
Starting this week, LinkedIn announced the launch of Matched Audiences, a set of targeting capabilities that give you the unique ability to combine LinkedIn’s powerful professional data with your own first-party data.
Matched Audiences has three new capabilities: Website Retargeting, Account Targeting, and Contact Targeting and it helps you engage key accounts, prospects, and audiences that matter most to your business.
With Matched Audiences, you can use LinkedIn to retarget your website visitors, market to your contacts from your customer databases and marketing automation platforms, and reach decision makers at target companies for your account-based marketing programs.
Matched Audiences is available for all LinkedIn advertising products, including LinkedIn Sponsored Content, LinkedIn Sponsored InMail, and other ad formats.
How you can get started:
Website Retargeting: Re-engage your website visitors
Website Retargeting lets you create target audiences from your website visitors to nurture them with always-on campaigns.
“Retargeting through LinkedIn has allowed us to capitalize on our past site visitors through Sponsored Content, acquiring leads at a cost much lower than on other retargeting platforms.” — J.P. Rastrullo, SugarCRM
Account Targeting: Market to influencers and decision makers at your target accounts
With Account Targeting, you can securely upload a CSV list of company names and match that against the nearly 12 million company pages on LinkedIn. This lets you support your account-based marketing programs by reaching decision makers at your target companies.
“Using LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences features has allowed us to better align our PPC campaigns with sales by focusing on an account-centric strategy vs. a lead-centric one. The results we see through these campaigns greatly enable sales to open doors & deepen engagement at target accounts.” — Ryan Kelly, Nanigans
Contact Targeting: Engage prospects and contacts on LinkedIn
Through Contact Targeting, you can securely upload a CSV list of email addresses or connect directly to Marketo, Oracle Eloqua or LiveRamp platforms, to import lists of contacts.
Over the past 6 months, LinkedIn has run a successful pilot program for Matched Audiences with over 370 participating advertisers and 2,000+ active campaigns delivering above-average performance compared to product benchmarks. On average customers using Matched Audiences saw:
- 30% increase in CTR and a 14% drop in post-click cost-per-conversion with Website Retargeting,
- 32% increase in post-click conversion rates and 4.7% drop in post-click cost-per-conversion with Account Targeting, and
- 37% increase in click rate (CTR) with Contact Targeting
Overall, this feature helps marketers close the gap to deliver true full-funnel marketing, leading to greater ROI.