LinkedIn Ads ABM Playbook 2026

Speaker A: Account based marketing on LinkedIn ads is a superpower. I'm going to walk you through my modern ABM playbook on, um, this week's episode of the LinkedIn ads show. Welcome to the LinkedIn ads show. Here's your host, aj wilcox. Hey, hey there, LinkedIn ads fanatics, as he said. I'm A.J. wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast the LinkedIn ads show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show. For advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status, account based marketing, or ABM, M on LinkedIn is genuinely one of the platform superpowers. Ever since the beginning of the platform in 2008, we've been able to target an exact list of companies that you want to go after. Even though we have this ability, there's so much more strategy that goes into building a successful ABM campaign. So today I want to walk you through the entire playbook soup to nuts and building the list with the best match rate, how to target the roles that you want on top of it, uh, the content and ads to actually show them all of that. The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by b2linked.com the LinkedIn Ads Experts. That's right. B2Linked is the ad agency 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been back since 2014. You know, before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me as your point of contact and my local team, and you won't get a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us. Plus, with the strategies we've developed in our mastery of the platform, we save our clients more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads management, schedule your free discovery call@b2linked.com discovery all right, first off, in the news, I have a client with a really high performing offer and we're getting like $25 cost per lead. We're targeting very senior important people. But so many of the leads were coming in were not matching our targeting. So after a long discussion with LinkedIn's product support and engineers, we figured something out and I wanted to make sure I shared it with you. I was under the impression that in order for a member to be targeted by company size, they had to be linked to a company that had declared that as its company size. So many of the leads we were getting were not linked to a company. They had the generic little gray building in their profile, which obviously didn't fit our standard of company sizes that have at least 5,000 people. Well, it turns out that's not the case. If someone's not linked to a company, LinkedIn will try to match the closest company name to what they typed, which can oftentimes be an established company with lots of employees. So even if they just type the name of their own side project, it may result in a lot of leads coming in from similarly named companies who are more established and they may not have a tight company size fit. So what I'm hoping that LinkedIn will do in this case, because this would be really easy for them, is to create a custom segment on the back end that we can have applied to our our ad sets by our LinkedIn rep. And this would just be able to exclude people who are linked to an unknown company from our targeting. That would be super easy for LinkedIn to build and support. Would totally be able to solve this issue. Would love to hear about your experiences if any of you have found ways around this though. I've also gotten asked a lot about something called reserved ads. What this is is you reserve the first ad slot for your target audience and instead of buying clicks you're essentially reserving a time period. LinkedIn has found that people are 260% more likely to click on ads in the first slot, which is actually pretty crazy. Last I heard it was about $100,000 investment for six weeks. And you get a fixed audience, one that you get to choose. There's not much optimizing you can do. LinkedIn will quote you your CPMs that you're paying ahead of time. You get a fixed audience for one campaign and audience that's actually probably ad set. It appears to be pretty expensive. CPM wise. With an audience size of around 1 million, you'll probably be paying about $148 CPM, which is pretty high. It, you know, probably a 60, 70% premium. But just to ensure that you actually land in the absolute first slot, we've also talked about a new product before called BrandLink. What these are, these are pre roll ads that you get to run at the beginning of some really big brands organic video content. So that means if you want to watch something from Business Insider that is automatically playing in your newsfeed, you're going to have someone's ad playing. Before I pretty much written this one off similarly to reserved ads, I was like oh, there's going to be a huge buy in. I'm actually really impressed though. Aside from some really high priced buy in, the media is not very expensive. So benchmarks that they're getting so far I got this from a rep is they're paying on average a CPM um of about $47 which is not bad. That's actually lower than most CPMs. We're getting about a 15 cent cost per view, which is about 10 cents cheaper than what I consider the benchmark. They're getting a 32% view through rate and a completion rate of 3%. I'm going to imagine that these are skippable since we have a completion rate that's like 3% but if we were running these just as normal video ads, I would expect a completion rate less than 2%. So these are quite a bit higher. I don't recall exactly what the buy in is to even participate here. I want to say it was something like $10,000 per partner that you wanted to work with, but I know that process has gotten easier. So talk to your rep if you're interested. I may or may not be off on that. Also, Anthony Blattner in the LinkedIn ads fanatics community, he surfaced something that was really interesting. LinkedIn actually made some changes in how treat industry targeting. So it looks like what's happening here is a page has to declare what industry they're in, but sometimes someone hasn't updated the industry when there's a better industry that has now come out. Or sometimes people just outright choose the wrong industry. So what LinkedIn is doing, they're going through each of the companies and if they see that there's a good reason to, they'll actually recategorize your company if they can tell that you've been miscategorized. Companies can also now belong to multiple industries. So for example, if you're a fintech or financial technology where you're serving people in the finance space with some sort of a technology there, like a SaaS software, LinkedIn can consider you in the financial services sector and then they could also consider you in software company. And assuming that this is accurate the way that LinkedIn is doing it, I'm actually all for this. I really like the idea of maybe an additional classification we could do. A lot of people I talk to are like, well, we want to target B2B companies. Well, there's no clean way of targeting just B2B companies, but in this case LinkedIn could tag them as both. Something like a B2B B2C D2C, B2G. You know, they could have that kind of classification in addition to their normal industry targeting. So I would love it if LinkedIn could do that. I also want to shout out Anthony Blattner. His company, Speedworks Social just released a free LinkedIn ads auditing tool. So you can see the link to that in the show notes. Way to go, Anthony. That's awesome. That's going to be a huge benefit to us advertisers. All right, as you know, every week I'm shouting out a company and wearing their swag. This week is stride.com Greg Schue is the CEO. Whenever I have an E commerce digital marketing question, Greg Schue is the first person I consider reaching out to. So if you're responsible for an E commerce brand, check them out. Stryd, that's S T R Y D e dot com. All right, and if you want me to shout your company out, talk about you on the show, DM M me, I'll have you send me some swag and I'll wear it. Okay? We had an awesome review for the show. This is from Shapiro S1 from Great Britain. He says LinkedIn inspiration, five stars. I've recently discovered AJ Ah when he was recommended to me. I can't recommend him highly enough. Not only is he very open and honest, his genuine enthusiasm and super helpful information on these podcasts are excellent. The part that surprised me the most is how much LinkedIn are charging for ads compared to other platforms, but how effective those ads can be if done right. I was getting quite disheartened with LinkedIn, but now I feel inspired. Thank you, A.J. hey, Shapiro, I don't know your full name, so feel free to reach out to me. But thank you. I really appreciate the kind words. That's exactly the goal of this podcast. I get so excited about LinkedIn ads. It's just like I'm bubbling up from inside and I can't help but release it. So I'm so glad I can release it on people like you who are getting real value out of it. So thank you. All right. Do you have a question, review, or feedback for the show? Message me on LinkedIn. My DMs are free and open. You can also email us at podcast. Com if you want to attach a voice recording from you. I'll play you right on the show. I can shout out your details or keep you anonymous. And of course you're welcome to send just dumb text as well and I'll be happy to read it. I want to feature you all Right, without further ado, let's hit it. All right, again, we're talking about ABM on LinkedIn. Here's why ABM is so strong on LinkedIn M and why it works. There are a ton of ABM companies and tools out there, but in my opinion, no one does this better than LinkedIn themselves. The reason why comes down to the quality of the intelligence of where someone works on um, LinkedIn as a personal profile. You are going to add your company experience and you're going to claim what company you work for and that's just going to be selected by you. So we know that's accurate. Other ABM platforms though, they need to try to distill that data down from things like the IP address of the visitor. Does it coincide with the known IP addresses or of a specific company out there that they have in their database? So to be fair, this is probably very accurate for enterprise level companies like Microsoft, but for small ones, I really question the ability for ABM to even work. So I love LinkedIn for this ability to specify just a specific list of companies and target only the roles that I care about at that list. It's not just spray and pray everyone who works at one of those companies. And because this generally produces smaller audiences, it's also pretty cheap and it doesn't need to take a huge chunk of your budget. It means it's a total win win for everyone. So obviously first you need to build your account list. So step one in any ABM playbook you have to build your account list before you can even touch campaign manager. So go figure out who your ICP is, your ideal client profile from whatever sources you trust, distill the company names from that list and save that to be able to use inside of LinkedIn ads as well as all the other places that you want to use it to. If you have intent data, uh, from something like six sense or demand base, great, you can work with that on LinkedIn. If you have data about the companies who are visiting your website from something like factors, AI or another source, that's great too. That's usable in LinkedIn as well. You can also go to the LinkedIn Companies tab and create a dynamic list of the companies that are interacting with your organic and paid content. Also awesome. And that's brand new. If you're just looking to start creating your ABM lists, the very first place I would suggest going is to your sales team, go and ask them for a list of their their dream accounts. It's a great way to start that conversation, you can get the list that you're hoping for and also show your sales team that you're invested in their success because oftentimes marketing and sales teams, they don't get along super well. There's some friction, and this can be a great way of alleviating that. You could also go to sources like builtwith.com who might be able to sell you a list of companies who are using a certain product. And here's a little trick. If I have a contact list, a list of individuals, I know that I can always strip that info out and turn it into a company list. If you're targeting just the contact list, you're only going to reach the people that you want. And you're probably not going to reach all of them because the match rates aren't all that great in a contact list. But if you turn that into a company list, you're able to reach your contact for sure. But you're also able to reach their coworkers, their boss, their boss's boss, et cetera. So I'm a big fan of using company lists rather than contact lists. All right, so now that you've got your list, the name of the game is getting that match rate as close to 100% as you can. If you have their LinkedIn page URL, that gives you a near 100% match rate. So it's highly preferred. You just put that in the column, upload it, and you're on your way. But if you don't have the LinkedIn page URL, you can use an enrichment service of some kind to get it. People will enrich your data and sell you that data. And if you can't get the LinkedIn page URL, you can just use company name with website that oftentimes will give a pretty good match rate. Now here's a trick I use. Go ahead and upload. Let's say you just have company name and web URL. Upload that list, you wait the 24 to 48 hours. Realistically, it's more like 72 hours for that list to process. Then you go into edit the list and you'll look at the unmatched tab. LinkedIn will actually show you the results there. They'll show you which company names it did not find a match to. Then if there's, let's say there's only 12 on that list, you can then go and do the manual research on just that handful that didn't match. Then if you re upload that list, you can get 100% match rate. Or you can just re upload just the 12 that you were missing and then add both of those lists into every ad set that you're using. And those combine really well too. So if you have the time, this is a great way of ensuring that you're reaching your full list. I'll also say this is a luxury that you get with company lists that you don't get with contact lists, because LinkedIn won't tell you who on your contact list did or did not match, but they will show you specific company names. It comes down to privacy. Now I can hear some of you screaming, what about dynamic lists? Yes, of course, manually uploading your lists into LinkedIn is not something that anyone wishes that they had to do. It's monotonous, it's annoying. And I take pity on anyone who this is a normal part of their job, myself included. So you likely have a tool integration that will let you send lists and populate them into LinkedIn dynamically, where every time you add someone to your CRM, they're automatically populated in that list. And that's awesome. HubSpot, um, Zapier do this. I know there are other tools out there as well. I will just say that I still often do this manually even if I have access to HubSpot or Zapier to do it, because I like having control over how I upload and structure the data to then get me the best match rates. If I use a tool to do it, it's just going to upload the way it does it and there's no editing that I can do. Check out episode 120 on getting the best match rates as I shared my whole process there and I linked to it in the show notes. All right, now that you have your list in there, you get to decide who do I target on top of that list. That means yes, these are the companies I'm going to reach, but now I get to specify who the roles are. If you're targeting only the companies on a list and then launch that ad set, you're going to be targeting everyone at that company, the CEO, all the way down to the janitor and everyone in between. Sometimes you may want to do this. There is value there, but I would say most of the time you'll want to narrow to just specific roles in that company list that are part of your ideal target audience. Generally lists create smaller audiences, so there's benefit to keeping our targeting as broad as makes logical sense. The larger the audience, the lower you're usually able to get your cost per click and your costs per impression. So I like to use the broader targeting here. I prefer job function, seniority and sometimes I'll even use skills. Those are like the broadest kind of targeting that I think you can use, sometimes even interests. It is possible to get really tight in your targeting using things like job title, but since LinkedIn only understands 30 to 50% of job titles, I recommend broader targeting unless you absolutely need the ultra targeted. It's okay if you're wasting on a few people who aren't relevant to your audience. With ABM targeting, you don't usually have to add facets like company size, revenue or industry, because when you created those ABM lists, you already selected those companies based off of criteria like this. But of course it is possible if you need to further segment your list across multiple ad sets, you can certainly do that, have one list being broken up into multiple ad sets. But usually I like to keep it pretty broad. So now that you have your lists and your targeting, next question is, how do I now integrate this kind of approach with the advertising that I'm already doing on LinkedIn? Well, generally your ABM ad sets will make up a very small part of your account's total spend. So that's okay. It's going to play really nicely together. I like to treat my ABM ad sets like they're cold. And then as soon as we get interactions from our ABM ad sets, I feed those interactors into our stage two retargeting audiences. So they start as an abm, but then once one of them interacts, now they're part of my more general retargeting. And of course you can create a multi stage funnel just for your ABM list, but it usually requires having a lot of companies on your list to make sure that you have an audience big enough and meaningful enough to actually build a two or three stage funnel out of it. That's why I like to combine them with the general retargeting that I'm doing across the whole account. As soon as you start running your ABM ad sets, I can almost guarantee you're not just going to get a whole bunch of your ideal target audience filling out forms and talking to your sales team. So how do you actually know that your ABM efforts are working? I do this through a combination of the Companies tab and the audience penetration metric, and I'll throw a third in there. The Revenue Attribution Report integration is also a great way of checking that this is working. So the Companies tab, this is new and this is where you can see a breakdown of the exact company names and how they've interacted with your organic content, your ads, and both a hybrid. To access this in Campaign Manager, just go to plan companies and then filter down to just your ABM ad sets and then all of the data that you see there are just going to be the companies by name who are interacting with your ads. I also mentioned the audience penetration metric. This is the one that shows you of your total audience represented by your ABM ad set, what percentage of those individuals have actually seen at least one impression during the time period that you have selected. This is valuable because your frequency number will only tell you the average number of times that you've touched an individual. But penetration will tell you the percentage of your audience who hasn't even had a chance to see a single impression. This is super valuable. In addition to your frequency number, I also mentioned the Revenue Attribution report. This is where as soon as a deal shows up in pipeline, it's able to let LinkedIn know and then LinkedIn can come back with a report and tell you, oh, all of these companies who are now in pipeline, this is how they've interacted with your organic content and your paid content. This is free to do. It only integrates with a handful of CRMs, but I definitely recommend setting it up. I'm really curious to hear how you're all measuring the effectiveness of your ABM plays as well. Let me know if I missed something. All right, now we need to talk about what sort of creatives should you use with your ABM campaigns? I've tested all kinds of different stuff here. I've tested ads where we're actually using the company's name and logo and in the image the copy is actually calling out and saying specifically that it's for that company. And we've also run ABM ad sets where we're using just general creative to show across the entire ABM ad set. If you want to do that one to one, showing a, uh, company's name and logo in their image, what you have to do to do that is you have to have a single company per ad set. So if you're targeting 50 companies, that's 50 ad sets that you have to build creative for and build and maintain. It's a huge headache. And I honestly, I can say from the results that we've seen, I don't think it's worth it. The happy medium here, I think is go ahead and target one ad set for your entire ABM audience, but go ahead and use the dynamic insertion to insert things like their company name into the copy. You won't be able to do it with the image, but that's okay. Honestly, I think it's worth it. There are a few tools out there that will actually make the one to one targeting easier. They'll actually build the ad sets for you, but I don't have any that I would actually recommend right now. But my main takeaway here is to treat those audiences like they're cold, because in ABM they usually are. Now here are the most common mistakes I see. If your list is too broad, you're not really doing abm. You're just crumpling a bunch of company names into an ad set to show separately. If your list is too narrow, it can be hard to spend enough that it's actually meaningful. If you ignore having a low match rate and you're actually missing out on a whole bunch of the companies that you think that you're targeting, that's a mistake as well. Number four, treating a third party list like one that you source from Demand Base or six Sense treating them like they're a warm audience. Well, they haven't. You don't actually have evidence that they even know who you are, let alone like and trust your brand. So I would again treat them like they're cold. Number five, don't forget to turn off audience expansion. If you've left this on, your ABM list is worthless because LinkedIn is going to go outside of your targeting list in order to show people your ads. Number six, don't forget to turn off the LinkedIn audience network. If you leave it on, you'll waste 99% of your budget on bots and spam. I'll mention I do really like the LinkedIn Audience Network for ABM lists, but you have to use a really strict block or allow list. We talked about this on episode 150. I went ahead and linked to that in the Show Notes as well. This is going to allow you to only show your ads on trusted publications like New York Times, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, et cetera. I found that the LAN traffic that comes from them is actually good. If you're using one of my free block or allow lists from the Episode Show Notes page. I've actually found that the land traffic can be really valuable, but without it, it's an absolute waste. Just because you targeted a list does not mean that the list knows who you are. So again, I like to recommend you treat all of these audiences as cold and don't rush yet for the sell. There are some limitations in Campaign Manager that you should be aware of. If you try to upload a list that LinkedIn deems too small, LinkedIn may actually kick it back and say that your isn't big enough to upload. But usually that just means that if you copy a few of the rows and just make sure that you have more rows, it kind of tricks LinkedIn and they'll go ahead and accept the list. But regardless, in order to actually start showing ads, um, to an audience, that audience has to be at least 300 members that LinkedIn recognizes. This is super easy for ABM lists, because if you have 20 companies, those companies have many employees. So of course the resulting audience size is going to be at least 300. But with a contact list, this is actually quite a bit harder. We know we need 300 people on it, so if we upload a list with 400, it still means that we need to have at least a 66% match rate to have LinkedIn resolve at least 300 people. So you probably want to build your contact lists much larger than that. I'll also mention that if you're targeting fewer than 100 companies, it might actually be better for you to type in each company name manually into Campaign Manager's targeting. That's because as you type and LinkedIn's going to auto suggest the right company, as that process happens, you know you have a 100% match rate. But if your list is over 100, Campaign Manager is not going to let you write all of those in. LinkedIn is limited to only 100 targeting facets in any one chunk, so you're going to have to upload the list as a matched audience. And of course our standard caveat here, like all of the data on LinkedIn profiles and our targeting, our targeting is dependent on the audience keeping their profiles up to date. So thank goodness, LinkedIn doesn't usually have a problem with this, but it is possible that occasionally you'll reach some people who've recently left the company and just haven't listed a new company yet. I'd argue this is still better data quality than any other source out there who is trying to tell you that they know who works at which company. All right, this is my expert level hack for you. Episode 91 of the podcast touches on this in a lot more depth. But I really like targeting the whole buyer's committee. I just realized that if I target the whole buyer's committee from my cold audiences, I'm going to be spending a lot of budget on audiences who just don't care yet about what I do. For instance, just because I know that this is going to go across the desk of someone in finance, it doesn't mean that right from the get go I'm going to be targeting finance guys. So my really cool hack here is to distill the company name from any lead that comes through, put that into an ABM list, and then run all of your buyer committee targeting on top of just that little mini ABM list. This allows you to hit the whole buyer's committee, but only when you know that that company is actually ready to start evaluating your service. It's going to save you a lot of money. All right, if you're a LinkedIn ads fan, but you're not already a member of our private LinkedIn ads fanatics community, what are you waiting for? We've got four courses designed to take you from beginner to LinkedIn ads expert. Plus we have all the top minds in LinkedIn ads that are sharing what they're learning. Plus, there's an upgrade to get on our weekly group call. I try to answer all of your questions on LinkedIn as I see them. Um, but I always prioritize the fanatics community, so come join us if you want to get direct support and feedback from me. If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome. I'm always excited to have you here. Make sure to hit the subscribe button now if you're a longtime loyal listener. Thank you. As well, I would love to have you go and rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. That is the very best way that you can say thank you for all the hours that I put into doing this for free. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, please reach out to us@podcast2linked.com. I also want to give a shout out to Resty Concepcion. He's our longtime podcast editor for the show. If anyone out there is looking to have their podcast edited, he is the one I hands down recommend. We went ahead and put his details in the show notes as well. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week and I'm cheering you on in all of your LinkedIn ads initiatives. Sam.