LinkedIn Matched Audiences: retargeting, contact and company lists

This guide is built from LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions Help, mainly Get started with LinkedIn Matched Audiences, Retargeting with Matched Audiences and the requirement pages for company lists and contact lists. It covers the three ways to build a Matched Audience, the list formats and minimum sizes LinkedIn states, match rates, predictive audiences (which replaced lookalikes), and why audiences expire. How Campaign Manager and the rest of LinkedIn targeting work is in our LinkedIn ads basics guide.

What Matched Audiences are

Matched Audiences are custom audience segments you build from your own data and use in an ad set, either as the whole audience or alongside LinkedIn's profile targeting. LinkedIn lists three ways to create them:

• Upload a list of companies or contacts as a CSV file.
• Retargeting people who visited your website, engaged with certain ads, opened or submitted a Lead Gen Form, engaged with your Company Page, responded to a LinkedIn Event, or were matched through the Conversions API.
• Connect a marketing partner, such as a CRM or data platform, that sends segments to Campaign Manager.

You create all of them in Campaign Manager under Plan, then Audiences, then Create audience and Matched Audience. LinkedIn's minimum ad set audience is 300 member accounts, and every Matched Audience has to reach that number before it can deliver on its own.

One limit applies to every type: LinkedIn says The size of Matched Audiences may be limited within the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland. It only matches members there who have opted in, so expect smaller audiences for European lists and visitors.

Company and contact lists

Company lists are matched against LinkedIn Pages (LinkedIn says it has more than 50 million), and contact lists are matched against member accounts, according to LinkedIn's company and contact targeting overview. Both use a CSV template you download from Campaign Manager, and LinkedIn's upload page walks through the steps: Audiences, Create audience, Matched Audience, Company / Contact, choose the list type, then Select list and Agree & Upload.

A few rules from the same pages and the troubleshooting page:

• Headers must match LinkedIn's list. Company files accept companyname, companywebsite, companyemaildomain, linkedincompanypageurl, stocksymbol, industry, city, state, companycountry and zipcode. Contact files accept email, firstname, lastname, jobtitle, employeecompany, country, appleidfa, googleaid and googleuid. Changing or removing a header causes an upload error.
• The Page URL is the best match key for companies. LinkedIn calls it the most efficient way to match and says the URL should end with the company name, not a number ID.
• Emails can be plain or hashed. If the list isn't hashed, LinkedIn says it'll be locally hashed in your browser before it’s saved. If you hash them yourself, use SHA-256 and keep the header email; it is the only field that accepts hashed values.
• One list per audience. Several files mean several audiences; you can then select more than one in an ad set to reach 300.
• Narrow with profile data, not interests. You can layer job function or seniority on top of a list, but LinkedIn says contact lists may not be used with member interests and traits.
• Allow up to 48 hours (rarely longer) for a list to build. LinkedIn suggests re-uploading as a new audience if it is still building after 72 hours, then contacting support.

Retargeting audiences

Retargeting audiences are built from people who already interacted with you. The lookback windows below are the ones LinkedIn gives on its retargeting page and Company Page audience page.

LinkedIn notes that views, opens and engagements in your ad reports will not correspond directly to matched member accounts, so an ad with 2,000 video views won't give you a 2,000-person audience. To grow an engagement audience it suggests selecting more ad sets (up to 200) and a longer lookback. A Company Page audience needs creative manager or higher on the ad account plus super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster on the Page; our Campaign Manager roles guide explains those roles.

Website retargeting and the Insight Tag

Website audiences need the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your site; if it is already there for conversion tracking you don't install it again. LinkedIn's website retargeting page offers two ways to define the audience:

• Website Actions: button clicks, page visits and form submissions the tag collects automatically. You tick the ones you want and can filter pages or keep only buttons that submit a form.
• URL rules: pages whose URL starts with, equals or contains what you enter, combined with And also and OR rules.

The part that surprises people: the audience starts building on the day you create it. It won't include any website activity that happened before that date. A 90-day audience is only complete after 90 days, and it has to reach 300 matched members before it delivers. Not every visitor is a LinkedIn member who can be matched, so small sites can wait a long time. Create website audiences early, even before you plan to use them.

LinkedIn also says the Insight Tag should not be installed on web pages that collect or contain Sensitive Data, giving pages about specific medications or where people manage bank accounts or medical appointments as examples, and it suggests checking with your legal counsel. In the EEA and UK the tag usually sits behind a consent banner too; see our guide to cookie consent banners.

Match rate and audience count

Campaign Manager shows two numbers for a list, explained on LinkedIn's match rates page:

• Match rate is the share of rows in your source that matched a member account or Page.
• Last audience count is the number of reachable member accounts or Pages after duplicates and opted-out members are removed.

LinkedIn's example: a list of 2,000 entries where 1,400 match, but 200 of those are duplicates, gives an audience of 1,200. Lists that match fewer than 300 members show a match rate of <5% and appear grey on the Audiences page. Contact lists only match members with verified email addresses, which LinkedIn says can lower match rates; an email address a member hasn't verified on LinkedIn won't match. One member can also hold several emails, so a partner segment can look bigger than the audience it produces.

If a match rate is low, LinkedIn's advice is to check formats and headers first, use the template, add Page URLs for companies, and for hashed emails remove hidden characters and test your hashing against the sample outputs on the troubleshooting page.

Predictive audiences, lookalikes and Audience Expansion

LinkedIn's lookalike audiences page says On February 29, 2024, LinkedIn's lookalike audiences were discontinued. Existing ones became static, ad sets using them kept delivering, and lookalikes not used in a draft or active ad set for 30 days are archived. LinkedIn recommends two replacements:

• Predictive audiences combine one source with LinkedIn's AI to build a new audience of people predicted to perform actions similar to those within your source data. Sources can be a Lead Gen Form, a contact or company list, a conversion, or a retargeting audience (one type per audience). Lists need 300 to 300,000 rows; the other sources need more than 300 member accounts. You pick a location and use a slider for size, the audience refreshes daily, and LinkedIn says to allow up to five days after it shows Ready to reach full size. Details are on the predictive audiences page, with steps on creating one.
• Audience Expansion adds people with attributes similar to your target audience, mainly using professional demographics. It is turned off for ad sets that use predictive audiences.

Two details from LinkedIn are easy to miss. A predictive audience built from a list can include the people on that list, so exclude the list in the ad set if you only want new prospects. And there is a limit of 200 predictive audiences per ad account.

Statuses, expiry and limits

The Audiences page shows a status for each segment. These are LinkedIn's status definitions:

Expiry is the one that stops campaigns. LinkedIn's expired audience page says you can't add an expired audience to an ad set or reactivate an ad set that contains one. For company and contact lists, the fix is to edit the audience and re-upload the file; otherwise delete the audience, which removes it from the ad set (deleting can't be undone). Each ad account can hold up to 1,000 Matched and predictive audience segments; when Create audience is greyed out, you are at that limit.

You can apply a segment that is still building to an ad set; LinkedIn's best practices page says the ad set starts delivering once the audience reaches 300 members. Because location is required targeting, a list that only just passes 300 can drop below it once you set a country.

Sharing audiences and how LinkedIn stores the data

A Business Manager admin can share Matched Audiences with other ad accounts in the Business Manager or with a partner's Business Manager. Updates carry through to every account it is shared with, but you can only edit, delete or copy an audience from the ad account where it was created. Predictive audiences can't be shared; you share the source data instead and build a new one.

LinkedIn's data collection and storage page says:

• Uploaded contact list data is deleted automatically within 30 days, and the audience built from it within 90 days if it isn't edited or used in an active ad set.
• A company list's raw file is deleted after one week (or when you close the account).
• For website retargeting, direct identifiers are removed within seven days and the data is deleted at 180 days; that page gives website segments a range of 30 to 180 days.
• Advertisers only ever see an anonymous segment, available once it reaches 300 members.

That doesn't replace your own obligations. Upload only contacts your privacy notice and consent cover; our Google Ads Customer Match guide covers the same questions for Google, and remarketing audiences compares retargeting across Google and Meta.

Our view: how we use them

These are our recommendations, not LinkedIn rules:

• Set up website and engagement audiences on day one. They only collect from the day you create them, so an audience made today is ready when you need it later.
• For account-based campaigns, start with a company list with Page URLs, then narrow it with job function or seniority so you reach the people who buy rather than everyone at the company.
• Exclude customers and current leads with a contact list when the goal is new business, and exclude recent form submitters from lead ads.
• Refresh lists on a schedule, for example monthly from your CRM, so audiences stay current and never hit the 90-day expiry.
• Test predictive audiences against your list in separate ad sets rather than mixing them, so you can see which brings the leads your sales team keeps. Our guide to B2B website lead generation covers what happens after the click.

Frequently asked questions

What is the minimum audience size for LinkedIn Matched Audiences?

A Matched Audience must match at least 300 member accounts before it can be used in an active ad set, and an uploaded company or contact list needs at least 300 rows to upload. LinkedIn recommends 1,000 or more companies and at least 10,000 email addresses.

Does LinkedIn still have lookalike audiences?

No. LinkedIn discontinued lookalike audiences on February 29, 2024. It recommends predictive audiences or Audience Expansion instead.

Why is my LinkedIn contact list match rate so low?

LinkedIn only matches contacts to members with verified email addresses, so work emails that aren't on a profile won't match. Check the headers and format, and add first name, last name and company or several IDs per person to improve the chance of a match.

Why is my LinkedIn website audience still building?

Website audiences start collecting on the day you create them and need 300 matched members before they deliver. Check that the Insight Tag is on every page in your rules and that the URL rules are right, then wait for more LinkedIn members to visit.

Why did my LinkedIn Matched Audience expire?

Audiences expire when they haven't been edited or used in an active or draft ad set for 90 days. Re-upload a company or contact list to reuse it, or delete the audience so the ad set can run again.

Do I need to hash emails before uploading a contact list?

No. LinkedIn hashes unhashed emails in your browser before saving them. If you prefer to hash them yourself, use SHA-256 and keep the header email.

For more on LinkedIn advertising, see our guides to LinkedIn ads basics, Campaign Manager roles, conversation ads and thought leader ads.