LinkedIn Single Image Ad Retargeting Guide – bestmembers

LinkedIn has pleasantly surprised its users by constantly introducing new features in recent years.

In April 2022, they publicly announced the possibility of creating a retargeting audience based on people who interact with single image ads.

This targeting option is included with video view and lead form retargeting as another way to reach visitors who have interacted with the ad.

These audiences are currently created based on the campaign level, including only those individuals who meet the targeting criteria in the campaigns you choose to include as an audience.

Please note that you can potentially use either standalone single image ads or sponsored content based on existing posts you have promoted.

There are several options to expand or narrow your audience.

You can include all people who interact with the ad in any way (including reactions, comments, posts, and clicks), or you can strictly limit audience generation to paid clicks.

This only includes individuals who take the intended click action that is billed in your campaign settings, such as clicking on a landing page, opening a lead form, or watching a video.

You can also choose an engagement period to include people in your audience.

The options are: 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days.

You’ll probably want to consider the potential size of your target audience from your original campaign and the length of your sales cycle when deciding which length to choose.

You can also create a different length audience to distribute different future retargeting messages based on the length of their initial engagement with your ad.

Benefits of Interaction Based Retargeting

You’ve probably heard acronyms for moving to a cookie-free web, such as GDPR, CCPA, and ITP.

Remember FLOC?

Pixel-based retargeting audiences continue to become less reliable as mobile OS and browser restrictions reduce the ability to track users.

On the other hand, data from third-party platforms has become more valuable.

By expanding the reach of interaction retargeting across the platform, LinkedIn instantly offers a way to build an audience of people who might not otherwise use pixel-based retargeting.

In addition, paid search has become more audience-focused, with looser match types and stronger machine learning, and less targeting of very specific keywords.

Supplementing your search with paid social media is becoming increasingly valuable to reach your target audience across multiple channels.

Particularly for B2B ads, LinkedIn allows you to reach those people in the spotlight with precise targeting, where identifying keywords can sometimes be tricky for niche industries.

By strictly limiting your audience to people who have interacted with your ad, you can build an audience of those who match your targeting criteria.

For example, if your initial campaign settings are limited to targeting people who work on a business listing, you know that the narrower audience of those who click on your ads should only include employees of those companies.

Basically, you have now created a list of people associated with your main target accounts who are also interested in your content based on their behavior.

You can also either increase your audience by enabling multiple campaigns, or stick to segmenting different audiences into individual campaigns, depending on how you want to retarget in the future.

Fully consistent campaign approach

The high cost of LinkedIn has always made it a difficult channel to justify spending on brand awareness advertising.

However, post-engagement audience building allows for more strategic ads at the top of the funnel to engage users interested in your brand and redirect them with more offer-driven messages.

For example, a top-of-the-funnel campaign might contain sponsored content that connects users to blog posts related to your industry.

You can build an audience of people who interact with these posts and then retarget lead ads by offering a buyer guide in exchange for their contact information.

Since you’ve already warmed them up with original content, you could theoretically preselect people who have shown some interest in your products.

At a minimum, even if you don’t have immediate plans to create a future campaign, set up a retargeting audience any time you set up a single image ad campaign.

After that, you will have a ready-made audience if you want to use it in the future.

Audience exceptions

Using engagement audiences directly for targeting can also be useful for exclusions.

If you don’t want to oversaturate users with your ads, you can exclude people from your campaign after they become interested.

In particular, when running a brand awareness/top of the funnel game, you can ensure that they don’t keep seeing the same post after they’ve reacted or clicked on it.

Also, if you move people to a campaign with mid-funnel offers as an asset, for example, you can avoid crossing wires by continuing to show them higher funnel content and focusing on keeping lead generation messages in their feed.

Exclude ad members from the original campaign by targeting them in a lead generation campaign.

Start Targeting!

Now that you’re familiar with the ability to create a single-image retargeting audience on LinkedIn, start thinking about how to embed it in your ad account.

You may already have blog content that you can promote with sponsored content ads to start building an audience.

Think about the persona you want to attract; you may want to cast a wide enough net to be cost effective, knowing that you can narrow it down to people who are directly interested.

Build your audience, let it start building, and start reconfiguring it to take more action.

I’m excited about this feature and look forward to seeing what LinkedIn brings to advertisers over time.

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Featured Image: Abel Justin / Shutterstock