Unlike Instagram or TikTok, LinkedIn users aren’t aimlessly scrolling with glazed eyes and cramped fingers. They’re in the zone – making connections, finding new roles, sharing tips and trends, and discovering new vendors, partners, and solutions.
LinkedIn leads as the most used social platform for B2B marketers with:
- 80% say LinkedIn is their most used social platform
- 94% expect their use of LinkedIn to either stay the same (29%) or grow (65%) this year
Running paid ads to this high-intent, career-minded audience is a no brainer, but with more than 230 million LinkedIn users in the U.S. alone, serving the right ad to the right person is challenging.
Garrett Mehrguth, Directive’s CEO, is bullish on this point: you can’t trust LinkedIn’s ad targeting, without manually verifying your account list to weed out outdated or incorrect user data.
Let’s dig into native limitations of LinkedIn’s ad targeting capabilities. Then, we share Directive’s step-by-step process for optimizing ad targeting lists to get the most bang for every dollar spent on LinkedIn ads.
The Backbone of LinkedIn Ad Targeting
To get in front of decision-makers in your ideal customer profile (ICP), LinkedIn offers ad targeting based on detailed demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data.
LinkedIn targeting options include:
- Industry – professionals experienced in your sector.
- Job Title – specific roles and responsibilities within a company.
- Company Size – organizations that match your desired scale (frequently used as a proxy to target a desired company revenue level).
- Seniority – decision-makers or entry-level employees, depending on your needs.
- Skills and Interests – target skill sets or relevant professional interests.
- Custom Audiences – upload an audience email list or use LinkedIn’s matched audiences to retarget users.
- Lookalike Audiences – reach users similar to your active audience, by matching similar traits or data points.
Sounds great, right? Not so fast.
While LinkedIn offers robust targeting options, much of its data is user-generated and often outdated. Users self-select “industry” when creating their profiles, write in job titles, or manually set up LinkedIn Business Pages.
Users are then on their merry way, rarely returning to update their profiles as career paths, interests, and skill sets change. Just think about how you use LinkedIn – keeping your profile up-to-date is just one more task on a never-ending task list.
Business pages get the same lack of love – an intern likely set that page up 15 years ago and it no longer reflects evolving service offerings, audiences, teams, and focus areas.
Needless to say, if you’re using outdated and inaccurate user-generated data to define your LinkedIn ad targeting, you risk wasting money on uninterested, out-of-market people.
Inaccurate LinkedIn Ad Targeting Inflates CAC
Let’s look at one data point: Industry is a popular starting point for defining your ad target, particularly for B2B marketers.
LinkedIn offers over 149 industries to choose from, when setting up a Business Page. LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers even more industry selections for sales teams to prospect new customers.
These plentiful options sound like the holy grail for audience targeting, but again, they’re user generated data points and frequently outdated or inaccurate.
Let’s look at the Industry category for three popular companies:
Account: New Relic
- LinkedIn says: Software Development
- In reality: Monitoring Software
Account: SumoLogic
- LinkedIn says: Software Development
- In reality: Observability Software
Account: Greenhouse
- LinkedIn says: Software Development
- In reality: ATS Software
Though each of these companies sells software, their solutions, capabilities, use cases, challenges, and ideal customer is drastically different.
When there are approximately 30,000 SaaS companies worldwide, just think of how much ad spend is wasted by simply targeting “software development companies.”
When ads reach the wrong users, engagement drops and clicks fail to convert, diminishing campaign ROI.
Targeting irrelevant audiences increases customer acquisition costs (CAC) and distorts your ad performance data, making it harder to optimize future campaigns. This is a big problem – accurate performance data helps you identify the content, campaigns, and audiences that effectively convert customers.
With these insights, you can continuously improve your campaign strategy and allocate more budget to the most valuable, high-converting audiences and campaigns, reducing the cost per acquisition and boosting ROI.
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3 Steps to Verify LinkedIn Target Account Lists to Improve CAC
At Directive, we manually verify our account lists to make sure our ads get in front of the most relevant, high intent audiences to lower our CAC.
We’re in the business of delivering value – not keeping secrets – so we’re spilling our three-step process for more accurate targeting and less wasted ad spend, below.
Step 1 – Find Your Targets; Review Your Ideal Customers
With paid advertising, broad and imprecise targeting means paying more for worst results. Instead, focus on a specific, narrow niche to improve your success.
To find your niche, start with your existing customer base. Analyze their commonalities to define a clear ideal customer profile.
Start broader in the ideation phase and get increasingly more specific:
- B2B or B2C?
- Services or SaaS?
- Industry?
- Job title?
- Employee size?
We recommend employee size over revenue, since most private companies don’t disclose their annual revenue and data enrichment tools (like ZoomInfo and Apollo), use employee count as a proxy anyhow.
Once you compare these details, you should have a clear picture of your ICP in your mind. For example: CFOs at B2B enterprise manufacturing companies, needing better accounting software.
By using your existing customer base to map ICPs, you can build better ad targeting lists and create highly personalized campaigns that speak directly to customers’ needs and challenges.
Mehrguth says it best, “The key to better ad targeting is to get specific, have some confidence, be bold, and be something for someone, not everything for no one.”
Step 2 – Enrich and Validate Your Account Data
With a clear ICP in-hand, build a list of target customers from your marketing database or prospecting tools, like ZoomInfo.
Share your prospect list with a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) vendor to manually verify that each company is legitimate, active, and truly matching your ICP.
Our BPO vendor manually verifies that each company has:
- An active website that does not redirect
- Employee count on LinkedIn matching the expected company size data (ballpark)
- Service/solution offering in your target vertical (accurate industry classification)
Based on this manual verification process, we catch and remove nearly 50% of accounts for not fitting our ICP – and that’s okay! We’re proactively reducing potential wasted spend by 50%, before running a single ad.
If you see similar waste levels, don’t forget to get a credit from your data provider for those mismatched accounts.
Step 3 – Upload Verified Data to Ad Platforms for Better Targeting
Now that you have a reliable, manually verified TAM, it’s go time. Upload your verified lists to different ad platforms, like Meta and LinkedIn, for more precise targeting.
Just think: using your verified list and LinkedIn’s CTV product, you can now confidently run TV ads, conversation ads, and sponsored content, all using that same audience list.
Not only will you reach the exact accounts where you’re trying to get a foot in the door, but you can test different ad strategies and optimize campaigns for continuous improvement.
Key Benefits of Manual Verification
Manually verify your TAM to reach key accounts and maximize your ad spend.
Using manual verification, marketers:
- Avoid outdated targeting data, like industry classifications.
- Improve ad relevance.
- Reduce wasted impressions and clicks.
- Improve lead quality.
- Lower overall customer acquisition cost.
- Increase ROI.
Plus, by taking the time to manually verify your TAM and test different ad strategies and platforms, you’ll learn how to optimize your go-to-market strategy. You’ll have the data and confidence to get more aggressive and creative in campaign strategies.
You can experiment with different content, incentives, budgets, creative, landing pages, and messaging to better understand and motivate your audience.
By cleaning out your targeting lists, you’ll run more efficient and cost-effective ad campaigns, while constantly getting data to improve future ad performance.
Takeaway
Serving ads to the wrong buyers wastes time and budget; increasing your CAC and muddying performance data. Of course, with LinkedIn’s user-generated data, it’s easy to make this mistake and reach the wrong industries and individuals.
Instead, follow our lead at Directive and take the time to manually verify your LinkedIn account list to remove outdated data. Manual verification helps you focus on your ICP, optimize campaign performance over time, experiment with different ad strategies, and save your budget.
Accurate targeting ensures every dollar works harder to attract the right customers – high-intent and relevant audiences, who are more likely to engage and convert.
To help you get started, download our Manual Verification template or contact us to talk to a paid media expert about improving your campaigns once and for all.
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Team Directive
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