As someone who manages a portfolio made up of mostly B2B clients, LinkedIn is a core part of their marketing strategies, both for organic and sponsored posts. Beyond being a channel to share content and engage with followers, the platform provides some access to some very useful data which enables us to build detailed profiles of potential clients at all stages of the marketing funnel.
While LinkedIn Analytics on a company page will give a bit of insight into who your followers are, and who is engaging with your content, LinkedIn Campaign Manager is where it’s at if you want to dig into demographics even further, and analyse this data to find new prospects.
The company page LinkedIn Analytics will break down your follower demographics by location, job function, seniority, industry, and company size, which can be helpful to confirm that you are reaching the right people to an extent. However, if you are using LinkedIn Ads, the demographics tools in Campaign Manager provide a lot more information to work with, therefore helping to inform your marketing strategy, and provide better insights to your sales team.
Getting the most from LinkedIn Ads data
To really make the most of your data, you’ll need to set up website audiences using the Matched Audiences feature in LinkedIn Ads.
Log in to your Campaign Manager account and navigate to Account Assets > Matched Audiences. Click on ‘Create audience’ and from the drop down menu, select ‘Website’.
Here, you’ll need to name your audience and set the criteria. Think about key pages on your site, such as product and category pages, careers pages, blog pages, resource pages, and contact/lead gen pages. You can even use a term that appears in a URL, so if you have a lot of pages on a specific topic, you can pop that in to create an audience.
The other options are ‘starts with’ meaning a user is added to the audience for any URL beginning with the page you input, and ‘exact’, if you only want to capture users that visit that specific URL.
Once you hit create, the audience will begin to update. Not only can these audiences now be used for retargeting, but they can also be utilised for profiling potential clients. You’ll need at least 300 users in a matched audience before you can begin using it.
The Website Demographics tool
In the tool, you’ll be able to see insights about your website audience with professional data from LinkedIn.
While LinkedIn Analytics will provide you with demographics by location, job function, seniority, industry, and company size, the Website Demographics tool can show:
- Job function
- Job title
- Company
- Company industry
- Job seniority
- Company size
- Location
- Country/Region
- County
The ones that I feel are most important here are ‘Company’ and ‘Job title’. If you’ve set up multiple audiences, you can see users in these categories that have visited those specific pages on your website. Although you only get to view 25 rows of data, you can get a good idea of the companies, and people’s roles, that are engaging with your website. You can also compare data across two different audiences.
Note that there isn’t an export tool, but you can easily copy and paste it into a spreadsheet if you want to come back to the data later on.
This data can be used to build Account Based Marketing lists, and can also be passed onto the sales team to give them a better idea of companies who are already engaging with your brand.
Demographic data from LinkedIn Ad campaigns
If you’ve been running LinkedIn Ad campaigns for a while and have set up an audience that is made up of job titles, member skills, or groups (or maybe a combination of all three) you should be regularly checking that your ads are reaching the right people, in the right companies and industries based on your targeting criteria by selecting a campaign, and then viewing the demographics tab.
Here, you can change the ‘Display’ drop down to show the companies being targeted. This is super handy for grabbing a list of potential prospects to pass to your sales team, or turn into a dedicated ABM campaign. Equally, if there are companies, or job functions, locations, company sizes, seniorities, job titles, or industries (just change the category on the ‘Display’ drop down) that you know you don’t want to reach, you can exclude them from your campaign so you are no longer wasting impressions on them, and can focus your budget on reaching potential clients that really matter.
While you’ll only be able to get a small sample of all the data LinkedIn holds due to the maximum of 25 rows shown in these reports, it still provides a great starting point for building target demographics at a fairly granular level.
Want to get started with LinkedIn advertising? Get in touch with us today!
