How to Retarget on LinkedIn

Your best prospects are often not a secret - they're the people who have already visited your website, watched your product demo, or engaged with your company's content. Reaching these warm audiences again, at the right time and with the right message, is one of the most effective ways to turn initial interest into real business. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up and run powerful retargeting campaigns on LinkedIn, helping you stay top-of-mind and guide potential customers toward conversion.

What is LinkedIn Retargeting (And Why It Matters)

In simple terms, retargeting is the practice of showing ads to users who have already interacted with your brand in some way. On LinkedIn, this means you can create specific ad campaigns for people who have visited your website, engaged with your LinkedIn Page, watched one of your video ads, or even belong to a contact list you've uploaded. It's a fundamental part of any serious marketing strategy.

Why does it work so well? Because you’re no longer shouting into the void. Instead of advertising to a completely cold audience that may have never heard of you, you're communicating with people who are already familiar with your business. They’ve shown a degree of interest, which makes them far more likely to listen to what you have to say next. This typically leads to a much higher return on ad spend (ROAS) and lower cost-per-conversion compared to prospecting campaigns targeting cold traffic.

The Foundation: Installing the LinkedIn Insight Tag

Before you can retarget anyone based on their website activity, you need a way for LinkedIn to know who those visitors are. This is where the LinkedIn Insight Tag comes in. It’s a small snippet of JavaScript code that you place on your website. Once installed, it allows LinkedIn to match your website visitors with their LinkedIn profiles, creating an audience you can later target with ads.

Think of it as the surveillance system for your website audience. Without it, LinkedIn is blind to your traffic. It's the first and most important step in setting up website-based retargeting.

How to Install the Insight Tag

Setting it up is relatively straightforward. Just follow these steps:

1. Navigate to your LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
2. Click on Account Assets in the navigation bar and select Insight Tag from the dropdown.
3. On the Insight Tag page, you'll see a few options for installation:
   • Install the tag myself: LinkedIn will give you the full code snippet to copy and paste into the global footer of your website's HTML, right before the closing <,/body>, tag.
   • Send the tag to a developer: If you're not comfortable with code, you can email predefined instructions directly to your web developer.
   • I will use a tag manager: This is the most common and flexible method for marketers. It works with tools like Google Tag Manager (GTM), Adobe Tag Manager, and others.

Using Google Tag Manager (Recommended)

If you're using GTM, the process is clean and simple:

1. From the Insight Tag page in Campaign Manager, copy your unique Partner ID (it's just a string of numbers).
2. In Google Tag Manager, create a new tag. Choose the "LinkedIn Insight" tag type from the list of community-provided templates.
3. Paste your Partner ID into the appropriate field.
4. Set the tag to fire on "All Pages" under the Triggering section.
5. Save, preview to make sure it's working, and then publish your container.

Once your tag is installed, return to the Insight Tag section in Campaign Manager. If it's collecting data, you'll see your website domain appear with a green dot, indicating your tag is active. It can take a few hours to start seeing data populate, so don't worry if it's not instantaneous.

Building Your LinkedIn Retargeting Audiences

With the Insight Tag active, you can start creating "Matched Audiences." This is where the real power of retargeting lies. In Campaign Manager, go to Account Assets >, Matched Audiences to get started. You can create audiences based on several sources:

1. Website Visitors

Fueled by the Insight Tag, this is the most common form of retargeting. You can create audiences based on the specific pages people visited - or didn't visit - on your site. The goal is to segment your visitors based on their implied intent.

Some powerful website audiences to build include:

• All Website Visitors (Last 90 Days): A broad audience that’s great for general brand awareness or content promotion campaigns.
• Pricing Page Visitors: These users are showing high buying intent. You can target them with case studies, testimonials, or demo offers to nudge them toward a decision.
• Blog Readers: People who read a blog post about a specific topic (e.g., "social media analytics") can be retargeted with an offer for a related ebook, webinar, or tool.
• "Thank You" Page Visitors: These are people who have already converted (e.g., filled out a form or made a purchase). You'll typically want to exclude this audience from your lead gen campaigns to avoid wasting ad spend, but it can be a great audience for upselling or promoting customer-only events.

2. Contact and Company Lists

If you have a list of email contacts or target companies, you can upload them directly to LinkedIn to create an audience. This allows you to target people you already have a relationship with, even if they haven't visited your website recently.

To do this, you’ll need a single-column CSV file of email addresses or a well-formatted list of companies. LinkedIn will then match these against its user base.

Example uses:

• Target leads from a recent tradeshow with a follow-up ad.
• Re-engage a list of dormant or cold leads with a new offer.
• Upload a list of target companies for an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, then layer on job titles to reach decision-makers.

A quick note on privacy: Make sure any contact lists you upload are compliant with GDPR and other data privacy regulations. These should be people who have opted-in to receive communication from you.

3. Video Viewers

Video is a fantastic tool for grabbing attention in the LinkedIn feed. Retargeting allows you to build an audience of people based on how much of your video ad they watched. Someone who watches at least 50% of your product demo video is signaling strong interest!

You can create audiences of users who watched:

• At least 25% of your video
• At least 50% of your video
• At least 75% of your video
• 97% of your video (fully completed)

A smart strategy is to show a top-of-funnel, brand-focused video to a broad audience, and then retarget those who watched 50% or more with a more direct, bottom-of-funnel offer like a demo request or free trial.

4. Lead Gen Form Opens

LinkedIn's native Lead Gen Forms are incredibly useful for capturing leads without making someone leave the platform. But what about the people who click your ad and open the form but don't submit it?

You can create an audience specifically for these users. They showed enough interest to open the form but got distracted or had second thoughts. Retargeting them with a new ad featuring a softer call-to-action (like watching a video instead of booking a demo) or highlighting a key benefit can be an effective way to bring them back into your funnel.

5. Company Page Engagement

This audience is made up of people who have engaged with your LinkedIn Company Page in some way, such as visiting the page or clicking any link or call-to-action button. This is a great way to target your most loyal organic followers and move them further down the funnel. They already like what you're doing organically, now’s your chance to show them a more specific, valuable offer.

Your First Retargeting Campaign: A Step-by-Step Example

Let's tie this all together with a practical example. Say you're a SaaS company and your goal is to get more demo bookings.

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Offer

Your highest-intent audience is people who visited your pricing page but didn't book a demo. This tells you they're considering your solution but need one final push.

• Audience: Create a Website Audience for visitors to your "/pricing" URL.
• Exclusion: Create another Website Audience for visitors to your "/demo-thank-you" URL and exclude them from your campaign.
• Offer: Instead of just showing them the same "Book a Demo" ad, offer something that addresses their likely hesitation. A campaign centered around customer testimonials or a case study could build the social proof they need.

Step 2: Set up the Campaign in Campaign Manager

1. Create a new campaign and choose an objective like "Lead Generation" or "Website Conversions."
2. In the "Audience" section, navigate to the "List" tab and select your "Pricing Page Visitors" audience.
3. Go to "Exclusions" and add your "Demo Thank You Page Visitors" audience.
4. If your pricing page audience is very large, you can layer on additional targeting filters like job titles or seniority to refine it further.
5. Choose your ad format (e.g., Single Image Ad or a short Video Ad featuring a customer testimonial).
6. Set your budget, schedule your campaign, and launch it!

Best Practices for Success

Sticking to a few key principles can make your campaigns far more effective.

• Be Specific with Your Segments. Don't just lump all "website visitors" into one giant audience. Separate audiences by intent (blog readers vs. pricing page visitors) and tailor your messaging accordingly.
• Refresh Your Ad Creative. Seeing the same ad over and over leads to ad fatigue. Rotate your creative every few weeks to keep your message fresh and engaging.
• Pay Attention to Audience Size. LinkedIn requires an audience to have at least 300 matched members before you can target it. If your audience is too small, you may need to increase the date range (e.g., from 30 days to 90 days).
• Use a Timely Cadence. Think about the lookback window. Someone who visited your pricing page three days ago is a much hotter lead than someone who visited 90 days ago. You can create different campaigns for different timeframes.
• Give Them Something New. Good retargeting doesn't just repeat the same message. It advances the conversation. If they saw a high-level video first, show them a specific case study next. Nurture them - don't just nag them.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn retargeting is an incredibly efficient way to allocate your ad budget by focusing on professionals who already know who you are and have expressed interest. By installing the Insight Tag and thoughtfully segmenting your audiences, you can create hyper-relevant campaigns that meet your audience where they are and gently guide them toward the next step.

Running effective paid social requires a strong organic foundation to create those warm audience pools in the first place. You need a steady stream of engaging page posts and videos to build engagement and drive website traffic that you can later retarget. That's why we built Postbase, a social media management tool made to simplify how modern teams plan and publish content. By using our visual calendar and powerful scheduling, you can keep your LinkedIn page consistently active and valuable, ensuring your paid campaigns always have a fresh pool of engaged followers and website visitors ready to be converted.