st Practices For LinkedIn Retargeting To Cut Costs & Increase Conversions

LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach your target audience. You can reach out to potential customers using its robust targeting options. Retargeting is also possible through this channel.

A LinkedIn Ad example.

LinkedIn can be expensive to use for remarketing. It may seem counterintuitive to remarket to people who have previously engaged with you. There are some tips you can use to get the most out of your budget. I will share with you my secret to a successful, cost-effective LinkedIn retargeting campaign.

The 9 most important LinkedIn retargeting strategies

Use these LinkedIn retargeting tips to maximize your results.

1. Audiences from all sources are welcome

When creating a remarketing campaign, the first thing you should do is ensure that as many people are included as possible. website visitors are a common target but it does not tell the entire story. Even if someone hasn’t visited your website, it doesn’t mean that they don’t know your brand.

You can create audiences in the LinkedIn Ads Platform from different sources. Each one plays a specific role. You’ll be presented with a list of options when you click on the Create a New Audience button.

There is more to retargeting than that.

You can upload any customer data you already have, such as a list of contacts, a list of companies, or information from offline events. You can reach people you already know by matching them to LinkedIn users, regardless of whether they have visited your website recently or not.

The majority of the options in the “Retarget by section” have nothing to do your website. They focus instead on how users interacted with your brand on LinkedIn.

Did they interact with your page, attend an event that you sponsored, or open and/or submit the lead generation form? What about the creative? What about creatives?

You should consider these touchpoints when trying to identify brand-aware users for your lists. You’re losing out on an audience that could be very powerful if you don’t include these users in your LinkedIn Retargeting Strategy.

2. Advertising costs are affected by the size of your audience

You should include more users into your retargeting strategy.

The larger your audience, the cheaper it is to reach them through LinkedIn Ads.

Here is a quick example that shows two audiences you could target in the PPC area:

The first audience consists of just two US job titles: Digital Marketing Managers and Digital Marketing Specialists. The target audience is approximately 160,000 people and the cost per click is expected to be between $1.26 and $2.88.

You’ll see below that the visual changes when I expand the listing to include people who have member groups aligned with PPC :

You can see that even though I only increased the target audience from 180,000 to 185,000, the estimated cost per click range has decreased slightly. It now sits between $1.15 and $1.72. This might not seem to be a significant change, but every little bit counts when running LinkedIn ads campaigns.

This can have the opposite effect. You could dilute your audience by expanding too much. Don’t just add users to your campaign without considering the value they bring. You can then stick to the slightly higher cost and more targeted audience in order to achieve your campaign goals.

3. Keep exclusion audiences updated (including lead gen ads)

If you are adding users just to increase your audience, but you are not targeting the correct people, you will not achieve your campaign goals.

It can be equally as effective to exclude the right people as it is to target them. The audience types above can be used to target campaigns but can also be excluded.

Use all the above list types to exclude users that have already performed these actions, depending on your LinkedIn retargeting goal.

The LinkedIn lead generation form exclusion is one of my favorites. You can create a list below of users who have opened and submitted lead forms in your LinkedIn Ads campaign. If your retargeting is intended to generate this type of lead then you should exclude all form submissions.

4. Text ads and other formats of advertising can be used

Retargeting LinkedIn users is a great way to remind them that they have already interacted with your brand. It’s nearly impossible to get a clear picture of each user’s journey.

You can reach your LinkedIn retargeting audiences in a variety of ways by using multiple ad formats, even if their content is not drastically different. We’ll talk about that in a moment. )

This video will give you a good overview of the different ad formats and their requirements.

It is text ads that I always use when I am retargeting on LinkedIn.

Text Ads are not the most visually appealing option on LinkedIn but they can be a great tool for retargeting. Text Ads appear on the right side of LinkedIn’s interface, unlike In-Feed Ads.

The text is small and requires a different type of image (usually just a single-point focus shot or logo) because it’s so tiny. They are not visible to most users because they do not appear on all screens of the interface.

Text ads have low click-through rates, high impression counts and low click-through rates. Although that may sound bad, I have found Text Ads to be much cheaper than In-Feed formats. While conversion rates may also be lower, the cost per acquisition with this format is usually much lower.

Text ads may only generate smaller conversions but they are also cheaper. This is something I will never be disappointed by.

5. You can experiment with different calls to action and see what works.

It’s also important to experiment with different call-to-actions until you find what works best for your audience.

It’s not a good idea to use the same call-to-action as your original campaign. What makes you believe that the user will take action the second time around if they didn’t do it the first?

LinkedIn retargeting works differently than other channels. This channel is not a good fit for actions at the bottom of the funnel, such as demo requests or purchases. We need to focus on the middle part of the funnel.

Why middle instead of top? There are a few reasons. These users already know you, so an impression of high brand awareness is not really needed. It’s not worth paying LinkedIn’s high price for brand awareness messages. You can reach a larger audience by using these messages on a different platform, or by targeting new LinkedIn users.

6. You can control your rotation settings to your goals

LinkedIn offers a rotating setting for ad creatives. No worries if you don’t. Many people don’t know about it because it is a bit hidden in the interface.

At the top of each page, in the editor’s ads setup tab, you will find the gear icon.

Clicking on the button will give you two options: optimize ads, or rotate them evenly.

If I rotate my ads, I choose the metrics that are most important to myself. Optimize will initially rotate your ads, but over time will favor specific ads based on performance.

It may not sound like a bad idea, but I suggest you test out what works in your account. The optimize setting, despite being called “optimize”, and attempting to prioritize ads with the “best performance,” doesn’t always produce the best results.

7. Include five ads to get full coverage

In the same tab of the interface you will see a message telling you to “create five ads in order to improve performance.”

You should include five ads to improve the performance of LinkedIn Ads. It’s a good idea, and I agree, but five is the magic number for sponsored content ads.

If you are using sponsored content and have five ads, you can display all five for each user within your audience during a 48-hour time period. You’ll get only three or four impressions if you have only three or four ads.

While other formats may have different impression counts, I chose sponsored content because it seemed to be the most popular.

For a complete list of all other formats, and to get a quick rundown of how many creatives you can use in each format, watch the LinkedIn Ads show with AJ Wilcox.

8. Ad fatigue can be avoided by monitoring the frequency and reach of your ads.

LinkedIn retargeting can still cause you to lose your audience, even with proper audience size and frequency limits. Reach and frequency are two metrics that will help you with this.

Reach is the total number of users who saw your ads in a certain time period. The frequency is the number of times that each user has seen those ads in a given time frame.

These numbers can be found by adding the columns one by one or using the pre-set Delivery columns option.

You may have to experiment with these numbers for your audience. If you aren’t seeing good results or your creatives have run for some time, I recommend checking them. You might want to switch up the ad format, message, call to action or a combination of these.

9. Manual bidding is the best way to bid (and you can also bid on the floor).

I would like to suggest that you make your LinkedIn retargeting campaign as cheap as possible.

You can select manual bidding in each campaign type instead of the max delivery strategy or any other default strategy. You can choose the amount you wish to bid for an impression in the auction.

I usually start out with a low number. I know I’ll miss a few clicks but I also know I’ll get the lowest cost per click for my audience.

If my performance is good, I will be able to get more volume over time by increasing my bids and winning more auctions. This is my tried-and-true bidding strategy for all of my LinkedIn ads campaigns, and it works better when retargeting.

Create LinkedIn retargeting campaign that works

LinkedIn retargeting may not seem to be the best strategy for growing businesses at first. These best practices, however, will help you to get the best results for your audience. LinkedIn Ads are a costly ad format, but leveraging my LinkedIn remarketing strategies can help you reduce costs and maximize marketing ROI.

Here are the nine LinkedIn retargeting practices in summary:

1. Use all sources
2. Advertising costs are affected by the size of your audience
3. Keep exclusion audiences updated (including lead gen ads)
4. Text ads and other formats of advertising can be used
5. You can experiment with different calls to action and see what works.
6. You can control your rotation settings to your goals
7. Include five ads to get full coverage
8. Ad fatigue can be avoided by monitoring the frequency and reach of your ads.
9. Manual bidding is the best way to bid (and you can also bid on the floor).

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