Set up campaign targeting for Classic campaigns

Last updated: 5 months ago

When you create a new Classic campaign in Campaign Manager, you'll be prompted to select your audience. You can use an existing audience or create a new audience.

Existing audiences include:

  • Saved Audiences - Audiences you've created and saved to be used in future campaigns.
  •  Audiences - Audience templates created by LinkedIn to help you reach various types of professionals.
  • Audiences - Custom audience segments that you can create, which include uploading a list of companies or contacts, retargeting, and predictive audiences.

Here's a tip

If you’re launching an Accelerate campaign, we automatically create an audience optimized towards your objective by using your product name and description, audience signals you select, and historical data from your account’s previous campaigns. Keep in mind, not all audience targeting facets are available for Accelerate campaigns. Learn more about targeting for Accelerate campaigns.

Set up campaign targeting for Classic campaigns

Here's a tip

If you have a self-service account, we’ll suggest a target audience for your campaign. You can use these suggestions, edit the suggested audience, or reset the audience if you’d like to choose your audience without suggestions.  


If you have active campaigns, we’ll suggest an audience based on your most recent active campaign. If you don’t have an active campaign, we’ll suggest an audience based on either your last applied saved audience or your most recent inactive campaign.

To set up campaign targeting when creating a Classic campaign:

  1. When creating a campaign, go to the Audience section on the Set up Campaign page.

  2. Select an existing audience or create a new audience. If you select an existing audience, the targeting selections will be applied and you can make any changes needed for your current campaign.

    • Click the Saved Audiences dropdown menu to choose an audience you built.
    • Click the Audiences dropdown menu to choose from a LinkedIn template.
    • Scroll down to Audiences and select from List upload, Predictive, Retargeting, Third party, or Other.
    • To remove all selections, scroll down to the bottom of the section and click Reset audience. This will reset any targeting selections.

  3. Choose either Recent or permanent location or Permanent location from the Locations dropdown to select the desired locations for your audience.

  4. Optional: Search for additional locations to include in your targeting audience by typing the location name you want to include in the search field. Select the checkbox next to the location you'd like to add. You can also remove locations by clicking the X next to the location name.

  5. Optional: Exclude locations by clicking Exclude and selecting the region and/or countries you want to exclude from your campaign targeting.

  6. Select the profile language of your audience. You can only select one profile language for your target audience.

    Important to know

    When you select English, your campaign will target all member accounts in the location your campaign is targeting, regardless of the language member accounts have selected on their profiles. Please note, this doesn’t apply to Sponsored Messaging. Learn more about our targeting options for LinkedIn Ads.

  7. In the Who is your target audience? section, click Narrow or the  icon to specify audience segments or attributes you’d like included in your audience. Click Exclude to specify audience segments or attributes you’d like to exclude from your audience. Learn more about using AND-OR targeting to build your audience. 

  8. Select Audiences to access audience segments created from list uploads, predictive audiences, retargeting, third parties, or other. 

  9. Select Audience attributes to add targeting facets from categories such as company, demographics, education, job experience, and interests and traits. Keep in mind, adding attributes within the same targeting facet will expand your audience.

  10. Optional: Select or clear the Enable Audience Expansion checkbox to enable or disable Audience Expansion. If you enable Audience Expansion, people with excluded attributes won’t be included in your audience. 

  11. Once you’ve built your audience, you can:

    • Click View audience summary to review your audience. 
    • Click Save audience to save the audience, so you can apply this audience criteria to other campaigns.

Related tasks

Learn more about Audiences page

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