Any time you can get more insights about your target audience on an ad platform, it’s a good thing. There’s never such a thing as too much info. And from what I can tell, one of the best insights tools out there is widely underutilized. LinkedIn Website Demographics. This feature within the LinkedIn Campaign Manager allows you to view your ad traffic segmented by profile targeting parameters—job function or company size, for example. The tool unlocks invaluable information that can be used to build better campaigns, improve on existing ones, and get the most out of your budget. And yet as I mentioned, it's hardly discussed. Today’s post will be my attempt to remedy that a bit and help you achieve better performance out of your LinkedIn campaigns.

From our LinkedIn Advertising Guide

In particular, I'm going to outline three things you can do with the data from the LinkedIn Website Demographic tool to optimize your campaign performance:

1. Understand, segment, and create better audiences audiences. 
2. Identify top performing audience segments to focus on.
3. Optimize existing LinkedIn ad campaigns.

Using LinkedIn Website Demographics to identify ideal audiences

Although we all feel like we know our target audience pretty well, it’s important to know how the platforms see them. We might think someone has a certain level of seniority or a certain job function, but LinkedIn could view it a different way. For this reason, it’s important to review how your audience stacks up in LinkedIn’s eyes so you can build prospecting campaigns accordingly.

To find this data, go to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and in the dark blue upper portion of the top navigation, you’ll find a link for the Website Demographics section of the interface.

Here you’ll see the user information from your website, but broken down by LinkedIn targeting options. So let’s go through this feature to outline all we can do with it.  

View website visitors by job function 

LinkedIn Website Demographics shows you the percent of page views on your website broken down by Job Function.  Are sales team members most interested in your ads? Or perhaps you attract more business development folks. Knowing the job functions of your audiences, you can cater your ad copy and messaging for better results.

Further segment by pixel

In the “B2B site” example above, you can see below that I'm viewing “all visitors,” but if you click on the dropdown, you can change the audience to be any audience from your website pixel users. If there’s not an audience listed that you want to see, you can easily create it right from this view.

Compare audiences

In addition to segmenting audiences, you can also compare them. On the right, next to that audience dropdown tab, there’s a “Compare to website audience” dropdown where you can choose a second group to view at the same time.

Once you’ve selected your second audience, you can see the differences between their makeups with two-color bar charts. This is great because if one audience is performing better than another or intrinsically has higher value, you can see how they are represented on LinkedIn and craft target audiences to focus on those better, higher value lists.

For example, in the image above, I’ve added a “converting users” list to compare to a general page visitors list. Here I can see that I have a high share of conversions coming from the Business Development Job Function group,  but a group like Support sees a decent number of page views and no conversions. So maybe I exclude Support Job Function from my campaigns moving forward.

Customize views by date range 

Additionally, we can continue to adjust the view to be a little more customized to our needs. You’ll notice there’s a date range picker in the upper right of the LinkedIn Website Demographics interface that allows you to choose from a list of presets or create a custom timeframe.

This can be immensely useful, especially if you made any changes to branding or other acquisition channels, as the makeup of these audiences could be drastically different depending on the date range.

Analyze by more than just job function

Job function isn’t the only demographic you can look at with LinkedIn Website Demographics. You can also view the audience breakdowns based on additional criteria like job characteristics, company size, geography, and more.

Use this in the same way you use the previous view comparing job function. This way, you can identify insights like which company sizes are doing the best and can you use this information to determine your ideal audiences.  

Using LinkedIn Website Demographics to get individual campaign data

Once you’ve determined the right audiences to go after, you can then run effective, well-targeted LinkedIn ad campaigns. But the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool does not stop being useful once you hit launch. You can also review demographics data for your individual campaigns and use the insights to improve performance.

To use the LinkedIn Website Demographics feature for a particular campaign, just click the check box next to the campaign name and click the “Demographics” button in the top navigation. From there, you’ll have views that are relatively similar to the other demographics interface, but with a couple key differences:

• First, there aren’t ways to compare audiences since there’s only one audience per campaign.
• Second, and most importantly, this page has a number of more stats as it’s focused on showing the performance for each segment within the campaign. This is where you can get some really good insights on how your LinkedIn campaign is performing and find some strategies for optimization.

The page will almost always default to show top line metrics for Job Function. As with the image above, you’ll be able to see Impressions, Clicks, Average CTR, Conversions, and Conversion Rate for each of these Job Functions.

One thing to note about this page is that the Impressions, Clicks, and Conversions won’t always add up to the full total of the campaign. There is a “reporting minimum” LinkedIn uses to help keep some user privacy, so if your campaign has 15 conversions and you only see 12 accounted for in the report, they’re likely spread too thin between the other values for LinkedIn to share.

Just like the other demographics portion, you can change the date range for your campaigns and you can also choose different display options.

Using LinkedIn Website Demographics to optimize ad performance

Now that you know the data you can see using the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool, let’s get into how you can use it.

The way I approach LinkedIn advertising optimization through the demographics insight report is to review the performance for the same type of targeting I’m using. Since LinkedIn sometimes prohibits you from excluding audiences that aren’t using the same targeting options, it’s important to make sure you’re looking at actionable data.

So if I’m targeting users with Job Function, I’ll start there. But if I’m targeting with Job Titles, that’s where I’ll focus.

Based on the data you can see in LinkedIn Website Demographics, you can then either exclude low-performing segments or create new campaigns to better focus on a top performing group.

Think of this just like you would any other advertising platform where we want to focus on the best performing audiences and make sure you're speaking to them in the way that gives them the most benefit and increases your chances of landing them as a customer.

Start using the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool for better ads

There are lots of ways we can optimize our LinkedIn campaigns, whether it’s through bid strategies, ad copy adjustments, or by adjusting our audience before launch or after by focusing on the most important demographics. Use the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool to help ensure you’re not only targeting the right audience, but also the one that performs the best. There ‘s a lot to know about this tool, so let's recap:

• The LinkedIn Website Demographics feature allows you to see LinkedIn ad traffic to your website, broken down by your LinkedIn targeting criteria. You can use it to:
• Segment your audience by job function, company size, geography, and more.
• Compare audiences to see your highest converting groups. 
• View deeper metrics within each job function for individual ads. 
• Get a better understanding of who is clicking on your LinkedIn ads to better target your campaigns and messaging.