Of all the demand generation programs that I’ve run and experimented with over the years, retargeting via LinkedIn has performed consistently well. In fact, it’s cost per conversion beats the average I’ve seen from Google retargeting – largely, I believe, because of the ability to overlay LinkedIn demographic filters to your retargeted audience.

There are plenty of online tutorials available to help you get started (for example, you’ll need to have the LinkedIn Insight Tag added to your website), so instead I’m going to share some experiences and best practices that have been useful for me when running a retargeting campaign through LinkedIn.

What is LinkedIn Website Retargeting?

With the LinkedIn Insight Tag installed on your website, your site visitors can be matched with LinkedIn members, allowing you to push content and a call to action into their LinkedIn feed. For a full explanation, click here.

Top Five Best Practices

• Should I retarget all of my website visitors?

This depends on your site traffic. If you have a large volume of monthly visitors, you might end up burning through your monthly budget in a matter of days on visitors that never had any intention of converting. Far better to focus spend on visitors you know (from your site metrics) have a higher chance of converting.

For example, when building your matched LinkedIn audience, start by only including key converting pages – such as your trial or demo page, pricing page, and key product pages.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to exclude pages – for example, the confirmation page you use after a successful trial/demo signup. So, by taking the above approach you may also enroll already-converted site visitors. Personally, I don’t worry about this; but it’s worth noting.

• Should I have multiple retargeting campaigns based on different product or service pages?

This is something worth testing. If your products or services are wildly different it might be worth experimenting with unique campaigns to retarget different cohorts of site visitors. However, be aware that your matched audience in LinkedIn must contain more than 300 members before the campaign will activate, so it’s worth checking you have enough site traffic to individual pages to make the effort worthwhile.

In my personal experience, I’ve found equal success having just one retargeting campaign, with a message generic enough to apply to +90% of visitors. It’s easier to admin just one campaign and if your site visitors are enrolled in multiple matched audiences, then you’ll just end up competing with yourself for their attention.

• Using demographic filtering

Even if you’re building matched audiences against visitors to certain, high performing pages of your site, you need to remember one thing – not all visitors are created equally!

You can therefore use LinkedIn’s demographic data to further filter the LinkedIn members you want to target.

For example, your historical sales data might tell you that you have a higher chance of converting visitors from certain countries, or those over a certain level of seniority. LinkedIn demographics will allow you to overlay this data onto your site visitors, helping to yield a significantly better ROI.

• What type of creative should I use?

When a LinkedIn member is enrolled into your retargeting campaign, there are a number of ad options available to you. Having experimented with most of them, my default option would always be a short video ad. This will be surfaced on the LinkedIn user’s feed and auto-plays as they scroll.

Remember, the people you’re retargeting already know who you are, and why they visited your site in the first instance. The goal of your retargeting campaign is to reenergize them and pull them back, and video typically forces the user to stop scrolling momentarily, while also offering great brand placement.

Use a tool like promo.com to create a short (10 sec) video that is strong in branding with a simple message (a value statement, price promotion etc).

• Think about your Call to Action

Think about what you want your retargeted prospect to do. Most likely this will be to complete a trial or a demo form on your site.

Don’t waste time using LinkedIn’s native lead-gen forms; they don’t work IMHO. Send the target directly back to your website and a relevant landing page.

Considering the prospect didn’t convert on their last visit to your site, you could absolutely create a new, dedicated landing page with an additional incentive – a price promotion for example. Just make sure that page is exclusive to your retargeting campaign and is no-indexed for Google to avoid it being used by anyone outside of the retargeted audience.