LinkedIn launches Custom Audience product

April 25, 2017: LinkedIn’s Custom Audience product, dubbed “Matched Audiences,” launched this week, just as the business-oriented network announced that it had hit the 500 million member mark.

Like similar Custom Audience products launched by Facebook, Twitter and Google over the past several years, Matched Audiences is a self-serve tool allowing marketers to leverage their existing contacts by using email addresses as the matching element. For example, a marketer with a list of customers who bought a certain product could be directly marketed to learn about an upgrade to that same product. Marketers using Marketo, Oracle Eloqua or LiveRamp can directly import lists to LinkedIn; additional integrations with other cloud-based marketing platforms are, according to LinkedIn, just around the corner.

Additionally, Matched Audiences lets marketers install a retargeting pixel (called an “Insight Tag”) on their websites. This tag — over time — generates an audience that can be subsequently marketed to on LinkedIn itself.

LinkedIn has published an informative PDF that will walk you through the mechanics of marketing via Matched Audiences. Another excellent how-to comes from MarketingLand.com’s A.J. Wilcox, who makes note of several limitations with Matched Audiences that marketers need to know about in advance, particularly with respect to the lack of feedback over which emails in a given list do not match (LinkedIn only provides a percentage of failed matches), and the lack of list management/list deletion features. Hopefully, these issues will be ironed out as the product goes forward, because the product would become easier to use.

LinkedIn’s sales collateral presents glowing ROI numbers for marketers who’ve used Matched Audience’s pilot program over the past six months. One marketer reported a 37 percent improvement in CTR using Matched Audience; with another scoring a 30 percent increase in CTR using Website Retargeting.

Whether your own campaigns will similarly benefit from using LinkedIn’s new product depends on a lot of things: the size of your list, its quality, your match rate on LinkedIn, and, of course, the quality of your creative and the degree to which your offer is unique and compelling. But this new product will likely encourage marketers to deploy some experimental budget in its direction, which should yield some interesting – perhaps even profitable findings.