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LinkedIn recently revealed its new retargeting features. Due to COVID-19, the professional social media website has been forced to make adjustments sooner than expected. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Senior Director of Product Abhishek Shrivastava announced that virtual engagement was in demand. With this, the need for live video events and other features has ‘accelerated.’
Today we’ll introduce the changes, explain their impact and discover what they mean for marketers and businesses.
You’ll see this new feature on the retargeting page. Retargeting allows you to keep tabs on the communication prospective customers have had with your brand. Based on this information, tailor content and message accordingly.
After some form of contact with your brand, some people will progress through the customer journey. This process begins with awareness and eventually leads to purchase.
LinkedIn has announced a future retargeting tool for events. It will retarget attendees in order to boost engagement and get people engaged before, during and after the event. As a result, we may just keep attendees close to the company at every stage of the event lifecycle.
If you click on Matched Audiences using the Account Assets tab, you should see the Create an Audience option. Depending on your goals, you can create this audience based on lead generation forms, website analytics or videos. In the future, this will expand so that you can create an audience based on your LinkedIn Event.
If you haven’t yet added the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website, now is the time. When running a retargeting campaign, the tag will be used to retarget, track conversions and get insights in real time. Using this feature, we can assess the visitors to our website and their preferences to inform content decisions.
LinkedIn can allow you to build an audience within 48 hours. As more LinkedIn users engage with ads or click to your website, your audience will continue to grow. As long as you remember this feature, your audience will continually refresh, which should lead to positive conversions.
Whether you use LinkedIn for ad campaigns already or have been considering it, retargeting on the platform gives us another option. For B2C businesses, retargeting has been an option for ad campaigns on Instagram and Facebook for some time. However, B2B services who have historically been left behind on LinkedIn are in for some good news.
Advertisers can reach out to people who have watched a certain percentage of video ads, either 100%, 75%, 50% or 25%. The lower you go, the more likely you are to encounter people who clicked away early because the content didn’t resonate. On the other hand, those who watched 100% of a video ad may have more of an interest, and a retargeting campaign could be the necessary step to convert their interest into a sale.
The new retargeting feature on LinkedIn will help find people who either opened or submitted a lead generation form. If the audience is large enough, we recommend starting with people who submitted a form. Generally speaking, the fact that they had enough interest to submit a form suggests that they are closer to converting than those who simply opened the form.
For most B2B businesses, there is a longer journey from prospect to customer. According to Shrivastava, retargeting helps generate a ‘tailored journey’ to bring people through the funnel more effectively.
To decide whether LinkedIn retargeting is worthwhile, you probably want to hear some numbers. At this stage, we’re still very early in the process. We’re sure there will be plenty of brands testing the feature in the coming weeks and informing us of the results. For now, we’ll stick with the test results from LinkedIn. According to TOPdesk and other advertisers, you can expect:
With more people converting, the companies were paying less for each conversion during testing. If this applies to the rest of us, it will be extremely helpful. We can either reduce the amount we pay overall for conversions, or keep the same funding and watch as more conversions come from this same investment.
In addition to this, LinkedIn reported a 25% increase in reach for Sponsored Content campaigns. Why? Since Microsoft owns LinkedIn, the whole network now includes Microsoft News, Flipboard and MSN. For some members, monthly touchpoints are increasing by 9X.
For both quality and security, LinkedIn is integrating Pixalate and Integral Ad Science. While the latter is designed for brand safety and protection for all ads, Pixalate helps filter publishers while considering invalid traffic.
As we’ve seen in this guide, we can retarget on LinkedIn using a few different methods. The first option is to retarget by website. While some will retarget based on all website visits, others will set up retargeting for specific pages. You can now reach out to everyone who clicks on a certain product page.
Others will want to retarget video viewers. Depending on the size of your audience, you can adjust your campaign based on how much of the video ad a particular audience viewed. Do you want to go for the smaller audience who watched 100% of a video ad, or the larger audience who watched more than 50%?
Finally, you can retarget with lead generation forms based on submitted or opened forms.
With retargeting by website, the first thing you need to do is add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website. Copy and paste the small code into the footer of your website. LinkedIn has produced helpful guides for this, and there are also tutorials on YouTube.
Once you’re ready, head over to the Matched Audiences tab in the targeting section. Here, you should see Add Matched Audiences and then Create Website Audiences. At this stage, you choose the URLs pertinent to your marketing campaign. Remember we said that you can retarget visitors of the whole website or specific pages? This is where you differentiate. If you only want to focus on a couple of product pages, make sure you enter the respective URLs at this point.
Now it’s just a matter of following instructions and completing the setup. LinkedIn has stated that the building phase of the campaign will take around 48 hours. As soon as the audience reaches 300 people, delivery starts. (Patience is required in the early phases of the campaign.)
Before finishing up, we wanted to differentiate between ‘and’ / ‘or’ in the setup phase of your campaign. When you choose to enter a second URL in the ‘or’ space, the user will need to visit EITHER of the two pages to qualify. If you enter the second URL in the ‘and’ space, the user needs to have visited BOTH pages to qualify. By clicking the Add URLs button at the bottom, you can shape the campaign as needed.
