LinkedIn has significantly improved its advertising functionality with the introduction of a LinkedIn remarketing pixel, called a LinkedIn Insight Tag. Once you’ve created and added the retargeting pixel to your website, the next step is to create a LinkedIn custom audience of those website visitors. As that custom audience grows in size, you can use it to advertise your LinkedIn ads to people who have visited your website. Utilizing custom audiences in your advertising is beneficial because you are advertising to a warm audience vs. a cold audience. Your LinkedIn custom audience allows you to target website visitors who have visited your site within the past 90 days.

How to Create a LinkedIn Custom Audience

To begin, visit your LinkedIn Campaign Manager. If you are an ads admin of more than 1 LinkedIn ads account, you’ll have to select the ads account you want to build the custom audience for, from the list.

Click on the Website Demographics tab to get started building your website custom audience. You then have the choice to create a website custom audience or an uploaded list audiences.

Note: This Uploaded List Audiences tab is where to visit if you want to upload your email list to create a custom audience of your email subscribers.

From the Website Audiences tab view, click on the Create an Audience button on the right side.

In the pop-up on your screen, give your website custom audience a name and set the parameters for tracking those visitors. You can add more than 1 URL and can apply logic within your audience setup. 

You have the choice of Exact, Starts with, and Match when adding your URLs. For more information on those audience filters, click here. 

Once you save your new custom audience parameters, you are presented with the LinkedIn Insight Tag html to copy and paste onto your site. If you’ve set up your Insight Tag as your first step, this will be redundant. And just like with the Insight Tag, you will have to visit a page that will be tracked in that audience, in order to verify the LinkedIn custom audience (meaning, if you are setting up an audience of your blog post visitors, you’ll want to visit your blog page or a blog post in order to initiate the URL verification process). LinkedIn indicates that it can take up to 24 hours after visiting a website page, for it to show as verified inside your Campaign Manager.

According to LinkedIn:

Once you set up Website Demographics for your website, your website audiences will begin to build. Your website audience must build up to 300 members before data will be available on your Website Demographics page.

Using your LinkedIn Custom Audience in LinkedIn Ads

If you want to use one of your custom audiences in your LinkedIn ad, you will select that audience (or audiences) in Step 3 of 5 of the ad build process.

Note: Once your custom audiences have populated, you’ll see the audience size listed to the right of each audience name.