Use contact targeting to build audience segments that will allow you to tailor your advertising campaigns to target your priority contacts. Contact lists are part of LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences.
Here's a tip
If you select a contact list when building your ad set audience, you can refine your audience by choosing additional targeting attributes, such as job function or seniority.
When uploading your company lists, they need to adhere to LinkedIn's formatting guidelines or the upload won’t be successful. For the most up-to-date format, download the CSV template provided in Campaign Manager.
Populate your template
Review the table below to understand the requirements needed when populating your template for contact lists.
| Requirement | |
| Headers | Don’t change or remove the headers. When populating a template, add your own list below the headers provided. Changing or removing template headers will cause an error when you upload your audience. |
| Minimum size | Your list must have at least 300 rows for a successful upload. |
| Maximum size | The maximum list size is 20 MB or 300,000 records. |
| Compatibility | CSV file uploads or information received from third-party API partners are supported. You can only create a contact list audience segment from a single list. If you have multiple lists, you'll need to create a separate audience for each list. |
| Minimum number of member accounts | Your list must match a minimum of 300 member accounts to be used in an active ad set. If your audience size doesn’t reach 300 member accounts, you’ll see < 300 members in the Last audience count column on your Audiences page and the list name will be gray. You can’t use that audience in an ad set until it has been updated and hits the minimum number. |
Important to know
It might take up to 48 hours (on rare occasions, longer) to generate your audience.
Match your list to LinkedIn member accounts
To match your list to LinkedIn member accounts, we require at least one of the following:
- Email address - Email addresses included in your list can be regular (unhashed) email addresses or a list of hashed email addresses using SHA-256. If the list of email addresses isn't hashed, it'll be locally hashed in your browser before it’s saved. In either case, make sure your list header is email.
- First and last name - When providing first and last name, you can also provide the individual’s company name for more accurate matching.
- Mobile device ID for Google AID
- Mobile device IDs are unique user-resettable identifiers provided by the mobile device’s operating system. Mobile device IDs can be used to build an audience based on mobile app activity.
- If you have more than one ID type associated with each user (such as email and mobile device ID), provide all the IDs you have. This will improve the probability of matching to a member.
Here's a tip
Email address is the only field that allows you to include hashed values.
Best practices for your contact targeting list
A few tips for your contact targeting list:
- We recommend uploading lists with at least 10,000 personal or professional email addresses to help ensure your list matches with at least 300 verified email addresses on LinkedIn.
- When selecting targeting facets for your ad set audience, contact lists may not be used with member interests and traits.
- If you're using special characters, save the file encoded to UTF-8 to help ensure successful upload.
Related tasks
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