LinkedIn presents a powerful platform to connect with your desired audience. Its sophisticated targeting capabilities offer diverse avenues to reach potential clients. Furthermore, it excels as a channel for retargeting.

An illustration of a LinkedIn Ad. However, LinkedIn can be costly for remarketing. Initially, the idea of paying a premium to re-engage users who’ve already interacted with you might seem illogical. Nevertheless, by implementing certain best practices, you can optimize your spending and ensure maximum return on investment. In this article, I’ll unveil my secrets to a cost-efficient and successful LinkedIn retargeting approach.

9 Essential LinkedIn Retargeting Recommendations

To achieve optimal outcomes, adhere to these vital LinkedIn retargeting best practices:

1. Leverage Audiences from All Possible Sources

When crafting a remarketing strategy, the top priority is maximizing your reach. While a website visitor audience is a common target, it only reveals a part of the picture. The absence of website engagement doesn’t necessarily equate to a lack of brand familiarity. Within the LinkedIn Ads platform, you can construct audiences from various sources, each playing a distinct role. Below is a list of options available when creating a new audience on LinkedIn:

As evident, there’s much more to explore than just website retargeting. The initial group allows you to upload existing customer data, such as contact lists, company lists, or data from offline events. This enables you to connect with known individuals after matching them on LinkedIn, irrespective of their recent website activity. Within the “Retarget by” section, most options focus on how users have engaged with your brand on LinkedIn, rather than your website. Did they interact with your company page, a sponsored event, or open/submit a lead generation form? What about your creatives? Did they click on a single image ad or watch a specific video ad for a certain duration? These are crucial touchpoints to consider when identifying brand-aware users for your lists. Neglecting these users in your LinkedIn retargeting strategy translates to overlooking a potentially impactful audience.

2. Audience Size Influences Your Advertising Expenses

Beyond simply missing out on engaging a broader user base, there’s another compelling reason to expand your retargeting audiences. On the LinkedIn Ads platform, larger audience sizes correspond to lower costs per user. Let’s illustrate this with two potential audiences targeting individuals in the PPC domain:

The first audience consists of two job titles across the US: Digital Marketing Manager and Digital Marketing Specialist. With an audience size of 160,000, the anticipated cost per click falls between $1.26 and $1.88. However, observe what happens when we expand the list to include individuals belonging to PPC-related member groups:

Despite only increasing the target audience to 180,000, the estimated cost-per-click range slightly decreased to $1.15 to $1.72. While seemingly insignificant, every bit counts in LinkedIn ad campaigns. Conversely, while aiming for cost reduction, excessive expansion can dilute your audience. Avoid adding users without considering their value to your campaigns. In such cases, prioritize a slightly higher cost and a more refined audience to ensure campaign goal alignment.

3. Maintain Up-to-Date Exclusion Audiences (Including Lead Gen Ads)

Similar to the previous point, adding users solely to inflate your audience without proper targeting is counterproductive. Excluding the right individuals can be as impactful as targeting the right ones. Each audience type mentioned earlier can be used for both targeting and exclusion. Based on your LinkedIn retargeting campaign’s objective, leverage all list types to exclude users who have already taken desired actions. One effective method is LinkedIn lead generation form exclusion. As illustrated below, you can compile a list of users who have opened and submitted a lead form within your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. These are clearly qualified leads. Therefore, if your retargeting campaign aims to generate similar leads, excluding all lead generation form submitters is recommended.

4. Employ Diverse Ad Formats (Including Text Ads)

When retargeting with LinkedIn ads, remember that these individuals have already engaged with your brand in some capacity. However, obtaining a comprehensive picture of every user’s journey is nearly impossible.

Utilizing multiple ad formats allows you to reach your LinkedIn retargeting audience in novel and distinct ways, even if the ad content remains relatively consistent (more on this later). Each ad format has specific requirements and specifications. For a detailed breakdown, watch this video. That being said, one format consistently proves effective for retargeting and I incorporate it into every LinkedIn retargeting campaign: Text Ads. While not the most visually appealing, Text Ads excel in retargeting. Unlike In-Feed Ads, they appear on the right-hand side of the LinkedIn interface.

They are smaller, necessitate a different image type (usually a logo or a focused shot) due to size constraints, and have limited text. Moreover, they are less visible as they don’t appear on all screens within the interface. Therefore, expect high impression counts, low clicks, and relatively low click-through rates. However, Text Ads often boast significantly lower CPCs compared to In-Feed formats. While conversion rates may also be slightly lower, the overall cost per acquisition tends to be much lower. In essence, Text Ads might drive fewer incremental conversions, but their cost-effectiveness is a major advantage.

5. Experiment with Calls to Action to Identify the Most Effective Approach

Similar to ad formats, it’s crucial to experiment with different calls to action until you discover what resonates best with each audience segment. Replicating the same call to action from your initial campaign is generally not advisable. If it didn’t elicit a response the first time, it’s unlikely to do so on the second attempt. Moreover, LinkedIn retargeting operates differently from other channels. Typically, low-funnel actions like purchase or demo requests don’t perform as well. Instead, focus on targeting the middle of the funnel.

Why the middle and not the top? For a couple of reasons. Firstly, these users already possess some degree of familiarity with your brand, making high-level brand awareness messages redundant. Secondly, investing LinkedIn’s premium pricing in such messages is not cost-effective. To reach a wider audience with brand awareness messaging, consider alternative platforms or target new users on LinkedIn.

6. Tailor Your Rotation Settings to Align with Your Objectives

LinkedIn offers a rotation setting for your ad creatives, although it’s somewhat hidden within the interface. Within each campaign’s ads setup tab, you’ll find a gear icon at the top.

Clicking on it reveals the option to either optimize ads or rotate them evenly.

Personally, I prefer even rotation, as it allows me to prioritize metrics based on my criteria. Conversely, the optimize setting, while initially rotating ads evenly, eventually favors certain ads based on their performance. While seemingly beneficial, I recommend testing both options to determine what yields the best results for your accounts. Despite its name and intent, the optimize setting doesn’t always deliver optimal outcomes in my experience.

7. Incorporate Five Ads for Comprehensive Coverage

In the same interface tab, you’ll encounter a message prompting you to “create five ads to improve performance.”

The recommendation to create five ads stems from its potential to enhance LinkedIn Ads performance. Furthermore, at least for sponsored content ads, five appears to be a magic number for maximizing ad impression counts. With five sponsored content ads, you can reach each user in your audience up to five times within a 48-hour timeframe. However, with only three or four ads, the impression count for the same period drops accordingly. While other formats have different frequency caps and corresponding impression counts, I’ve used sponsored content as an example due to its popularity. For a comprehensive overview of the optimal number of creatives for other formats, refer to this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show with AJ Wilcox.

8. Track Reach and Frequency to Prevent Ad Fatigue

Even with frequency caps and well-defined audience sizes, excessive LinkedIn retargeting can lead to ad fatigue. Two metrics, Reach and Frequency, can help mitigate this risk.

Reach represents the number of unique users exposed to your ads within a specific timeframe. Frequency, on the other hand, denotes the average number of times each user encountered those ads during the same period. These metrics can be accessed by adding their respective columns or utilizing the preset Delivery columns option. The extent to which you can leverage these stats for your audience may vary. I recommend reviewing them whenever performance dips or when creatives have been running for an extended duration. It might be time to refresh your approach by adjusting ad formats, messaging, calls to action, or a combination thereof.

9. Opt for Manual Bidding (and Bid Through the Floor)

My final recommendation for optimizing LinkedIn retargeting campaigns revolves around minimizing cost per click. For each campaign type, manual bidding provides an alternative to max delivery or other default strategies. This allows you to dictate your bid in the ad impression auction.

I usually begin with a low bid, acknowledging that I might miss out on some impressions. However, this strategy ensures the lowest possible average cost per click for my target audience. Over time, as performance improves, I gradually increase my bid to secure more impressions and increase volume. This tried-and-true bidding strategy consistently yields positive results across all my LinkedIn ad campaigns, particularly for retargeting.

Develop High-Performing LinkedIn Retargeting Campaigns

At first glance, LinkedIn retargeting might not seem like the most obvious strategy for business growth. However, by implementing these best practices, you can maximize your chances of achieving favorable returns and generating valuable leads. While LinkedIn Ads can be costly, leveraging my top LinkedIn remarketing tips can help you control expenses and maximize your marketing ROI. As a reminder, here are the nine LinkedIn retargeting best practices:

1. Utilize audiences from all available sources
2. Remember that audience size directly impacts your advertising costs
3. Keep exclusion audiences updated, including those from lead generation ads
4. Don’t limit yourself to one format; use multiple ad formats, including text ads
5. Continuously test and adjust your calls to action to determine what resonates best
6. Take control of your rotation settings to align with your campaign goals
7. For maximum coverage and potential reach, always aim to include five ads in your campaigns
8. Regularly monitor reach and frequency metrics to stay ahead of ad fatigue
9. Embrace manual bidding and don’t hesitate to “bid through the floor” for optimal cost efficiency