Audience Insights API Use Case

LinkedIn's Audience Insights API enables marketers to analyze and identify target audiences and their interests. This tool provides insights into professional demographics on LinkedIn, helping define audience segments and optimize content and media strategies. The API can answer questions such as:

• What are the top job titles for members of my audience working in a specific industry?
• In which top U.S. cities do members interested in "Computer Programming" reside?
• How many decision-makers meet my audience criteria?
• What are the common skills of audience A compared to audience B?
• What is the profile make up of my 1st party audiences?

The marketer with these insights can then:

• Push discovered audiences to Campaign Manager to simplify workflows.
• Target the appropriate audience based on campaign objectives, such as reach, frequency, and demand generation.
• Personalize messaging to the right audience based on insights.

Why?

• Marketers must understand, segment, activate, and measure key audiences essential for business growth.
• Marketers require support in go-to-market strategies, including audience-first and ABM approaches.
• Marketers require solutions to mitigate data and intelligence loss from third party data deprecation.
• LinkedIn provides rich professional demographic, firmographic, behavioral, and engagement data to support:
  • Audience discovery
  • Audience activation
  • Audience & content planning

Permissions

For information on specific permissions, see Permissions.

Pre-requisites

• Your developer application has access to LinkedIn Advertising APIs. If you are new to our APIs, get started by applying for Advertising API access.
• Your developer application must be provisioned with the Audience Insights API product.
• You have access to at least one ad account with one of the following roles:
  • ACCOUNT_BILLING_ADMIN
  • ACCOUNT_MANAGER
  • CAMPAIGN_MANAGER
  • CREATIVE_MANAGER
  • VIEWER

For more information on Ad Account roles and permissions, see:

• Ad Account User Role Definitions
• Create and Manage Ad Account Users

Example User Process Flow - Prospect Audience

Media Planner received a new campaign brief. They log into their agency tool and navigate to the “LinkedIn Audience” module to begin validating the campaign brief target audience and exploring other audiences to potentially target. When they complete their analysis, they save the created audience to their client’s LinkedIn Ad account.

Use case : Prospect Audience

Understand the professional profile of the audience to develop audience strategy and create an audience based on insights to reach identified people on LinkedIn.

Step 1: Generate a 3L OAuth Token

If there is no valid existing member token for the relevant user from any previous integration, we recommend using the minimum required scope permissions, such as r_ads, to fetch the authenticated user's Ad accounts.

For generating 3L OAuth token, please see Generate 3L OAuth Token.

Step 2: Retrieve all LinkedIn Ad Accounts

Retrieve all LinkedIn Ad accounts for the end user to select one for use with the LinkedIn Audience Insights APIs. Pass the chosen Ad account along with the metadata in subsequent API requests.

For information on retrieving Ad accounts, please see Retrieve Ad Accounts.

Step 3: Generate Audience Insights

Utilize the Ad account from the previous step to generate audience insights. Audience insights can be derived based on various facets such as job functions, job titles, job seniorities, member interests, and member skills, among others. This list outlines the available ad targeting facets to derive insights from the target audience segmented by one of these facets in response. For more information on targeting capabilities, see the following additional details:

• TargetingCriteria object
• Descriptive examples for targetingCriteria object
• List of supported adTargetingFacets in targetingCriteria object
• Ad Targeting Entities

To generate audience insights using the Audience Insights API, please refer to the API documentation here.

Step 4: Push the Prospected Audience to LinkedIn

Save the targeting criteria used to fetch insights and prospect the audience with the Saved Audience Templates API. Saving the audience in LinkedIn allows you to activate them through the Campaign API or from the Campaign Manager user interface.

For more information on saving an audience on LinkedIn, refer to Saved Audience Templates.