You can make the most of your LinkedIn advertising budget with retargeting ad campaigns aimed at people who have already shown interest in your brand.
Ever wonder what happens to people who discover your company via LinkedIn but disappear after visiting your website once?
You can tell it’s happening when you see website traffic from LinkedIn, but only a small number convert on your site. (How small? Unbounce puts the average conversion rate at four per cent across a broad range of industries.)
Where do these visitors go, and more importantly, can you get them back? You can, with a feature called LinkedIn retargeting.
It’s worth your while to try. Advertising on LinkedIn is a solid B2B marketing strategy, giving you access to a vast network of professionals. And according to LinkedIn, four out of five of its members drive business decisions and, together, they have twice the buying power of the average web audience.
How to retarget ads on LinkedIn
- Create a LinkedIn advertising account
- Install a LinkedIn Insights Tag or pixel to your website
- Create a LinkedIn retargeting ad campaign
- Choose the audience for your campaign
- Launch your ad campaign
What are LinkedIn retargeting ads?
As valuable an audience as LinkedIn provides, advertising on the platform isn’t cheap. It’s most effective if you can target the right people and get your ads in front of them. Otherwise, you’re likely to spend your advertising budget swiftly with little impact.
One way to make the most of your LinkedIn advertising budget is to use LinkedIn retargeting. LinkedIn retargeting, sometimes called remarketing, means getting your ads in front of LinkedIn users who have already interacted with your website.
A small pixel, or snippet of code, is added to your website’s backend to track their online activity. This tracking pixel is called a LinkedIn Insight Tag. This pixel tracks when people visit your website from LinkedIn then leave without taking a desired action, like making a purchase or converting in some other manner. These prospects have shown an interest in your company, but they didn’t take the next step. LinkedIn retargeting ads will get your brand back in front of these people to re-engage them and try to pique their interest.
This strategy allows your ad campaigns to reach people who are most likely to convert to customers, boosting the impact of your advertising dollars. As a result, you’ll be able to acquire leads more successfully and at a lower cost.
How to retarget your LinkedIn ad campaigns
Let’s dig into how to get your LinkedIn ad campaigns in front of these interested audiences. Doing so might be the nudge they need to remember why they were looking into your company in the first place.
1. Create a LinkedIn advertising account
Start using your LinkedIn Campaign Manager if you haven’t already. First, you’ll need to set up a LinkedIn Advertising Account so you can create ad campaigns.
2. Install a LinkedIn Insights Tag or pixel on your website
You can install this tag on your website by pasting the code from your Campaign Manager into your site footer, or you can skip the coding entirely and rely on a tag manager. Note that there’s an extra step to ensure the advertising pixel will work with Chrome users. Again, you can do it yourself through your Campaign Manager or hire a developer to get you up and running.
3. Create a LinkedIn retargeting ad campaign
Now you’re ready to try creating an ad campaign. Follow the prompts in your Campaign Manager to set things up. You’ll be able to choose from different objectives, such as awareness, consideration and conversions, to suit your goals for the campaign.
Next, you’ll choose your audience and ad format, where you want your ad displayed, and the budget and schedule for your campaign. Remember that retargeting typically boosts your conversion rate, so it’s a worthwhile investment. Once you run a few campaigns, you’ll get a clearer idea of what your return on investment is and can increase your budget accordingly.
4. Choose the audience for your campaign
Let’s dig a little deeper into choosing the audience for your campaign. LinkedIn will show you all the options during setup to help you select the best fit for each campaign.
For LinkedIn retargeting audiences, you can choose from:
- Website Audience: This selection allows you to target people who have visited your website from the LinkedIn platform.
- Video Audience: With this choice, you can target users who viewed one of your video ads in the past.
- Lead Gen Form Audience: If you have a lead generation form and want to target people who have opened or submitted it within a certain time period, this choice allows you to put ads in front of them. You can target people who interacted with your form within the last 30 days or any time up to a year ago.
- Company Page Audience: This captures people who have interacted with your LinkedIn company page.
- Event Audience: This selection targets people who RSVPed to events (past or upcoming) that you held or plan to hold on LinkedIn.
- Matched Audience: A matched audience (also called a lookalike audience) is made up of people who are like those in one of your other campaign audiences.
It’s easy to imagine how powerful retargeting ads can be when you see how precisely you can focus your campaigns. Learning who you need to target for best results is part of the testing you’ll do to create retargeting campaigns in LinkedIn.
5. Launch your ad campaign
Here’s what happens behind the scenes. First, a user sees your regular ad in their LinkedIn feed. Perhaps they click through to your website but don’t become a customer. Thanks to the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed on your site, they become a lead. The tracking pixel stores their history on your site in website cookies and sends that data to LinkedIn.
The data then triggers your retargeting ad to be shown to that user to remind them to return to your site and engage with your brand again. Hopefully, this leads them to take the desired action, like contacting you, purchasing a product or signing up for a webinar.
Pro tips to retarget LinkedIn ads
Learning how to retarget LinkedIn ads to interested customers can take a bit of practice, but you have a lot of autonomy and flexibility to create ad campaigns that suit your goals and budget.
Keep these tips in mind when you retarget LinkedIn ad campaigns:
- Be flexible with your budget. While advertising on LinkedIn is certainly not inexpensive, retargeting allows you to get your ads in front of a relevant, interested audience. Check your metrics and conversion rates when deciding on your budget, as these ads can show a better return on investment.
- Craft ad copy and select ad images that target your audience and speak to their pain points. They have interacted with your brand before, so create targeted messaging for them. For example, if you’re targeting people who have RSVPed to an event, mention the event. Personalizing ads so they feel relevant to your audience is key, and clear calls to action can help keep people moving through your funnel.
- As with any other advertising campaign, measure your progress as you go. Then, when you see what’s working, you can repeat what’s effective and change what isn’t.
Driving traffic to your website is just one part of your marketing strategy. Analyzing what happens when people visit your site but don’t convert is a savvy way to narrow down your outreach. When you can get your brand in front of B2B decision makers whose actions indicate interest, you have a much higher chance of converting them to customers.
