How to automate LinkedIn Matched Audiences

Targeting the right leads for your business isn’t just about casting a wide net for the sake of quantity. You need to pinpoint the main decision-makers at the companies most likely to deliver the highest returns. 

This is exactly where tools like LinkedIn Matched Audiences come into play. You can use it to segment your audience according to specific company details, run relevant ad campaigns, and even surface content to folks based on previous interactions they’ve had with your brand. 

And when you pair LinkedIn Matched Audiences with Zapier, you can reach the right people even faster. With Zapier’s LinkedIn Ads integration (and its Matched Audiences actions), you can build Zaps—what we call automated workflows—to streamline this entire process and give you more time to convert your leads.

Table of contents

Before we get started

When automating LinkedIn Matched Audiences with Zapier, use the Zapier LinkedIn Ads integration, which also works to automate your LinkedIn Lead Gen account. 

There are two main parts to every Zap:

• The trigger: an event that starts a Zap, like when a new lead is added to your CRM. 

• The action: an event a Zap performs after it’s triggered, like adding that new lead to a custom audience in LinkedIn. A single Zap can perform one or more actions.

The LinkedIn Matched Audiences integration has four actions:

• Create Audience: creates an audience you can add companies or contacts to. 

• Add Company to Audience: adds a company to a specific audience. 

• Add Contact to Audience: adds a contact to a specific audience. 

• Remove Email from Audience: removes an email address from an audience.

• Create Report: creates a new report based on the parameters you define.

• API Request: makes raw HTTP requests to the LinkedIn Ads API to interact directly with LinkedIn’s API endpoints that don’t yet have pre-built actions in Zapier.

Now, let’s dive into popular ways to automate LinkedIn Matched Audiences. 

Add new CRM leads to LinkedIn Matched Audiences

Your CRM is a central source of truth for most sales teams, as it’s probably where all your newest and most up-to-date leads live. 

It makes sense, then, that you’ll want to add those prospects to your LinkedIn Matched Audiences, so you can serve them ad campaigns and keep your product front of mind. 

With these Zaps, any time you add or update a prospect in a tool like Salesforce or HubSpot, Zapier will automatically add them to a specific audience in your LinkedIn Matched Audiences account. That way, instead of manually checking your CRM tool on a recurring basis for updates, you can focus on converting leads into customers. 

Add form submissions to LinkedIn Matched Audiences

Using a form to collect contact information from leads? 

By pairing your forms tool with Zapier, you can be confident your leads will end up where they need to go—LinkedIn Ads. By automatically adding them to your matched audience, you can more easily reach out and nurture them through your campaigns. 

Add event and webinar registrants to LinkedIn Matched Audiences

Webinar attendees are already interested in your product. Keep up the good work—and keep them nurtured—by adding them automatically to a segment in LinkedIn Matched Audiences. Target more folks like your attendees with these workflows. 

Add new subscribers and purchasers to an audience 

Even if a lead takes that first step to becoming a customer by making a purchase or by becoming a subscriber, your journey’s only just beginning. 

You still need to nurture them with offers and campaigns, inspire upsells, and cement their loyalty. When you connect LinkedIn Matched Audiences to your payment or newsletter tool, you can add new customers straight to a specific audience. 

Whether you need to retarget them now or in the future, these Zaps will do the heavy lifting for you.  

Add users to a custom audience from a webhook

Now let’s say you collect leads in another app or custom platform that doesn’t connect to Zapier just yet. Don’t waste your time manually adding each one to a matched audience in LinkedIn Ads: use webhooks instead.  

Webhooks let your apps speak with each other—sending detailed information back and forth whenever new items occur in the first app. These Zaps, for example, will catch payloads inside your app, which Zapier’s webhooks will catch. Zapier then automatically updates the custom audience you’ve set up in LinkedIn Ads, saving you a whole lot of time and headaches. 

Create new audiences based on company updates

A lot of conversations around your ad campaigns happen in team chat apps like Slack. A team member might ask you to build a new Matched Audience with specific details in a marketing channel, for example. Or perhaps your marketing team adds new profile information to a Google Sheet for your next ad campaign. 

Instead of routinely checking your messages and documentation, you can set up Zaps that will automatically create new audiences within Linkedin Matched Audiences that pull in information (like your audience type, name, and description) directly from those apps. 

You’ll have more time to focus on running those campaigns, instead building them. 

Optimize your lead flow

On its own, LinkedIn Matched Audiences is a great marketing tool that helps you retarget website visitors, reach contacts, and build account-based marketing campaigns. 

But by pairing it with Zapier and automation, you can streamline the manual process around targeting high-value leads, helping you focus on what matters most: converting them into loyal customers. 

This article was originally published in April 2021, written by Ana Gotter. It was most recently updated in December 2024 by Elena Alston.