Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences help you find people with similar characteristics to your targeted audience. Lookalike audiences are identified using an existing matched audience segment, such as website audiences, account lists, or contact lists. Once your lookalike audience has been added to a campaign, you can also select additional targeting facets, like job function and company industry, to further refine your target audience.

Lookalike audiences use a proprietary algorithm to build upon your selected audience and looks at LinkedIn profiles and company attributes to determine similarity in order to expand to audiences who share similar characteristics. Your lookalike audience size can be up to 15x larger than your original audience size. The original matched audience segment will not be included in your generated lookalike audience.

Important: Lookalike audiences will match based on member and company similarities, but it’s not a guarantee that any particular characteristics will be shared in the generated lookalike audience. However, lookalike audiences don’t use sensitive demographic signals such as sex or age within the model.

Requirements

Lookalike audiences need to be created from valid matched audience segments with at least 300 matched members. Matched audience segments that are still building, expired, or in an error state can’t be used.
Lookalike audiences can’t be used with audience expansion.

Note:

Re-uploaded account or contact lists won’t automatically recreate an updated lookalike audience. In order to capture your latest audience, you’ll need to generate new lookalike audiences for your contact and account lists.
Lookalike audiences can’t be created from lookalike audiences.
If you delete the original audience list, your generated lookalike audience will not be affected.
Creating a Lookalike Audience for Ad Targeting

The lookalike audience feature helps you target people with similar characteristics to your matched audience segment.

To create a lookalike audience:

Sign in to Campaign Manager.
Click the correct account name.
From the account detail page, click the Account Assets dropdown on the top of the page.
Select Matched Audiences from the dropdown.
Select a Data source from the data filters in the left rail.
Click the More icon to the right of the Audience name you want to create lookalike for and select Create lookalike from the dropdown.
You can also click the People icon in the top right of the page to create a lookalike audience.
A green popup screen will appear if your submission is successful.
Once your lookalike audience segment is created, it can take up to 24 hours for the generated audience count to be reflected on the targeting page.
LinkedIn Matched Audiences – Overview

LinkedIn Matched Audiences is a set of targeting capabilities that gives you the unique ability to combine LinkedIn’s powerful professional data with your own first-party data to reach the right audiences on LinkedIn. With Matched Audiences, you can retarget your website visitors, securely upload lists of companies or email addresses, and integrate with contact management platforms such as Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and LiveRamp.

Note: Matched Audiences will only match members who have opted in from the EU, EEA, or Switzerland and members who have not opted out from other countries.

Website Retargeting

Website retargeting allows you to retarget your website visitors with LinkedIn ad campaigns for continued engagement and deliver relevant ad content based on the pages they visited on your site. Learn more about getting started with Website Retargeting.

Account Targeting (CSV Upload)

Through Account Targeting, you can upload CSV lists of company names and company domains to match against LinkedIn Pages. Learn more about uploading lists of companies for Account Targeting.

Contact Targeting (CSV Upload)

Through Contact Targeting, you can upload lists of personal and professional email addresses to match against LinkedIn members. Learn more about setting up Contact Targeting through CSV upload.

Contact Targeting (Data Integration)

Contact Targeting through Data Integration allows you to connect directly with your contact management platforms to import lists of contacts to match with members on LinkedIn for ad targeting. Learn more about integrating with contact management platforms through Data Integration.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences allow you to identify a new audience segment by building upon an existing matched audience segment, such as website audiences, account lists, or contact lists. Learn more about lookalike audiences.

Additional resources:

Getting Started Guide
Accessing Matched Audiences in Campaign Manager
Troubleshooting Tips for LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Data Collection and Storage for LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Using Filters to Create Website Audiences for Website Retargeting and Website Demographics
Using the Website Audiences Tab – Overview
Using the Uploaded List Audiences Tab – Overview
Account Targeting List Templates
Adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to Your Website
Asset Copying – Overview