Yes, You Can Audit Your LinkedIn Targeting

Sam Fonoimoana
June 4, 2020

Your LinkedIn campaigns may not be targeting the audiences you specified – this is both good and bad.

One of the most powerful aspects of the LinkedIn platform is the ability to precision-target very specific audiences (my last article was about this). You can tailor your campaigns to different audiences by job title, company, company size, industry and much more.

Yes, You Can Audit. This is great, but how can I be sure that the majority of my campaign spend is going to audiences I specifically targeted? Let’s go through an example of how we can audit our job title targeting.

In this example I have set up a campaign that will target 2 specific IT titles – 1) Director of Information Technology and 2) Head Of Information Technology

Now I want to know how the campaign has performed and spent across the job titles and to be sure that LinkedIn is in fact sticking to my 2 job titles. At Stoke, our data engineers have come up with powerful audit reporting that can give us these insights – we call it the Audience Targeting Audit. Here is what it looks like:

Let’s dissect this piece-by-piece.

Pie Chart. This shows what percentage of the campaign spend is going to other audiences vs. your target audiences. This shows 73% of my campaign spend going to other audiences.

KPI. The $17.52k represents the minimum dollars spent on audiences you didn’t target. It is at least this amount and likely higher because currently the LinkedIn API will give you only a subset of the full data when looking at this level of granularity.

LinkedIn Campaign Table. You can view all campaigns that have job title targeting and the amount spent on targeted audiences vs. other audiences. When you select a campaign it will filter the table on the right which brings us to our last piece …

Audience Targeting Table. Here you can see all of the job titles that the campaign actually targeted. The green checkbox indicates it is one of the titles I explicitly targeted. I can see impressions, clicks, spend, CTR and CPC by each job title.

This audit is quite useful to see what is actually happening with your spend. And now I can take some actions:

Include The Winners. Chief Information Officer has the highest CTR and was not one of my original titles, I may want to include this into the campaign.
Exclude The Losers. Technology Manager took quite a decent portion of my spend and performs well below average. I will explicitly exclude this from the campaign.
Audience Expansion. I will double check that audience expansion is not enabled on the campaign so that it can narrow this further (other audiences may still pop up, just not as high a percentage).

Note: Some variation is always expected because members can have multiple concurrent titles. But obviously we should strive for the vast majority of our spend to go towards our ideal target audience.

As LinkedIn marketers, we need the ability to make sure our campaigns are targeting as designed. The Audience Targeting Audit is a powerful tool that will give you this information. The Audit is able to cover the following targeting facets: job title, company, company size, industry and seniority.

Stoke is offering the Audience Targeting Audit for a single targeting facet for free. Anyone interested please reach out and we will get it to you in minutes.

Happy marketing and happy analyzing!