When you see ads delivered by LinkedIn, we hope that you find them useful. LinkedIn serves ads that allow organizations to connect with business professionals through a variety of ad products that we offer our advertising customers (advertisers). LinkedIn’s “Marketing Solutions” business allows advertisers to select characteristics to help them reach their ideal audience.

Ads. When we use the term “ads” we mean content others pay LinkedIn to show or promote a commercial message. This is distinct from the marketing content you may see from LinkedIn about LinkedIn’s own features and services.

Ads are important to enabling LinkedIn to provide many of our services to members without a fee. 

LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Ads aid us in delivering on that vision because they help to fund many of the core services we provide to members for free. That is, ads help us to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce - including those who are not in a position to pay for access to valued features of the LinkedIn service such as job searching, investing in professional knowledge, and demonstrating skills to others.

You always have control over how LinkedIn uses your personal data for personalized ads.

As described in greater detail below, if your settings allow, we use your personal data for “personalized ads” including showing, measuring (and providing aggregate reports to our advertisers), and improving our ad tools to make them more effective. We do not use sensitive data about our members (such as medical conditions, race, ethnicity, or religion), or data we collect from third-parties to profile members (e.g. infer interests and traits about our members). Nevertheless, we understand that members may not want their personal data to be used for personalized ads and we offer a robust set of controls through your ad settings so that you can adjust the level of personalization for ads that LinkedIn shows. 

Note: You can change your settings at any time, and any change you make to your settings impacts how personalized the ads are, but does not impact the number of ads you see or your ability to access and use other valuable features of LinkedIn, including your access to jobs. For example, if you were to turn off all of your ad settings, you will still see ads, but they may be shown based on the content you are viewing (including language) and not shown based on the data we connect to you for ads.

1. Where We Serve Ads and Who Sees Our Ads

Members may be shown personalized ads by LinkedIn on and off of the LinkedIn services.

• On LinkedIn - When you visit the LinkedIn service (site or apps) you will see ads. LinkedIn shows different types of ads across the LinkedIn service, such as video and text ads. Learn more about the types of ads we serve and how to recognize them.
• Off LinkedIn - We also look to serve our members ads off the LinkedIn service. Finding and serving ads to our members off the LinkedIn service requires that we work with others (ad partners such as third-party ad exchanges and/or owners of sites and apps). Therefore, we offer members an ad setting that controls whether LinkedIn can use data from those others to find and serve members an ad off the LinkedIn service.

Note: We do not use data about members' activities off of the LinkedIn service to infer interests or traits of our members. Learn more about LinkedIn’s use of data from others.

2. Members: Data We Use for Ads

Most of the ads that LinkedIn serves are personalized - we aim to deliver ads that are relevant to the member. This means that we use data that we have (and are allowed to use) about a member to serve ads, and to measure and improve ad relevance and effectiveness. 

• LinkedIn Profile - When members provide us information about themselves in their LinkedIn profile, by default, we will use that data to direct ads to that member. For example, if one of our advertisers requests that their ads be shown to engineers in Berlin, we include in the potential ad audience any members whose profile shows that they are an engineer located in Berlin. Also, our optimization models will rank the most relevant ads for members with such professional attributes and use the resulting ad engagement as feedback to improve themselves (e.g. if engineers in Berlin tend to click on certain types of design software ads, the relevance optimization model will adjust to reflect that and rank ads accordingly). We may also allow advertisers to build an ad audience out of members that have joined a LinkedIn “Group” or members that are following a particular company. Targeting by Group is not currently allowed by LinkedIn in the Designated Countries.
• Inferred Data - If a member’s settings allow, we will infer some information about that member based on information available to us and use that to personalize ads:
  • Inferred Location - In addition to the location that a member has chosen for their LinkedIn profile, we may also infer a city location based on a member’s IP Address (collected when members access LinkedIn services through their devices) and personalize ads based on this inferred location. 
  • Gender - We infer gender based on information from a member’s LinkedIn profile (including first names and pronouns that they use to refer to themselves) and may personalize ads based on the inferred gender. Note: We do not allow our advertisers to discriminate based on gender.
  • Age Range - We infer an age range based on a member’s LinkedIn profile (such as school graduation date) and may personalize ads based on the inferred age range. Note: We do not allow our advertisers to discriminate based on age range.
  • Interests and Traits - We infer member interests and traits from their LinkedIn profile as well as their activity on the LinkedIn service and then use those inferences to personalize ads. Our inferred “interests and traits” are predominantly professional and business topics and do not include sensitive categories of personal data such as race and ethnic origin, political opinions or philosophical beliefs. Note:
    • You can see the interests and traits that LinkedIn has inferred about you in your ad settings.
    • We do not use information from non-LinkedIn sites or apps to infer “Interests and Traits” about you. That is, when you visit sites and apps that are not LinkedIn services, we are not tracking you on these sites in order to learn more information about you or your interests in order to conduct ad profiling. 
    • Learn more about Interests and Traits.
• Activity Data - When logged in members visit the LinkedIn service (site and apps), we collect data about their visits, such as the actions they took on content (such as like, comment, share, video plays), actions they took on ads (such as views and clicks), and their job searches. We use this data to help us serve better personalized ads, including by optimizing their relevance and performance. Learn more.
  

• Off-LinkedIn Data From Others - We sometimes get data from others to help us personalize, deliver, and measure ads. If a member’s settings allow for the use of Off-LinkedIn data, here’s how we use it:
  • Ads Off LinkedIn - In order to show ads off the LinkedIn service we need to “find” our members on the sites and apps of others. These third-party sites and apps (or ad exchanges and related partners they work with) will send out data to many potential ad providers (including us) asking to bid on providing ads for their sites and apps. This data may include cookie and mobile ad IDs, IP addresses, or other data that may be used to identify or recognize the visitors to their site or app. We compare this data with the data we have about our members to see if we likely have a match. If we think we have a match, we may bid to show an ad on the bid-seeker’s site or app. If we win the bid and show the ad off of the LinkedIn service, we also measure its performance (similar to how we would if it were shown on LinkedIn). 
  • Advertiser Data for Ads (e.g. Retargeting) - Sometimes our advertisers provide us some information about their customers or “marketing leads” to see if we can match that to members of LinkedIn. For example, if a member had previously purchased an item from an advertiser or visited their website, they may seek to sell related services or upgrades to that product to the same person or follow up from a recent visit to their site or event. To do this, advertisers will share information that they have for one of their customers or marketing leads (such as a hashed email, name, or mobile ad ID), or install an Insight Tag which can tell us about visits to their site, and send it to LinkedIn. LinkedIn will then compare it with the information we have for our members to see if we have a match. If we find a match, we make a note in our ad systems of the members that have a match with that advertiser. We try to include those members that match with an advertiser in the ad audiences for that advertiser (but do not tell advertisers which members match and do not allow for ad audiences that have fewer than 300 different persons in them). 
  • Measure Ad Success (e.g. Conversion Tracking) - Advertisers like to know that their ad campaign money is being well-spent and they will work with LinkedIn to gather information about whether the ad audiences from LinkedIn find their ads valuable. To do this, advertisers will provide us with information about visitors or purchasers of their products (such as hashed email, name, IP address, cookie IDs or mobile ad ID). We will compare the advertiser provided information with the equivalent information we have for our members alongside the record of the ads that LinkedIn keeps of the ads that we have shown them. From this we can generate reports about “conversions” of ads into actions that show advertisers that the money they spent on ads through LinkedIn provided value to them and to improve our models that optimize such conversions. These reports we provide to advertisers do not identify members.
    

Learn more about our use of personal data from others for ads.

3. Measurement and Reports

Whenever we show an ad, we measure that the ad was shown (impressions) and/or other actions (such as partial views, comments, shares and clicks) so that we can use that data for internal business purposes and to bill and provide reports to our advertisers about their ad campaigns. These bills and reports that we share with advertisers do not identify members, but instead provide aggregate numbers (counts and values) of ad related actions such as video views, impressions and clicks. These reports for advertisers may also show this aggregated information by “professional demographics” - meaning a breakdown of the aggregate numbers of ad actions (such as views and clicks) by city (or state or country) and/or company, role or industry - in ways that do not identify members. Learn more about measurement and reporting.

Learn more

• How LinkedIn uses personal data for ads 
  • How LinkedIn uses data from others for ads
  • LinkedIn Ads and discrimination
  • LinkedIn’s processing on the basis of legitimate interests
    
• LinkedIn Ad Settings
  • Cookie and Ad Settings interactions
  • Marketing Solutions Service (DMA) and Ads Settings (GDPR) Interactions
• Ad types in LinkedIn Ads (LinkedIn Marketing Solutions)
  
• Ad Safety
  • Report inappropriate and offensive ads 
  • LinkedIn's Ad Library
  • Ad Library targeting parameters and impressions