Create LinkedIn predictive audiences for ad targeting

Last updated: 5 days ago

Predictive audiences help expand your campaign's reach by creating an audience predicted to perform actions similar to those within your source data. To create a predictive audience, we combine your data source and LinkedIn’s AI to automatically generate a new custom audience to use in your campaigns. 

Before you create a predictive audience

Before you can create a predictive audience, you must have a Lead Gen Form, a contact list (that shows Ready or Updating as the status on your Audiences page), a conversion, or a retargeting audience. Keep in mind, your data source must have 300 members or more to create a predictive audience. If you don’t have one of the data sources, you need to do one of the following: 

Keep in mind, if you use a contact list that is in Updating status, we’ll use the latest completed version of that audience to create your predictive audience. Since predictive audiences refresh every day, once your update finishes processing, the predictive audience will use that as the source going forward.

After you have a data source ready in Campaign Manager, you can create your predictive audience.

Create a predictive audience

To create a predictive audience: 

  1. Sign into Campaign Manager. 

  2. If you need to switch accounts, click the account name in the upper-left corner of the page and select the correct account name from the dropdown. 

  3. Click Plan on the left side menu and select Audiences

  4. Click the Create audience button at the top and select Predictive audience

  5. Name your predictive audience. 

  6. Click the dropdown menu and select the data source you’d like to create your audience from: Contact list, Conversion, Lead gen form, or Retargeting. You can only choose one. 

  7. Select the checkbox next to the source.

  8. Choose the location of your target audience. 

  9. Use the slider to select the size of your audience.

  10. Click Agree & Create

Your predictive audience is now ready to use in your campaign.

Predictive audience requirements

When creating a predictive audience, keep in mind: 

  • You can only select one type of data source (Lead Gen Form, contact list, conversion, or retargeting audience).  
  • If you choose a contact list, it must have a minimum of 300 rows and a maximum of 300,000 rows.
  • If you choose a conversion, Lead Gen Form, or retargeting audience, it must have more than 300 members. 
  • There’s a limit of 100 predictive audiences for each ad account. 
  • Predictive audiences can’t be shared across ad accounts or created from lists shared from Business Manager.  
  • Audience Expansion is disabled for campaigns that use predictive audiences. 

Related tasks 

Learn more