Auto-Targeting for Classic ad sets combines LinkedIn’s professional audience, platform signals, and your inputs to automatically build an audience for your ad set. Use Auto-Targeting to help reduce the time you spend on audience creation, while keeping the flexibility and control to add in additional signals to adjust your target audience.

To build your Auto-Targeting audience, we use the following signals: 

• Your product name and AI-generated insights on your product, service, or brand from the source URL you provide when you tell us what you're marketing. 
• Targeting settings, which include location, profile language, and exclusions 
• Optional audience signals, which include data sources (Lead Gen Forms, contact or company lists, conversions, and retargeting audiences) and select attributes (company industries, job titles, job seniorities, and job functions) are used to guide audience building.  
• LinkedIn advertising data combined with historical data from your account’s previous ad sets.

These signals build an audience that can help you reach member accounts that are most likely to convert for your business based on your ad set's objective. You can also select key targeting settings and add data sources to help you reach the professionals that mean the most to your business.

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• Auto-Targeting for Classic ad sets
  
• Use Auto-Targeting to build your audience for Classic ad sets

You can select optional targeting facets to expand or narrow your audience. Please note, the Locations attribute is required for your ad set audience.

Learn more about the targeting facets available in Campaign Manager. Keep in mind, if you create an Auto-Targeting audience, not all targeting facets are available.

Avoid limiting your audience by targeting only a few job titles. When you begin entering a title in the tool, Campaign Manager will auto-suggest other relevant titles that you may want to add. Include all relevant job titles to ensure your ad set's reach.

Broaden your audience by targeting both current and past holders of a given job title. These member accounts may have changed roles but still have a skill set relevant to your business. Select current, past, or current or past in the Job Titles dropdown menu.

For some ad sets, targeting by seniority can be an effective way to reach those with influence over a buying decision.

Skills include those explicitly added by member accounts in their skills section as well as keywords mentioned elsewhere in their profile. LinkedIn also derives skills from a member account’s job description, employer, industry, and education.

You can target up to 200 different companies using the Company Names option. For those who’d like to target an even larger list of companies, Matched Audiences allows you to upload a list of up to 300,000 companies.

Company Industries

Using the Company Industries facet allows you to target more broadly than specific company names. An organization may operate in many industries, however only the primary industry of operation as listed on their LinkedIn Page will be recognized.

Choosing to target by Degrees can sometimes limit your audience size because the Degrees profile field is not always populated.

For some ad sets, Fields of Study can be used as a proxy for skills or expertise in a given field, especially for recent graduates.

Member Interests targeting is an effective way to reach a range of member accounts based on topics or categories they’re interested in most and is most effective for ad sets with awareness and consideration objectives. Interest targeting can also help you reach a unique set of audiences when other targeting options are too narrow.

For example, if you’re looking to reach member accounts with an Interest in business travel, Member Skills targeting may not be as effective as it would reach those who have that skill listed on their profile (e.g. Travel Agents). However, interest targeting allows you to reach an audience with an interest in the topic (e.g. Corporate Executives or Consultants who travel for work).

Learn more about Member Interests targeting options.

Member Groups

LinkedIn Groups are online communities where those who share interests or professional associations can gather, discover new information, and ask questions. For example, for those looking to reach finance professionals, relevant Groups may include the Finance Club (840,000+ professionals), Banking Careers (500,000+ professionals), or Finance Plus: Private Equity, Venture Capital and M&A news.

Reach for some attributes or audiences may be limited when targeting within the European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland. We recommend the following when using certain audience targeting features:

• If you’re targeting Location, Member Gender, Member Interests, or Member Traits, we recommend you continue to use your selected option and explore other audiences or attributes to supplement your reach.
• If you’re targeting Member Age, we recommend adding job seniorities, years of experience, or job titles.
  
• If you’re creating a retargeting Matched Audience, we recommend you consider creating a scaled audience with our predictive audiences, using a data source that aligns with the specific actions you'd like to replicate. 
• If you're creating a website retargeting audience, we recommend you extend the length of your lookback window to help increase audience size.
• You can also enable the LinkedIn Audience Network to help extend the reach of your ad sets to members (based on their preference) on third-party apps and sites.

We recommend reviewing our targeting best practices for audience size and exploring and testing different targeting facets that fit your ideal audience profile.

Learn more about targeting options for LinkedIn Ads and how you can use AND-OR targeting for audience reach.

For Member Groups targeting:

When you choose to build your own audience, you can add attributes to the INCLUDE section of targeting setup, so your audience size will increase. If you add attributes to the Narrow audience further section or the EXCLUDE section, your audience size will decrease. As you select your targeting options, you can see an estimate of the audience size you'll be able to reach in the forecasted results window.

When you choose to use an Auto-Targeting audience, you can add audience signals to help further refine your audience. You can review the forecasted results window, but your estimated audience size won’t appear.

Learn more about best practices for target audience size and how to apply AND-OR logic to manage audience size in Campaign Manager.

When you choose to build your own audience, you can use these features to target the right audience:

• Matched audiences 
• Predictive audiences
• Audience templates 
• Saved audiences
• Audience expansion 

You can use these features with audience attributes to refine your audience.

Once your ad set has launched, you can better understand who’s interacting with your ads through anonymized ad set professional demographic data.

Once you know more about your audience, you can begin to tailor content to be more relevant and test ad variations to learn what performs best.