LinkedIn is taking down its ad targeting option ‘Lookalike
Audiences,’ preventing their creation and editing in ad development processes,
starting the 29th of February.
With the help of Lookalike Audiences, advertisers could extract
a list of customer information from their own database. LinkedIn’s system in
turn could scan the list for different characteristics and match them with other
similar and potentially interested users. The process has since been helpful to
advertisers in specifically targeting people who match the profile of their
existing customers.
Advertisers who have been relying on Lookalike Audiences would need to make changes to their active campaigns that are using the option. LinkedIn also adds that active campaigns using Lookalike Audiences “will continue to deliver using the static audience.”
While the update would have some impact on how advertisers reach
their target audience in the app, there are still other ad options to build audiences
available on LinkedIn, such as Predictive Audiences and Audience Expansion.
Predictive Audiences is similar to Lookalike Audiences, except that it uses fewer data sources to target the desired audience. These sources include LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms, advertiser’s LinkedIn contact list, and conversions data generated from the Insight Tag. Audience Expansion, on the other hand, enables advertisers to reach people with common interests.
