Dive Brief:

• LinkedIn has launched Matched Audiences, a new set of targeting capabilities that combine LinkedIn’s data with marketers’ own first-party data, the company announced in a news post.
• The new tool includes three targeting capabilities: Website Retargeting, Account Targeting and Contact Targeting.
• The social media platform has been running a six-month pilot program on the tools with more than 370 advertisers and over 2,000 campaigns. Results include an average 30% lift in clickthrough rate and 14% drop in post-click cost-per-conversion with Website Retargeting, 32% increase in post-click conversion rates and 4.7% drop in post-click cost-per-conversion with Account Targeting, and 37% increase in click rate with Contact Targeting.

Dive Insight:

LinkedIn has been relatively quiet since being acquired by Microsoft last June for $26.2 billion with the promise it would retain its distinct brand, culture and independence. At the same time, marketers had hopes that by joining the Redmond giant, LinkedIn might get tighter integration with Microsoft’s Office suite, and at the time John Keehler, adjunct professor of marketing at SMU Cox Business School, told Marketing Dive the deal could lead to “potentially new kinds of targeting” on the social media platform.

With the announcement of the Matched Audiences tools, Keehler’s initial reaction seems to have come to pass. With marketers often complaining in the past that it was difficult to reach a specific audience on LinkedIn, the Matched Audiences news has the potential to lure more marketers to the platform and to encourage existing users to ramp up their efforts. 

Each of LinkedIn's new tools uses different areas of first-party marketer data to enhance targeted campaigns. Website Retargeting uses visitors to the marketer’s website, Account Targeting lets marketers upload company names to match against the almost 12 million company pages on LinkedIn, and Contact Targeting allows marketers to upload email or contact lists into marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Oracle Eloqua or LiveRamp to import lists of contacts from LinkedIn.