Audience Tuning (Rate Accounts)

The Audience Tuning module is a powerful tool designed to help you refine and optimize your audience targeting strategy. The module provides several features that allow you to analyze and adjust how companies engage with your ads. Here’s a quick overview of the key tools:

• Rate Accounts
• Rate Industries
• Rate Countries
• Rate Account Sizes
• Rate Job Titles
• Rate Job Functions
• Rate Seniorities

Each of these tools helps evaluate a different segment of your audience. In this article, we’ll focus on the Rate Accounts feature and how it can improve your targeting strategy.

Rate Accounts: Key Features and Benefits #

The Rate Accounts tab is an enhanced version of the LinkedIn Demographic report (Company display), offering greater control over account targeting. Here’s how it works:

1. Full List of Accounts That Saw Your Ads

With Rate Accounts, you can view the complete list of companies that have seen your ads over a selected time period. Unlike LinkedIn’s native interface, which only displays the top 25 results, DemandSense provides the full list—up to 15,000 accounts—along with insights to help you decide whether to continue targeting or exclude certain companies.

Previously, Rate Accounts displayed statistics for active and paused campaigns only. Now, all campaigns associated with your LinkedIn ad account are included in the statistics, regardless of their status.

You can also use the new Campaign Status filter to narrow down the displayed data based on campaign status, making it easier to analyze accounts across different campaigns.

2. Detailed Account Information

For each company, you can access the following information:

• Company LinkedIn page and website link
• Industry
• Headquarters location
• Foundation year
• Company size
• Company logo

This data empowers you to make informed decisions on whether to keep targeting a specific company or exclude it from future campaigns.

3. Exclude Irrelevant Accounts

You can easily exclude irrelevant companies directly from the Rate Accounts interface—no need to log into LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

With the introduction of campaign-level voting, you now have more flexibility in deciding where an account should be excluded.

You can downvote a company at the ad account level, applying the exclusion across your campaigns, or at the individual campaign level, excluding the company only from selected campaigns.

This allows you to fine-tune your targeting strategy without unnecessarily excluding potentially valuable accounts from other campaigns.

Upvote/Downvote Logic for Rate Accounts #

Within the Rate Accounts tab, you’ll find two options for interacting with each company in your list: Upvote and Downvote.

Previously, account voting was applied at the ad account level. With the latest update, you can now vote on companies for individual campaigns, giving you more granular control over audience targeting.

Upvote

• Purpose: Marks a company as a valuable prospect, adding it to the DemandSense database.
• Impact: No immediate changes are made on LinkedIn, but the company is saved for future targeting evaluation in DemandSense.

Downvote

• Purpose: Excludes companies that are not relevant to your targeting strategy.
• Impact: You can now choose whether to exclude a company from all campaigns or only from specific campaigns. When downvoting an account, you can choose one of the following reasons:
  • Find fewer like this: The account is not part of your target audience.
  • Suppress active lead: The account is already in contact with your sales team.
  • Suppress customer: The account is already a customer.
  • Competitor: The account is a competitor.
  • Good lead but suppress: The account is a strong lead but needs to be excluded for other reasons.

Campaign-Level Voting #

The latest update introduces campaign-level voting in Rate Accounts, allowing you to evaluate and exclude companies for individual LinkedIn campaigns rather than applying the same decision across your entire ad account.

This is particularly useful when a company is relevant to one campaign but not another.

For example, you may want to exclude a company from a campaign targeting enterprise customers while keeping it eligible for another campaign promoting a different product or service.

With campaign-level voting, you can:

• Vote on individual campaigns: Upvote or downvote accounts for specific campaigns.
• Apply account-wide exclusions: Continue excluding companies across your entire ad account when necessary.
• Refine campaign targeting: Make more precise targeting decisions based on each campaign’s audience and objectives.
• Avoid unnecessary exclusions: Keep potentially valuable accounts eligible for other campaigns.

This functionality was previously available for other Audience Tuning attributes, such as industries, account sizes, and seniorities, and is now also supported in Rate Accounts.

Reversing a Downvote

If you change your mind, you can easily reverse a downvote by clicking the Downvote button again. This restores the company and removes it from the exclusion list. Similarly, an Upvote will also remove the account from the exclusion list while saving it in the DemandSense database.

How Does Excluding Accounts Work? #

When running LinkedIn ad campaigns, you may want to ensure that certain companies are not targeted.

Instead of manually excluding companies one by one within LinkedIn Campaign Manager, DemandSense automates this process using exclusion lists.

With the introduction of campaign-level voting, exclusions can now be managed at two levels:

• Ad account level: Exclude a company across all campaigns associated with the ad account.
• Campaign level: Exclude a company only from selected campaigns while keeping it eligible for others.

Here’s how the exclusion process works:

1. Downvoting a Company: When you downvote a company, DemandSense records your exclusion decision, including whether it applies to the entire ad account or a specific campaign.
2. Updating Exclusion Lists: The company’s information is added to the relevant exclusion list, which is managed through a CSV file via an API.
3. Applying Exclusions to Campaigns: DemandSense automatically applies the relevant exclusion lists to LinkedIn campaigns according to the selected exclusion scope.
4. Weekly Updates: The exclusion lists are updated once a week (every Friday at 10 PM UTC), ensuring that newly downvoted companies are included.

The process is automated, so you don’t need to manually create, upload, or maintain exclusion files in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

Why Use a CSV File for Exclusion? #

If you’re new to this, you might wonder why we don’t just exclude companies one by one directly in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Here’s why:

1. Limit on Exclusions: LinkedIn has limits on how many targeting exclusions you can apply directly through the platform. If we were to exclude companies one by one, we would quickly hit that limit and run out of space for other important targeting options.
2. Saving Slots for Other Targeting Parameters: By using a CSV file, we avoid these restrictions. The CSV allows us to efficiently exclude multiple companies at once, freeing up slots so we can use them for other targeting parameters (like job titles, industries, or locations). This way, your campaign can still be as specific as you need it to be without hitting any limits.

The exclusion process is automated and designed to be as seamless as possible. Once you downvote a company, DemandSense handles the exclusion based on your selected scope—either across the ad account or for individual campaigns.

The exclusion lists are updated every Friday, and the relevant changes are automatically applied to your LinkedIn campaigns.

This gives you greater flexibility to control which companies see your ads while keeping campaign targeting aligned with your goals.

Conclusion #

The Rate Accounts tab is a key feature in Audience Tuning, helping you assess the relevance of companies that have seen your ads and refine your targeting strategy.

With the introduction of campaign-level voting, you now have even more control over account exclusions. Instead of applying the same targeting decisions across all campaigns, you can evaluate companies individually and exclude them only where necessary.

Combined with expanded campaign visibility and the new campaign status filter, these improvements make it easier to analyze audience engagement and optimize targeting across your LinkedIn campaigns.

However, this is just one tab in the module. In our next article, we’ll explore the Rate Industries, Rate Countries, Rate Account Sizes, Rate Job Titles, Rate Job Functions, and Rate Seniorities features, all of which offer additional opportunities to optimize your targeting and improve campaign performance.

Frequently Asked Questions #