What if you could identify the people most likely to convert, before they ever engage with your ad?
Predictive Audiences use LinkedIn's AI to combine your data with platform signals—so you can reach audiences most likely to take action.
Unlike other targeting where we identify known users, Predictive Audiences expand your reach to people who behave like your best customers and are likely to take action.
Here's how to create a Predictive Audience.
From the Audiences Hub, select 'Create Audience' in the top left, then select Predictive Audience.
Next you'll name the audience.
Let's name it "Test" for this example.
Your Predictive Audience will be based on the source data you select here.
Data source options include a Company List, a Retargeting audience, a Conversions source, or a Lead Gen Form.
For this example, let's select Contact List.
The Contact List we choose will become the foundation for LinkedIn's predictive audience modeling.
A best practice here is to refine your audience before generating it.
When refining, please note that your Predictive Audience size should be dependent on your data-source size.
Do not exceed the limits on-screen.
When the audience is too large, the quality of who we're able to map starts to degrade.
So remember, we're staying within 200 times of our source.
If the size of our contact list is about 56,000, our target audience size is around 11 million.
With your data source selected, LinkedIn then analyzes the data to identify members with similar behaviors and a high likelihood to convert.
Let's look at how to actually apply your Predictive Audience to a campaign!
Start by selecting Advertise from the left menu.
For this example, we'll open an existing campaign called, 'Test'.
Within the Audience of the ad set, select 'Predictive' within the Target Audience section.
Here, we can select the Predictive Audience we just built.
From there, we can continue building the campaign, which is now set to target our Predictive Audience!
In this example, our Predictive Audience is still being built.
It's important to remember that the campaign, will not launch until the audience is built and ready.
Another best practice is to use Audience Insights to preview your audience and make sure it aligns with who you want your campaign to target.
From the Audiences tab, narrow the source to Predictive Audiences.
Then, select an already built Predictive Audience.
Now, select the 'Insights' button from the top menu to generate Audience Insights.
Here, you'll find a high-level summary of your Audience.
This includes the top locations of your audience, the typical audience-member attributes, and which companies employ this Audience.
You can scroll over and look at the content your Audience is interested in on LinkedIn.
You can get more info about their locations, or get more detail about the specific members.
This includes the functions they work in, what level of seniority they are, and how many years of work experience they have.
The info gleaned from Audience Insights can help us refine the audience even further by adding exclusions.
Exclusions make your audience stronger by preventing LinkedIn members with specific audience attributes from seeing the ads in your campaign.
For example, let's say you wanted to exclude all CEOs.
Within Audience Attributes, select Job Experience, then Job Titles.
Search for "CEO".
Select that job title, and now you've excluded anyone with job title CEO from seeing the ads in your campaign.
So now, our Predictive Audience includes the LinkedIn members in our criteria, but excludes anyone with the CEO title from seeing our ads.
This helps to reduce wasted impressions to ensure the right people are seeing your campaign!
Predictive Audiences start with your data, has AI do the heavy lifting, then lets you reach the people most likely to convert.
Build smarter campaigns with Predictive Audiences.
Try it out today!