LinkedIn Retargeting Essentials: How to Effectively Re-Engage Your Audience
May 2, 2024
LinkedIn retargeting is the process of re-engaging users who have already interacted with your brand, but have not yet made the purchase. It gives a strategic second chance to anyone who has entered the website. The site is part of the big, large network of LinkedIn, hosting more than 900 million members. Over 65 million of them of them are decision-makers. With such a huge network, the rates of engagement and conversion can be high if one decides to retarget ads on this platform.
LinkedIn is the most engaging social medium for career professionals. So it's important to understand the effectiveness of LinkedIn ads and the essence of its retargeting. With businesses eyeing to tap into LinkedIn's ability to retarget and recapture the eyes of the clients, the LinkedIn ad retargeting and conversion tracking can be used to gain better results.
Introduction to LinkedIn Retargeting
Let's start with the quick overview of LinkedIn retargeting functionality.
The key features of LinkedIn retargeting
1. Tailored Advertisement Objectives
With LinkedIn advertising, you have the power to hit three main objectives: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Each is designed to fit with a different stage of your marketing funnel. So that your retargeting ads are made to meet specific business goals.
2. Various Retargeting Options
You can get started with LinkedIn retargeting when you have an audience created via the Account Assets tab. With this, you can aim at website visitors, video ad interactions, engagements with Lead Gen Forms, and interactions with your LinkedIn Event. This gives a lot of versatility in creating segmented audiences and, therefore, more effective retargeting strategies.
3. LinkedIn Insight Tag
Website retargeting requires the installation of an Insight Tag, which is a conversion-tracking tool that allows visitors to be retargeted. Website retargeting gives you real-time access to the professional traits and the content preference insights of your audience. That can take up to 48 hours to start forming your target audience. The process will continue when more and more LinkedIn members visit your site or interact with your ads.
4. Better Targeting by Improving the Level of Engagement
Retargeting with LinkedIn allows you to engage your audience before, during, and after events. This doesn't only speed up the buyer's journey, but also messages them at the right moment, making your ad super relevant.
5. Better Performance with Matched Audiences
The "Matched Audiences" feature allows you to create an audience out of any base of users that interacts with your website, content, or LinkedIn page. This can be a powerful tool, especially in a B2B context, as the precision leads to high levels of engagement and better conversion opportunities.
Benefits and issues of LinkedIn retargeting
1. Rate of Engagement and Conversion
Retargeting with LinkedIn can drive your metrics of engagement significantly up. Studies show boosts in click-through rates by 30%, a reduction in post-click cost per conversion of 14%, and an overall lift in CTR of 37%.
2. Audience Size and Audience Engagement Problem
Now, the biggest issue is to stay with an audience large enough that we can retarget effectively. LinkedIn requires a minimum 300 member accounts in your audience to target. This can be a real limit for small or newer businesses. You have to really understand the difference between LinkedIn's cold layer and the retargeting layer to maximize your ad. More on this below.
3. Retargeting Layers
The retargeting strategy for LinkedIn can be split into two big layers: the cold layer at the top of the funnel and the retargeting layer at the middle of the funnel. People in the retargeting layer are slightly warmer and already have a point of reference and connection with your brand. This would then create some recall and engagement.
Leveraging LinkedIn Retargeting in B2B Marketing
What makes LinkedIn the preferred platform for B2B organizations is that you can target professionals and decision-makers. In this regard, LinkedIn Retargeting gives a strategic edge to B2B companies. Professionals and decision-makers have more buying power than average web audiences and are usually key business decision makers.
An example of B2B retargeting at Linkedin. Source: Linear
How to Set Up Your LinkedIn Retargeting Campaign
How to set up the LinkedIn retargeting campaign
1. LinkedIn Insight Tag
To set up your LinkedIn retargeting campaign, you need to get the LinkedIn Insight Tag onto your website. This is a special JavaScript code tracking conversions, website audiences, and demographic information in fine-tuning your ad campaigns. Use it to install a tag yourself, email instructions on installing a tag to a developer, or use a tag manager for integration.
2. Build Your Ideal Customer Profile
Very granular targeting is crucial. Audiences can be targeted based on website interactions, video ads, Lead Gen Forms, or even LinkedIn Events. For website retargeting, make use of the Insight Tag to monitor events like button clicks, page visits, and form submissions. The next step is to go to the 'Plan' section, click on 'Audiences', then 'Create audience', and finally 'Matched Audience' to finish the definition of audiences.
3. Size and Composition of the Audience
Consider audience size carefully; it impacts the cost of advertising. In general, the larger the audience, the lower the cost per click. Excluding the right people can be just as effective as including the right people. Make sure your audience meets the minimum required size of 300 members to ensure effective targeting.
4. Choose Ad Formats and Call-to-Action
Consider using more than one ad format to effectively reach your audience. Testing various calls to action will identify what resonates with the target segment of your audience. You can have up to five different ads running in the campaign for full coverage with as much engagement as possible.
5. Set and Manage Your Advertising Budget
Choose your budget strategy based on what you want to achieve with the campaign. LinkedIn, however, allows you to do manual bidding, and so you can really start very low and then from the performance just adjust accordingly. This gives you more control of cost per ad impression and better control of overall expenditure.
6. Launch and Monitor Your Campaign
Run your campaign only after you have the audience and ads in place. Monitor key metrics, like reach and frequency, so you don't fall prey to ad fatigue and get better performance overall. Change strategies based on real-time data to make retargeting efforts more effective.
7. Optimize Based on Performance Feedback
Monitor the performance of the retargeting campaign regularly. Make changes in your bidding strategy, ad rotation settings, and targeting the audience through such learning that comes from continuous analytics. Doing this ongoing optimization will see increasing engagement and conversion rates over time.
Following these steps, you will have a LinkedIn retargeting campaign to effectively re-engage with your audience and maximize your marketing effort on this platform.
Great Practices for LinkedIn Retargeting
Frequency and Relevance of Your Ads
- Frequency Caps: Frequency capping is the most crucial setting to make, as this will prevent users from getting bombarded by your ads. In essence, this is suppression of showing your ads multiple times to the same user—another instance of ad fatigue that would lead to bad user experience.
- Utilize Exclusion Lists: Activate the use of your exclusion lists so as not to show retargeting ads to those that have already converted or to people who are not interested. Just another way to keep those ads relevant.
- Privacy: Respect privacy standards and retain the trust of your audience. This means respecting the opt-out and data protection regulations.
Go Deep into Your Audience Insights
- Leverage Demographic Insights: Use the demographic information you have to narrow down your audience, and therefore open a way to discover new segments that might be interested in your offerings.
- Customize Your Behavior: Serve your campaigns according to the segmented behaviors, interests, and preferences of the audiences at their different stages of the buyer journey. Your ads will only become more and more relevant the more you use this more focused approach.
Ad Creatives and Testing
- Ad Variations Testing: Test different ad creatives in the same campaign to understand which resonates better with the audience. It may just as well pay off because the rates of engagement and conversion will go high.
- Make Ad Content Dynamic: Ensure you are always testing and iterating on your ad content based on feedback from performance metrics to keep your campaigns current.
Strategic Bidding & Formats
- Manual Bidding Strategy: Choose manual bidding if you want more control over how much you spend relative to the number of impressions that your ads will receive. This allows you to control costs while ensuring ads reach the right people.
- Multiple Ad Formats: Use a wide range of ad formats to engage your audience in creative ways. This would help you prevent ad fatigue and target different people in your audience.
Performance Monitoring and Tuning
- Keep Track of Reach and Frequency: Monitor the number of unique users your advertisement reaches and how frequent it is. Use this as data that can be used to moderate and optimize the advertisement without overexposing it.
- Use performance data to derive actionable insights that can be put to work toward better ad strategies, including bid and budget adjustments.
Advanced Retargeting Tricks
- Use Matched Audiences: Use LinkedIn's Matched Audiences to get more specific with your targeting. This will allow you to create customized audiences through their website or by interacting with LinkedIn content, which would further improve the precision of your retargeting strategy.
- Deploy Multi-Platform Strategies: While focusing on LinkedIn retargeting, there uses of some other platforms like Google Ads to expand the reach. But again, it ensures budget management across platforms without overspending.
Adopt best practices with LinkedIn Retargeting so all your ad campaigns can reach the right audience, and it becomes irresistible for a viewer not to respond.
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Get StartedFAQs
1. How does LinkedIn allow for audience retargeting?
You can also retarget with LinkedIn, specifically with Company Page targeting, where one can build an audience from members who viewed your LinkedIn Page or interacted with a call-to-action button. You can even set the criteria for when the audience member viewed or interacted with your page.
2. What should I do to take steps towards retargeting my audience on LinkedIn?
To get started with retargeting on LinkedIn, go to the Account Assets tab, and click on "create an audience." There you can do retargeting with criteria such as website visitors, video ad interactions, Lead Gen Forms submissions, and later LinkedIn Event participation.
3. Can you give me a few nice strategies for retargeting?
Effective retargeting means that you can target audiences, simplify messages, A/B test ad messaging, use various means of collecting custom audiences, make use of intelligent software to track and analyze, and time campaigns toward objectives.
4. How does LinkedIn Retargeting benefit me?
With more page views, time spent on your site by visitors, reduced churn rates, and an increase in customer lifetime value due to the exposure of the retargeted audience to an already existing brand or company, LinkedIn retargeting is complete.
Measuring and Optimizing Your Campaigns
Key Metrics and Performance Tracking
1. Understanding Key Metrics
Measure the click-throughs, impressions, CTR, average engagement, conversion, the actual price per conversion, leads, and CPL against the LinkedIn retargeting effectiveness of the campaigns.
2. Setting Up Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking should be configured to track conversions, the rate of conversion, and cost per conversion. Use LinkedIn's Lead Gen Forms to keep up with leads and find out the cost of each.
3. Measuring Ads Performance
Start with your first campaigns to establish some sort of baseline, so you know what numbers you need to top. From there, set improvement goals to ratchet up those baseline figures, so you're outperforming your old results.
Ad Management and Optimization
1. Ad Rotation and Control
It would help to have control over the ad rotation settings to test different strategies, making sure that each ad reaches the audience effectively. This will be the best way of finding out which metrics will be the most powerful for your goals.
2. Comprehensive Ad Coverage
Ensure there are always at least five ads in your campaign so that your target sees all five within 48 hours. This causes there to be repetition, view time, and sticking time with each user in your target.
3. Manual Bidding
Choose manual bidding to maintain an organized ad spend. The average cost per click is going to be drastically lower because your bid is maxing out at the floor.
Audience and Budget
1. Audience Size and Ads Costs
The basic rule applies: the higher the audience size, the lower the cost per user reached. There is, however, a fine line to be walked with regard to audience size and value. Once the value begins to decrease due to expanding the target audience too broadly, it will not increase overall.
2. Monitor Reach and Frequency
Reach and frequency must be monitored, as this helps avoid ad fatigue. Information from this helps determine the time any change in the ad format, as well as if there is a need to change the message or call to action.
Goal Setting and Analysis
1. Define your campaign goals
Well-define what your campaign goals are before you set forth: what would success look like for your retargeting efforts? How will outcomes be measured?
2. Campaign Results Analysis
Monitor the success of your campaigns against your goals, and regularly adapt your strategies based on your analysis to ensure that you are meeting or exceeding expectations.
Constant monitoring and optimization of your LinkedIn retargeting campaigns will largely increase the effectiveness of the campaigns and, consequently, bring up the engagement and conversion rates. Such a strategic approach always implies that retargeting efforts will not only be cost-effective but will also work in line with your holistic marketing goals.
Creating Good Content For Your Retargeting Ads
Audience Definition
Behaviors and Interests: It's time to segment your audience based on behaviors and interests, and that's the way you would do your LinkedIn retargeting ads. This, therefore, would be an excellent strategic way to do your segmentation, allowing you to talk directly to challenges and desires, making your ad very relevant and engaging.
Creating Your Message
Point Out Unique Selling Propositions: The retargeting ads must describe the unique benefits and offers guaranteed from products or services. This can be achieved in clear and concise compact language, with an attention-grabbing visual such as a relevant image or video.
Strong Call to Action: Develop a strong CTA as part of the advertisement to guide your audience on what to know more about, sign up for, or take action toward a special offer—ultimately guiding them through to the next step in their buyer's journey.
Ad Formats and Call to Action Optimization
Different Ad Formats: Use different ad formats from text to visual ads to diversify your connection to the audience. This might also increase the effectiveness and conversion rate of your campaign.
CTA Optimization: Test various kinds of calls to action, especially for the middle of the funnel, to encourage involvement, like signing up for webinars or downloading white papers.
Budget Considerations
Cost Implications: Please note that there are costs associated with content development and advertising fees charged by LinkedIn for the purposes of remarketing. Making it manageable is what will determine if the campaign will be successful.
Budget Recommendations: LinkedIn suggests a starting budget of $25 for brand new advertisers, and $50 to $100 for those who are returning with existing campaigns. This initial investment will have you dipping your toe in the pool and adjusting as you see the results.
Takeaways
In this article, we have delved into the details of LinkedIn retargeting. We've shown how it can take center stage in engaging with an audience that had at one point interacted with your brand. We've discussed the numerous advantages of LinkedIn Ads, especially in the B2B marketing arena, where precise targeting and insightful metrics lead the way toward markedly improved engagement and conversion rates. The strategic usage of retargeting features on LinkedIn — from the Insight Tag to Matched Audiences — elaborates on how custom efforts can be dramatically amplified to get your brand message across to the most relevant audiences.
We have touched upon the power of great content, understanding your audience at a very granular level, and optimizing the campaigns according to the data in driving home the point that best practices do need to be followed for retargeting campaigns. These steps to great LinkedIn retargeting campaigns — coupled with practical tips on effective budget management and ad optimization—serve up a full platter of the best practices to make the most of your retargeting efforts.
As you work to increase the success of your LinkedIn advertising strategies, remember that the expertise you need is only one conversation away. Contact us here to discuss further how we can drive your success on the world's biggest professional network, take full advantage of LinkedIn ads, and turn your prospects into loyal customers!
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Ekaterina crafts engaging and strategic content to drive brand awareness and audience engagement. Her expertise in digital marketing helps the agency deliver impactful campaigns and achieve client goals.