights is content and what do you know we get an idea of what interests make up the main HubSpot customer contact list that we have uploaded so LinkedIn is telling us which general interests and which product interests make up this core customer list that we have uploaded since I've already scrolled down to products I'm just going to stick with this one sales software makes up the largest percentage of this audience that is great to hear because that is definitely in line of what we're trying to sell right away and number two while it's not a ton going back up a little bit we can look at what general interests make up this key customer list some of these that we see in the top 10 section right here we're showing up as the top five interest results when we were looking at the segments within the one particular campaign so if I know certain interests make up my key demographic that is converting the best I may not want want to exclude it from the campaign even if it doesn't look like a perfect fit now since it's clear that this client is selling software I'm not going to say Target government interest because it shows up in the top 10 and this is your key customer list but I will say something like Corporate Finance which is very in line with this target audience is something that we have never targeted before can I layer this on into another campaign to try to optimize it to lower cost per lead or maybe use it with some other targeting options that I've potentially tried in the past figured they didn't work but I can bring them back with some additional interest targeting layers to see if it makes it more specific I can't give you the right direction to go but hopefully I'm giving you ideas of things to consider to see how you can use interest targeting within your accounts I'm not saying you have to go Page by page and look at every single one but sometimes finding those one or two nuggets can help you improve a campaign especially if you're starting to see performance plateau and you're looking for any little thing to do to make it better I still say that one of the best ways to optimize your campaigns within LinkedIn is to to number one test new creative prevent that from getting stale and the second is making sure that your exclusion audiences are constantly updated interest targeting can definitely help you with that second one to add potential interests that may not be relevant to your target audience but if you have creative that is Evergreen that is working really well if you don't want to change your creative using some other options potentially adding in some other options to narrow in and hone in on a more specific audience could be the right direction to go and interest targeting may be one of those options for you if you have any questions on how we may use interest targeting or if you want to share how this targeting has worked well or not well for you please let us know in the comments below 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 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