LinkedIn Expands AI-Powered Ad Targeting Tools

A quick note on LinkedIn’s Predictive Audiences, which utilize AI modeling to build audience profiles for you, based on a combination of your own data and LinkedIn’s insights.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“Predictive Audiences uses LinkedIn’s AI to analyze on-platform engagement data, like ad impressions and clicks, alongside your selected first-party or third-party data (conversions API data, lead gen forms, etc.) By identifying patterns, behaviors, and similar characteristics, this tool then creates a new audience that is predicted to take actions similar to your source data.”

So, much like Meta’s Advantage+ targeting, Predictive Audiences builds on your own targeting info to expand your pool of target customers, and get your promotions in front of more people who are likely to respond, based on LinkedIn’s own systematic analysis.

LinkedIn first launched Predictive Audiences back in 2023, then it retired its own Lookalike Audiences option last year, in favor of the new combined audience data approach. And now, LinkedIn has incorporated some new elements into Predictive Audiences to make them even more effective.

From this week, Predictive Audiences can now include company lists, which will further expand your targeting capacity, and the inputs that LinkedIn’s AI can use to build out your data. This could be particularly valuable for B2B marketers, enabling exclusions and expanded business profiling based on performance insight.

You’ll also now be able to add retargeting sources, which will give marketers even more capacity to merge their own data sources into the mix.

These are good updates, which will expand your capacity to use LinkedIn’s automated targeting tools to maximize ad performance.

And with AI ad targeting tools often generating better results than manual audience selection, based on expanded understanding of likely audience response, the benefits could be significant.

Indeed, LinkedIn says that early adopters using Predictive Audiences for lead gen objectives saw a 21% reduction in cost-per-lead.

Could be worth considering. You can learn more about LinkedIn’s Predictive Audiences here.