Convert LinkedIn audiences with signal-based ad targeting

Target LinkedIn ads based on buying signals.

Teams:

Marketing

Sources:

Zapier LinkedIn

Getting started

Most ad targeting is done based on fit criteria, retargeting pixels, and hard-to-verify third-party intent data.

It can help you narrow your scope, but there’s little way of knowing whether your ad spend is going to the precise potential buyers you want it to. Until now, that is.

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to automate LinkedIn ad targeting based on buying signals and buyer fit to increase conversions and boost return on ad spend.

What you’ll need:

Common Room
This is how we’ll create dynamic target audiences based on buying signals and fit criteria.

Zapier
This is how we’ll connect the dots between Common Room and LinkedIn. We’ll need access to Zapier’s Professional plan or higher in this case.

LinkedIn
This is how we’ll serve up our ads to the right buyers. We’ll be using a LinkedIn Ads account.

Step 1: Build audience creation Zap

First things first.

We need to create a task automation—or Zap—in Zapier

to create our LinkedIn Ads audiences.

In order to push contacts from Common Room to your LinkedIn Ads account via Zapier, your audiences must be created by Zapier.

In this case, we’d use a Google Sheet as our trigger.

We can populate the spreadsheet with audience names and descriptions either directly or via Google Form.

We’d connect our Google Sheet to Zapier and choose New Spreadsheet Row as our trigger event.

Next we’d set up our action. We’d connect our LinkedIn Ads account to Zapier and choose Create audience as our action event.

We want to configure our Zap so we’re properly mapping the correct values from our Google Sheet into the Name and Description fields in Zapier.

We’d hit Publish and now we’ve got a Zap that will create LinkedIn Ad audiences for us.

Step 2: Create ad targeting segment

We’d log in to Common Room and navigate to Segments.

Common Room’s segments feature allows you to automatically add individuals or organizations to auto-replenishing lists based on customizable criteria.

Every unique signal and firmographic detail is at our fingertips.

Prospector

Common Room’s Prospector feature allows you to search through a proprietary, constantly refreshed database of more than 200 million B2B contacts and organizations.

In this example, we’ll focus on socially engaged prospects—economic buyers who have reacted to or commented on our LinkedIn content.

We’d click New segment, select Create new segment for contacts, and add our filters.

Once we click Save, our segment will be auto-populated with every person tracked in our digital ecosystem who matches our criteria.

Step 3: Create webhook workflow

We can auto-add contacts from our segment in Common Room to the right audience in LinkedIn via Zapier.

First we’d go back to Zapier and create a new Zap.

Zapier will provide us with a URL we can copy and paste into Common Room.

We’d go back to Common Room, navigate to Settings and click Webhooks.

Once we’re done, we’d click Save changes, head back to Zapier, choose Code by Zapier as our action and select Run Javascript as our action event.

const nestedJSON = inputData.nestedJSON ||
'{}';

// Parse the nested JSON string to a JavaScript object
const data = JSON.parse(nestedJSON);

// Extract the required fields from the parsed data

output ={
primaryEmail: data.payload.primaryEmail || '',
organizationName: data.payload.organization?.name || '',
domain: data.payload.organization?.domain || '',
linkedinUrl: data.payload.linkedInUrl || '',
country: data.payload.organization?.location?.country || '',
fullName: data.payload.fullName || '',
title: data.payload.title || ''
};

Step 4: Automatically run ads against dynamic, highly targeted audiences

We can go to our LinkedIn Ads account and see the audiences our new workflow is building.

Now any time a contact is added to our segment in Common Room, they’ll automatically be sent to our LinkedIn Ads audience via webhook and Zap.

Wrapping up

And there we have it.

Now you can serve ads to prospects who match your ideal customer profile and focus your ad spend on people showing real interest in you.