Buyer groups leverage LinkedIn’s unique professional signals with our AI models to help you reach the group of professionals that collectively make product purchasing decisions for a company. By focusing on the decision-makers and key stakeholders for a company, buyer groups can help connect you with the most influential buying audience.
You can create a buyer groups audience when you’re building your ad set in Campaign Manager.
Step 1: Begin to create your ad set
Follow the steps to create a Classic ad set in Campaign Manager. You’ll need to select your campaign, enter details about your campaign, select your objective, and give your ad set a name.
Here's a tip
Buyer groups are currently only available in our Classic ad set creation type.
Step 2: Build your audience using buyer groups
After you’ve named your ad set:
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Optional: In the What You’re Marketing section, add or select your source URL.
- New URLs - Click Add new in the upper-right corner and enter the name and URL. We recommend using a specific product page URL instead of your website homepage to get the most relevant category suggestions.
- Existing URLs - Click the dropdown menu and select the URL you’d like to use.
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In the Audience section below Who is your target audience?, click Add Buyer Groups.
- If you added a source URL and it matches one or more of our product categories, we’ll provide suggestions for product categories to choose from.
- You can also scroll through all product categories or use the search bar at the top to search by keyword.
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Select the product category you’d like to use.
- Move your cursor over the category to learn more about the category.
- Review our buyer groups best practices for tips on selecting the best category for your ad set. You can choose up to three categories, but we recommend choosing the category that best fits your goals.
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Review the Forecasted results panel on the right to see your estimated audience size.
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Optional: If you’d like to refine your audience, you can use inclusions by clicking OR and exclusions by clicking Exclude in the Who is your target audience? section.
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Optional: Click the Save audience button to save your buyer groups audience. After choosing to save, name your audience and provide a brief description to help you easily find it again.
- To view audience insights on your buyer groups, you’ll need to save it.
- To view audience insights on your buyer groups, you’ll need to save it.
When you’re refining your buyer groups, we allow a specific set of targeting inclusions and exclusions to maintain performance.
| Inclusion or Exclusion (optional) | Data sources supported | Example use cases |
|---|---|---|
| AND inclusion | Company list (CSV file or third-party integration) | Include (AND) a company list to target buyer groups within specific strategic account lists. |
| OR inclusion | Contact list (CSV file or third-party integration), custom segments, retargeting audiences, skills, and relevant product category interests | Include (OR) a list of leads or other potential buyers in your buyer group audience. |
| OR exclusion | Company list - Third-party integration Contact list - CSV file or third-party integration Company attribute - Company size, company industry, company name, company followers, company employees Job experience attribute - Job titles, job function, job seniorities Retargeting audiences | Exclude member accounts or companies that have already converted or are not likely to convert. Please note, we automatically add your company to your exclusions so you don’t target employees with ads. |
Step 3: Finish building your ad set and launch
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Continue with the ad set creation process. You’ll need to select your ad format, review your budget and schedule, and add your ads. For more details on how to complete your ad set, review the instructions on how to create a Classic ad set.
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After you’re done building your ad set, click the Launch ad set button.
Important to know
We don’t use individual customer data to build audiences. Instead, the model is applied to LinkedIn professional profiles and LinkedIn engagements across our platform.
Results: View insights on your buyer groups and share across ad accounts
If you chose to save your buyer groups, you can access insights from the Audiences page in Campaign Manager (subject to members’ preferences). Your audience will be saved as a Saved Audience.
To view your insights:
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Click Plan on the left menu and select Audiences.
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Click Saved at the top.
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Click the name of your buyer group audience to get to insights about your audience.
You can also share your Saved Audiences across ad accounts in Campaign Manager to use in other ad sets. Learn more about how to share a Saved Audience.
Some considerations when sharing a buyer group audience:
- You can only share your buyer groups Saved Audience across ad accounts in Campaign Manager, not Business Manager.
- If your buyer groups Saved Audience includes any Matched Audience segments (such as a company list), those segments won’t be shared to your other ad accounts, even though the rest of the buyer groups audience will be.
Additional buyer groups considerations
When creating a buyer groups audience, please note the following additional considerations.
| Consideration | Guideline |
|---|---|
| Third-party API usage | Buyer groups aren’t available through partner APIs. |
| A/B testing capabilities | A/B testing is not available for ad sets using a buyer groups audience. We recommend testing using 1-2 comparable historical ad sets. Learn more about testing in our best practices for buyer groups. |
| LinkedIn Audience Network-enabled ad sets | You can enable LinkedIn Audience Network when using buyer groups in your ad set. However, buyer groups don’t serve ads on Apple iOS devices through the LinkedIn Audience Network. |
| Predictive audiences and audience expansion availability | These audience types are disabled when you enable buyer groups targeting. |
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