The Campainless Blog
For many B2B marketers, LinkedIn Ads is one of their favourite advertising tools. And the seemingly infinite audience targeting possibilities are a key reason for this. But selecting the best audience set up for your specific needs can be a difficult task. Particularly when it comes to sizing. Fortunately, we are gurus in this area and can help guide you through it. And while there’s no magic pill we can give you, we can share our ride-or-die tips for nailing audience size.
Despite there being no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to LinkedIn ads audiences, there is an ideal range that we recommend sticking within if you want to get optimal results. This target range encompasses the full funnel (top, middle and bottom). The lower range is usually suited more to the bottom and higher to the top. It also encompasses the different types of audiences – demographic, custom, lookalike and retargeting.
So, what is that golden bracket? In our experience, it’s between 40,000-400,000. This is the range where all the magic happens. Of course, there are exceptions. One of the main ones being website remarketing audience (which can be anywhere from 300+ upwards). While 1000+ is ideal, sometimes you are hamstrung by the number of people who have visited your website.
So now we’ve established the range we think you should play in, how do you narrow down your options from there? How do you understand the size your target audience should actually be? Let’s run through our top tips.
The first tip is asking yourself: what is the funnel stage of my campaign? And secondly, what is my goal at this stage of the funnel? For example, if it’s a top-funnel, brand awareness campaign you’re running, you’ll want to get your brand name in front of as many relevant people as possible.
For that reason, the broader your audience, the better and a larger sized audience is recommended. This means sticking to the high end of the ideal audience bracket – 200,000-400,000.
However, if you’re looking at a bottom-funnel acquisition campaign, you probably want to be as specific and targeted as possible. For this reason, you’re looking more at the 40,000-100,000 range.
As well as taking into account the funnel stage of the campaign you’re running and the ideal audience size bracket, you should always be keeping in mind your own understanding of your target audience.
Particularly the nature of the industry they fall into and your competitive landscape. You’re likely to have a good grasp of what this entails already and should always come back to this knowledge when audience building.
Ask yourself questions like:
Answers to these kinds of questions will help guide you in the right direction and ensure you’re using your ad spend wisely. For example, if you’ve created an audience that looks okay on paper but doesn’t match your understanding of how large your target audience actually is – you might need to re-evaluate your targeting decisions.
Don’t feel like you have a solid enough grasp on your target audience already? We’d recommend doing some additional research online, speaking to current clients and experts in your space or potentially investing in an intent-based platform like Bombora or Zoom.info. You can’t find the right audience size if you don’t understand your audience generally.
Our third and final tip for finding the ideal audience size is to test out a few different targeting options. See what size generates the best results, and returns the highest quality. As with anything on LinkedIn testing is the quickest, most effective way of finding the best audience composition (including size) for your business and allow you to hit your goals quickly.
Unfortunately, testing audiences is only an option really for those who have the money to justify it (and aren’t testing too many other variables at the same time), but if you have more than $200 a day available – testing is a must-do!
There you are – all our safely guarded, high-value tips for finding the perfect LinkedIn audience size. Make sure you start putting them into action today, and we look forward to seeing how they work for you.
Need a little extra guidance when it comes to LinkedIn audiences or campaign set-up in general? This article just scratches the surface of what the team at Campainless knows about LinkedIn Ads. Get in touch with us today and we’ll do our best to answer any questions you have.
