How businesses and websites can use third-party data to target advertising through LinkedIn

When you provide your email address to companies or visit companies' websites, you may be shown their products or similar offerings through LinkedIn ads.

Advertisers may collect and use third-party data to better reach their target audiences on and off LinkedIn. This third-party data may be contact information that you share with third parties or collected when you visit third-party websites.

Once collected, advertisers can include this information in their ad campaigns to define and reach a targeted, high-quality audience that is relevant to their business. Please note that LinkedIn does not tell these advertisers who you are.

Third-Party data from your interactions with businesses

Contact Targeting

Contact targeting is a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions feature that allows advertisers to upload lists of contacts to include as part of their target audience for ad campaigns. If you have already interacted with a company and provided them with your name or contact information (e.g. to sign-up for a newsletter or webinar), they may include you in a target audience for a LinkedIn ad campaign using contact targeting.

Data Integration

Another way advertisers can include contacts in a LinkedIn ad campaign is through data integration with a third-party contact management platform. If an advertiser uses a contact management platform, they may integrate the data collected there with their LinkedIn ad campaign.

Please note that with both contact targeting lists and data integrations, LinkedIn only receives hashed information from third parties. By applying hashing algorithms to the email addresses or other contacts, the text is rendered unreadable (in other words, LinkedIn does not keep new contact information about its members or anyone else), but it can be used to map advertisers' lists of users to LinkedIn members in order to serve them relevant ads.

LinkedIn doesn't disclose to the advertiser the members who see the ads. LinkedIn only provides aggregated data regarding the ad performance.

Third-party data from your interactions with websites

Website Retargeting

Advertisers can also use third-party data from their own company websites for LinkedIn ad campaigns if they enable the LinkedIn Insight Tag on their website. The Insight Tag is JavaScript code that tracks visits of LinkedIn members on third-party sites where the tag is enabled. Advertisers can then use this information about their website visitors to understand their site professional demographics, measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, and they can include their website visitors in the target audience of ad campaigns.

Just like with contact targeting, LinkedIn does not identify individual members to advertisers using website retargeting and only reports site professional demographics and ad performance in the aggregate. Also, LinkedIn itself removes members’ direct identifiers within seven days in order to make the data pseudonymous. This remaining, pseudonymized data is then deleted within 180 days.

What controls do I have as a LinkedIn member regarding the use of my data?

You can opt out from advertisers using third-party data to target you on LinkedIn by changing your LinkedIn advertising settings.

In the Third party data section of the advertising section of LinkedIn settings, you can change your preferences for the use of third-party data to target you:

Go to the Advertising data section of your LinkedIn settings.
Click the arrow icon to the right of Interactions with businesses.
Click the toggle to Off.

Please note that preventing the use of third-party data will not opt you out of receiving advertising. If you opt out of the use of third-party data, the ads you see may be less relevant to your interests.

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