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.

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. This streamlined process saves time and ensures your ads are shown to the right audience.

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.

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 the company from all future LinkedIn campaigns.
• Impact: This exclusion is applied across all your campaigns. You can choose one of the following reasons when downvoting an account:
  • 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.

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 a LinkedIn ad campaign, you may want to ensure that certain companies are not targeted. Instead of excluding companies one by one within the LinkedIn Campaign Manager—which can be slow and inefficient—there’s an easier way to handle this: we use an exclusion CSV file.

Here’s how it works:

1. Downvoting a Company: When you downvote a company (indicating that you don’t want to target them), that company’s information is added to an exclusion list in a CSV file via an API.
2. Attaching the File to Your Campaigns: This exclusion CSV file is automatically attached to your LinkedIn ad campaigns. It’s like creating a “blocklist” that prevents these companies from being included in your targeting.
3. Weekly Updates: This file is updated once a week (every Friday at 10 PM UTC), ensuring that any new downvoted companies are added and the list stays current.

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, the rest happens behind the scenes. You don’t need to manually update the CSV file or worry about the limits—it’s all managed for you. The file is updated every Friday, and everything is added to your campaigns automatically. This means that you can focus on running your campaigns while the system takes care of exclusions and ensures you’re reaching the right audience.

Conclusion #

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