Demographics Breakdown - Your Best Friend in LinkedIn Ads

Especially in B2B SaaS and on “expensive” LinkedIn, we need every cent to count and to control who’s actually seeing our ads. The demographic breakdown in LinkedIn feels like checking search terms in Google Ads—that’s where the real gold is.

The Goals

To simplify, I set up targeting in a way I know the audience is relevant - so I want to reach as many people possible. To get more signups, visits, etc., I tend to optimize on the creative level.

The ideal audience size is 20k to 80k, but sometimes it makes sense to run even with smaller audiences. For these smaller audiences, you really need to pay attention to how the budget is delivered.

The main benefit of demographics is to check budget allocation. It’s like an indicator of whether the campaign could even achieve the desired effect (especially for non-lead gen campaigns).

Let’s Break It Down:

Country

If you are not careful, you could end up dumping most of your budget into cheaper countries that probably weren’t your main focus. My strategy used to be splitting the campaign into North America vs. Europe to make sure the U.S. got enough volume. This used to be a bigger issue. But as of this year, I’ve noticed that geo combined campaigns really now do follow the estimated audience size for each country, so I rarely need to split campaigns anymore.

Job Seniority and Title

Usually, the cheaper and broader audience is at a lower seniority level. Even with job title targeting, it might seem like listing 10 management titles and one for individual contributors would lead to most of the spend going to management. But it doesn’t work that way. One job title could be so large that most of your budget flows there. Seniority breakdown is another key factor for budget allocation. But then I use job titles mainly for exclusions.

Company Size

I’ve seen too many budgets getting drained by large companies (10k+ employees), which isn't a good sign especially when mid-market or SMBs are your bread and butter.

Company Industry and Job Function

When it comes to job function and industry, I’m not necessarily excluding them outright (that can sometimes do more harm than good).

Company Name

If the industry doesn’t seem right, I go deeper into individual companies.

First, it helps with reporting—data to see how many of your opportunities were influenced by LinkedIn ads and by how much.

But the best part of company names is that they help with ABM campaigns or sales outreach since you can prioritize the list for sales of the most engaged accounts.

Getting the Data

It’s useful to use LinkedIn’s reporting API to get granular data. You can also automate a priority list for your sales outreach activities. I have a Supermetrics license for that.

But even without the API, you can manually check benchmarks, especially after launching a new campaign or merging campaigns.

Dive into the company engagement report to see the combined exposure per company, or ask your rep to use the opportunity report.

(Go to Plan > Audiences > Select any company list audience to see the details)

Or ask your LI rep for Opportunity Influence Analysis to see the influence on your pipeline.

Moreover, getting demographic details of your closest competitors (ask for Competior Analysis) is also useful to see where you stand.

It's useful to see the biggest diferences industry - do you have the same account list you’re going after? Or even the same job functions - are you targeting the same audiences?

To Sum It Up

Go check your demographics breakdowns to make sure you’re not wasting money on entry-level roles or pouring most of your budget into 10k+ employee companies.