LinkedIn made news last week when they announced that they would be limiting lookalike audiences for ad campaigns, such as those that GRIP.D runs for many of its clients. Naturally, we were concerned about what this meant for our ability to serve the businesses with whom we are so fortunate to partner. Find out what marketing agencies like GRIP.D will do about LinkedIn eliminating lookalike audiences.

What Will Come After Eliminating Lookalike Audiences?

But in typical LinkedIn fashion, they explained the move professionally and clearly, and have provided agencies like ourselves with a viable replacement.

Consider us cautiously optimistic.

LinkedIn sent an email out to its advertisers explaining the move, saying:

“We designed our lookalike audiences feature to help you expand your reach by targeting
audiences with similar characteristics. As our business has grown, we’ve introduced new tools like predictive audiences that will help you reach similar audiences and identify the buyers that are most likely to take action. Campaigns using predictive audiences for lead gen objectives have seen a 21% reduction in cost-per-lead.”

So LinkedIn is going to have AI do the work finding lookalike audiences for us, and it will cost us less?

AI’s Role After Eliminating Lookalike Audiences

Sounds too good to be true. But that’s sort of correct!

LinkedIn is citing increasingly restrictive data privacy laws for the move, and that’s a legitimate reason. Additionally, AI can dig deeper into the vast resource of data LinkedIn has at its disposal than simple personal characteristics can tell us. In their own explanation, LinkedIn says that predictive audiences:

“goes beyond the traditional "lookalike" approach, identifying individuals who not only exhibit similar characteristics to your existing customers, but also identifies their propensity to convert.”

If so, that’s a tremendous development for agencies and their clients.

At GRIP.D, we’re going to be watching this change closely. Any lookalike strategies that are already active will be allowed to remain in place, so no immediate change is necessary for our clients. But that is likely to eventually change, and if the power of AI to create more effective predictive audiences really becomes a powerful took for lead generation and client identification, you can be sure that GRIP.D will be at the forefront of utilizing it on behalf of our clients.