LinkedIn Audience Network

Last updated: 6 days ago

The LinkedIn Audience Network allows you to extend the reach of your Sponsored Content campaigns by delivering your ads beyond the LinkedIn feed to members on third-party apps and sites, if their settings allow. It algorithmically optimizes your campaign based on your audience targeting criteria, budget, and bid size to deliver your ads on sites and apps where your target audience is, which can help result in lower cost per key result.

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When you enable the LinkedIn Audience Network during campaign setup, the same targeting parameters, bid type, and budget created for your campaign applies.

About the LinkedIn Audience Network

Enabling the LinkedIn Audience Network means your Sponsored Content ads are:

  • Automatically delivered across a network of trusted publishers to expand ad reach to your target audience.
  • Optimized for delivery across placements based on your chosen campaign objective.

For each campaign, how the ad renders will adjust based on the placement and rendering specifications of each publisher. Top examples of ad renderings can also be viewed in real-time using the ad preview feature.

Keep in mind, the LinkedIn Audience Network feature is currently available for campaigns using these ad formats:

  • Single image ads
  • Carousel ads
  • Document ads
  • Video ads

LinkedIn Audience Network preferences and reporting

When you enable the LinkedIn Audience Network for your Sponsored Content single image, carousel, document, or video ad campaigns, you can customize your ad delivery by: 

  • Excluding certain categories of publishers based on IAB categories. Keep in mind, IAB categories are provided by our partner Pixalate, and could be updated or changed during your campaign. We recommend that you review the categories throughout your campaigns and update your block or allow list as needed. 
  • Choosing to include or exclude specific third-party sites and apps by uploading a custom allow or block list. This allows you to choose the apps and sites that your content appears on.

Once you launch a campaign with LinkedIn Audience Network enabled, you can view the results from Campaign Manager with the On/Off Network breakdown or by downloading a CSV report. For video ads, you can also view a breakdown of your ad placements with the Placements breakdown view. 

If you use Business Manager to manage your ad accounts, you can also share your allow and block lists with other ad accounts in Business Manager.

How serving on the LinkedIn Audience Network works

When publishers in this network have space to sell, they send a signal (bid request) out to bidders like LinkedIn. When a member is signed into LinkedIn, we compare that signal (bid request) with information we have about LinkedIn members to find a match based on the targeting criteria you defined for your campaign. In some instances, we use a model to estimate whether the signal likely belongs to a member who fits your targeting criteria, such as when a member isn’t logged into LinkedIn or is visiting a third-party site or mobile app. In the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland, we don’t collect site or app visit data from third parties (other than, subject to consent, customer sites that installed our Insight Tag) to inform the model.

The signals used to determine matches and inform the model can include: 

  • Cookies on a mobile or desktop browser 
  • Google Ad ID on Android 
  • Operating system, device make and model (User Agent) 
  • IP address 
  • Time of access (Time Stamp) 
  • Page URL of application name, as applicable 
  • Hashed emails

In addition to using these signals and models to serve ads off LinkedIn, we also use them to match audiences (for example, retarget visitors to another site) and provide aggregated ad performance reporting.

How long is the collected data retained? 

The observation data collected as described above is retained for a maximum of 90 days.

Data collection in the LinkedIn Audience Network 

Our technology doesn’t seek to infer interests from data collected off-LinkedIn for any individual we can identify for a match. LinkedIn only personalizes ads for our members. We don’t seek to profile non-members, and we also don’t create or enhance behavioral profiles of members with off-LinkedIn data.

Data protection policies 

Data collected by LinkedIn is immediately pseudonymized. Due to this, the model’s algorithms can at best learn which devices and signals likely belong to the same person (or device) or group and not who the individual is. Members can opt out from processing their data at any point in their ad settings.

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