Activate profiles for your LinkedIn campaigns for audience targeting, personalization, and suppression, based on hashed emails and mobile IDs.
Use cases
To help you better understand how and when to use the LinkedIn Matched Audiences destination, here is a use case that 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform customers can solve by using this feature.
A software company organizes a conference and wants to keep in touch with participants, and show them personalized offers based on their conference attendance status. The company can ingest email addresses or mobile device IDs from their own CRM into 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform. Then, they can build audiences from their own offline data, and send these audiences to the LinkedIn social platform, optimizing their advertising spending.
Supported identities supported-identities
LinkedIn Matched Audiences supports the activation of identities described in the table below. Learn more about identities.
IMPORTANT
Starting with September 2025, you can no longer map IDFA as a target identity, since IDFA is no longer supported by the LinkedIn Matched Audiences destination. See the LinkedIn Matched Audiences integration for more details. This change is due to LinkedIn鈥檚 requirements, and is not related to any Experience Platform destination service upgrades.
Target Identity
Description
Considerations
GAID
Google Advertising ID
Select this target identity when your source identity is a GAID namespace.
email_lc_sha256
Email addresses hashed with the SHA256 algorithm
Both plain text and SHA256 hashed email addresses are supported by 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform. Follow the instructions in the ID matching requirements section and use the appropriate namespaces for plain text and hashed emails, respectively. When your source field contains unhashed attributes, check the Apply transformation option, to have Experience Platform automatically hash the data on activation.
Supported audiences supported-audiences
This section describes which types of audiences you can export to this destination.
Audiences imported into Experience Platform from CSV files.
Export type and frequency export-type-frequency
Refer to the table below for information about the destination export type and frequency.
Item
Type
Notes
Export type
Audience export
You are exporting all members of an audience with the identifiers (name, phone number, and others) used in the LinkedIn Matched Audiences destination.
Export frequency
Streaming
Streaming destinations are 鈥渁lways on鈥 API-based connections. As soon as a profile is updated in Experience Platform based on audience evaluation, the connector sends the update downstream to the destination platform. Read more about streaming destinations.
Before you can use the LinkedIn Matched Audience destination, make sure your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account has the Creative Manager permission level or higher.
To learn how to edit your LinkedIn Campaign Manager user permissions, see in the LinkedIn documentation.
ID matching requirements id-matching-requirements
LinkedIn Matched Audiences requires that no personally identifiable information (PII) is sent in clear. Therefore, the audiences activated to LinkedIn Matched Audiences can be keyed off hashed identifiers, such as email addresses or mobile device IDs.
Depending on the type of IDs that you ingest into 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform, you must adhere to their corresponding requirements.
You can hash email addresses before ingesting them into 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform, or use email addresses in clear in Experience Platform, and have Experience Platform hash them on activation.
If you select to hash the email addresses yourself, make sure to comply with the following requirements:
Trim all leading and trailing spaces from the email string. For example: johndoe@example.com, not <space>johndoe@example.com<space>;
When hashing the email strings, make sure to hash the lowercase string;
Example: example@email.com, not EXAMPLE@EMAIL.COM;
Ensure that the hashed string is all lowercase
Example: 55e79200c1635b37ad31a378c39feb12f120f116625093a19bc32fff15041149, not 55E79200C1635B37AD31A378C39FEB12F120F116625093A19bC32FFF15041149;
Do not salt the string.
NOTE
Data from unhashed namespaces is automatically hashed by Experience Platform upon activation. Attribute source data is not automatically hashed.
During the Identity Mapping step, when your source field contains unhashed attributes, check the Apply transformation option, to have Experience Platform automatically hash the data on activation.
The Apply transformation option is only displayed when you select attributes as source fields. It is not displayed when you choose namespaces.
Connect to the destination connect
IMPORTANT
To connect to the destination, you need the View Destinations and Manage Destinationsaccess control permissions. Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.
To connect to this destination, follow the steps described in the destination configuration tutorial. In the configure destination workflow, fill in the fields listed in the two sections below.
The video below also demonstrates the steps to configure a LinkedIn Matched Audiences destination and activate audiences.
Transcript
In this video, I鈥檒l demonstrate how to connect to a social destination in real-time customer data platform. Let鈥檚 get started. The LinkedIn Matched Audiences connection will be used in this demonstration. Before we go through the connection and activation workflow, let鈥檚 review a common use case for this one. A retail company wants to show customers personalized offers based on their purchases. They include customer email addresses as part of the data ingested into 蜜豆视频 Experience platform. Audiences are then built using this data and sent to the LinkedIn social platform, supporting advertising spend optimization. Whether you鈥檙e a product administrator or marketer setting up connections and activating data from the real-time CDP, you need proper permissions to support these activities. They include View and Activate destinations and View profile segments and identity graph. This requires a LinkedIn ad account and campaign manager with creative manager permission level or higher. In the Destinations Catalog interface, select the Social Category filter or scroll until you see the Social section with the relevant destination cards. We鈥檙e working with the LinkedIn Matched Audience card. You may see similar cards with a deprecated reference. If you鈥檙e interested to understand why multiple cards exist, refer to the documentation. To create a new destination, either select the Configure New Destination from the 3-picker or the Setup button if that鈥檚 what you see on the card. For a new connection, we鈥檒l work with the new account type. Then provide a name and description before selecting Connect to Destination. This part of the workflow requires LinkedIn account authentication. Provide your login credentials to sign in. Upon successful authentication with LinkedIn, allow permissions for Experience Platform to retrieve the advertising accounts, the name and photo, and the ability to create and manage matched audiences. Next, confirmation of a successful connection appears in the workflow in Experience Platform. New fields display at the bottom. Provide a name and description for the destination as well as the LinkedIn Campaign Manager account ID. The Next button at the top advances you to the next step in the workflow. This step allows you to define which governance policies should be enforced for this destination. It鈥檚 an optional step, however in this case, it makes sense to choose the Export to Third Party policy. The connection process to LinkedIn Matched Audiences is now complete. At this point, we鈥檙e moving forward into the activation workflow for this new destination account. Verify that the correct account is selected if you see multiples, and then choose Next to Advance. Previously, I reviewed a common use case for LinkedIn Matched Audiences. If you recall, I mentioned that the Email Address field is part of the data ingested into Experience Platform. This destination supports two identity matching values. One of those fields is Email Address, hashed with the SHA-256 algorithm. When choosing audiences in this step of the workflow, ensure Email Address is a likely field that would apply. For example, the page views audience isn鈥檛 likely to have an email associated with profiles that qualify for that audience, but purchasers is likely to have an associated email address. Mapping is a step where matching fields are selected between Experience Platform and LinkedIn. Open the Attribute Picker for the Source field, then select the Email Address field from the Experience Platform schema, and then choose Save. In the Target field, choose the Field Picker. The two identity matching choices display. Choose the Email Target field, then Save. If your Source field contains unhashed attributes, check the Apply Transformation option to have Experience Platform automatically hash the data on activation. Review the activation details and choose Finish if everything looks good. A successful activation programmatically creates a LinkedIn custom audience in Campaign Manager. Audience membership is adjusted as users are qualified or disqualified for the activated audiences. Thank you for joining us for this demonstration of creating a social destination connection and activating data to it in the Real-Time Customer Data Platform.
NOTE
The Experience Platform user interface is frequently updated and may have changed since the recording of this video. For the most up-to-date information, refer to the destination configuration tutorial.
Authenticate to destination authenticate
Find the LinkedIn Matched Audiences destination in the destination catalog and select Set Up.
Select Connect to destination.
Enter your LinkedIn credentials and select Log In.
LinkedIn tokens expire every 60 days. You can monitor your token expiration dates from the Account expiration date column in either the Accounts or the Browse tabs.
Once the token is expired, data exports to the destination stop working. To prevent this situation, reauthenticate by performing the following steps:
Navigate to Destinations > Accounts
(Optional) Use the available filters on the page to display LinkedIn accounts only.
Select the account that you want to refresh, select the ellipsis and select Edit details.
In the modal window, select Reconnect OAuth and reauthenticate with your LinkedIn credentials.
SUCCESS
Your authentication credentials are refreshed and their expiration time is reset to 60 days.
Fill in destination details destination-details
To configure details for the destination, fill in the required and optional fields below. An asterisk next to a field in the UI indicates that the field is required.
Name: A name by which you will recognize this destination in the future.
Description: A description that will help you identify this destination in the future.
Account ID: Your LinkedIn Campaign Manager Account ID. You can find this ID in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account.
Enable alerts enable-alerts
You can enable alerts to receive notifications on the status of the dataflow to your destination. Select an alert from the list to subscribe to receive notifications on the status of your dataflow. For more information on alerts, see the guide on subscribing to destinations alerts using the UI.
When you are finished providing details for your destination connection, select Next.
Activate audiences to this destination activate
IMPORTANT
To activate data, you need the View Destinations, Activate Destinations, View Profiles, and View Segmentsaccess control permissions. Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.
To export identities, you need the View Identity Graphaccess control permission. {width="100" modal="regular"}
A successful activation means that a LinkedIn custom audience is created programmatically in . Audience membership is adjusted as users are qualified or disqualified for the activated audiences.
TIP
The integration between 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform and LinkedIn Matched Audiences supports historical audience backfills. All historical audience qualifications get sent to LinkedIn when you activate the audiences to the destination.