Using LinkedIn’s Insight Tag to understand your website audience

Understand your website visitors and improve your marketing campaign strategy without spending a penny using LinkedIn’s Insight tag and Campaign Manager.

As a B2B Marketer, LinkedIn is my go-to channel for social marketing campaigns. Being able to target my ads based on job titles, skills and company is so valuable to me. Although LinkedIn Ads are considerably more expensive, in my eyes it's worth its weight in gold to be able to target to those in ‘work-mode’.

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is a versatile tool. It’s known as the place to go to set-up LinkedIn ads, but not many people know about its ability to help you understand your website audiences. In the LinkedIn Advertising course we run, the participants always say they wish they knew about this section sooner, so I wanted to share this insight with you to help you with your campaigns.

Getting started: LinkedIn’s Insight Tag

LinkedIn’s Insight tag is a lightweight piece of Javascript code that you add to your website. If you haven’t got round to adding this code yet, I’d highly recommend you make this a priority. Find out everything you need to know about implementing your LinkedIn Insight Tag over on the LinkedIn Help section.

Building your website audiences

After implementing the LinkedIn Insight Tag, the next step is to build your website audiences. In Campaign Manager, visit Account Assets and scroll down to Matched Audiences. This section of Campaign Manager allows you to create website audiences and upload your own audience lists. Hit ‘Create an audience’, and simply add the URL of the page you wish to build an audience from. Amend the URL search by playing around with ‘Exact, Starts with or Contains’. Once the audience has been created, it may take up to 24 hours before it can be used in LinkedIn advertising or to uncover website demographics.

Discover more about your website visitors

Once your website audience lists have matched with at least 300 LinkedIn profiles in a 30-day rolling window, you can start to see demographic data in the Website Demographics section of LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager. This demographic data is based on the information shared by individuals about their professional life on their LinkedIn profile.

You can view by eight different professional traits

• Company industry
• Job title
• Job seniority
• Job function
• Company size
• Location
• Country
• Company

As a B2B Digital Marketing Manager, I’m always using the Website Demographics section to understand my audiences and find out if I’m hitting the bullseye in terms of targeting. Am I seeing an increase in specific countries or locations? Am I seeing a decrease in a usually popular job title or seniority level, and if so, why?

The most valuable view for me is Company. I look at this every week to see what companies our website visitors work for. I’ll either feed this information back to our sales team to see if there is an opportunity or add these companies to my account-based targeting list as part of our Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy.

If you’re getting a decent amount of traffic to your website, you can dive a little deeper into the audience insight by creating website audiences for individual pages. Then you can analyse the demographics of those specific pages. For example, over the last few months, our Digital Marketing Course has seen an increase in visits from those with job titles in development and design careers.

If you’re looking to gather information on how your marketing channels or campaigns differ in terms of audience, you can build your website audiences using UTM parameters or specific words in the URL. When building your audiences, use ‘contains’ and then add text from your URL or UTM parameters to distinguish the source, the medium or the campaign, rather than a URL. If you need help with UTM parameters, download our UTM Campaign Tagging Template and read our helpful guide.

Once the audience lists have been set up, you can compare two audiences side by side to understand the audience quality. For example, you could see which campaign or source had the most qualified traffic or generated higher quality leads.

I find this audience comparison really useful for audience-related A/B testing. I might have a hypothesis around content for a particular audience type so I'll use UTM parameters to indicate campaign differences. For example, I might want to test certain messaging or imagery with one audience type. I can compare the differences in content and see if my hypothesis was correct by comparing the audiences. It's important to remember that your audience list needs to hit 300 at least before you can use the audience list, so avoid being too specific.

Tailor your content to resonate

Now that you’ve set up your website audiences and you're starting to understand who they are professionally, you can use that information to create content that will resonate with them. Earlier in this blog post, I spoke about a new audience type for our Digital Marketing Course. After seeing this insight, I created new LinkedIn ads with messaging that will resonate with developers, and another for designers. These ads demonstrate how attending this course will help these audiences to work more cohesively with their marketing colleagues. It's a common reason for people with this job title attending the Digital Marketing course. I can then target these ads to the new audience types and optimise accordingly.

Depending on the audience types, I might want to change the content on my website or landing page to better reflect the changing audiences. I might want to add content to the page to answer any questions that the new audience might have. Be careful not to alienate other audiences though.

How do you use the Website Demographics section or LinkedIn Insight Tag to understand your audiences? Leave your tactics in the comments below.

Need more help with LinkedIn Advertising? We offer a one-day course teaching everything you need to know to create successful paid strategies and campaigns on LinkedIn.