LinkedIn audience expansion is one of those settings that seems helpful on the surface. LinkedIn pitches it as a way to reach more people who are similar to your target audience. But if you are running account-based marketing campaigns, audience expansion can quietly destroy your targeting precision and waste your budget on accounts that will never buy from you.
After spending $500k + over the past 2 years on LinkedIn ads running ABM campaigns tracked through ZenABM, and I have seen firsthand what happens when audience expansion is left on by mistake. In this guide, I will explain exactly what LinkedIn audience expansion does, why it is almost always a bad idea for ABM, and the rare situations where it might make sense.
LinkedIn audience expansion is a campaign setting that tells LinkedIn’s algorithm to show your ads to people beyond your defined targeting criteria. When you enable it, LinkedIn identifies users who share similar characteristics with your target audience — similar job titles, industries, skills, or behaviors – and includes them in your ad delivery.
The idea is simple: you define your audience, and LinkedIn finds “lookalike” users who might also be relevant. For demand generation campaigns targeting broad audiences, this can sometimes work. But for ABM campaigns where you have a specific list of target accounts, audience expansion directly undermines your strategy.
LinkedIn audience expansion is a checkbox in the campaign setup flow, under the Audience section. It is enabled by default in many campaign types, which is why so many advertisers accidentally leave it on. You need to actively uncheck it during campaign creation.
When you use company list uploads or contact list targeting for ABM, audience expansion will add companies and contacts that are not on your list. This means your carefully curated ABM campaign structure gets diluted with accounts you never intended to target.
During the ZenABM ABM Bootcamp, Max Herzeg – a LinkedIn ads consultant and founder of Kamrade who ironically was a LinkedIn employee – was quite clear about using audience expansion:
Audience expansion – don’t use that. And LAN – don’t use it either.”
Here is why audience expansion is so problematic for ABM specifically:
The entire point of ABM is targeting specific accounts that fit your ideal customer profile. When you upload a company list of 500 target accounts and enable audience expansion, LinkedIn might show your ads to 2,000+ companies. You lose the precision that makes ABM work.
Bilal, GTM Engineer at Userpilot, explained this problem clearly during the bootcamp:
“If you have 5,000 accounts and only 30% are wrong accounts… LinkedIn’s algorithm is gonna learn from those bad-fit accounts.” – Bilal, GTM Engineer at Userpilot
When audience expansion adds non-target accounts and those accounts engage with your ads, LinkedIn’s algorithm starts optimizing for the wrong audience. It learns from engagement signals that do not represent your actual buyers, which degrades performance over time.
With ABM, every dollar spent on a non-target account is a dollar wasted. Unlike broad demand gen where any qualified lead has value, ABM is about concentrating spend on accounts your sales team is actively working. Audience expansion spreads your budget across accounts that sales will never follow up on.
If you are tracking ABM metrics like audience penetration and account-level engagement, audience expansion muddies the data. You cannot accurately measure what percentage of your target accounts you are reaching when LinkedIn is also serving ads to unknown accounts.
I have audited dozens of LinkedIn ABM campaigns where audience expansion was accidentally left enabled. Here is what typically happens:
If your budget is being diluted across expanded audiences, you will never hit these penetration benchmarks for your actual target accounts. Use ZenABM’s company-level engagement tracking to verify that your impressions are actually reaching the right accounts.
While we are discussing audience expansion, we need to talk about the LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN) as well. LAN extends your ads beyond LinkedIn to third-party apps and websites. LinkedIn’s sales reps actively push this feature.
“Your reps will be really pushing you to use it… they said to me last week, ‘how about using your ads on connected TV while people are watching Hulu or Netflix.'” – Emilia Korczynska
LAN has the same fundamental problem as audience expansion: it takes your carefully targeted ABM ads and shows them in contexts you cannot control, to audiences you cannot verify. For ABM, both settings should be turned off.
There is one narrow scenario where audience expansion could be justified: when you are running broad awareness campaigns that are not part of your ABM program. If you are running a separate campaign optimized purely for reach – perhaps promoting a large event or a brand campaign – and you are not concerned about account-level targeting, audience expansion can help you get more impressions for less money.
But even then, I would argue that you are better off building a larger target account list rather than letting LinkedIn’s algorithm decide who to show your ads to. As Bilal put it:
“How do you waste your budget on LinkedIn? Having a bad list.” – Bilal, GTM Engineer at Userpilot
A deliberately broad list is still better than a random algorithm expansion because you control the quality.
Here is a step-by-step process to make sure audience expansion is off in your campaigns:
For existing campaigns, go into each campaign’s settings and verify that audience expansion is disabled. I recommend auditing all your active campaigns right now — it is one of the most common LinkedIn ads mistakes I see.
Because audience expansion is enabled by default in many cases, I recommend creating a checklist for every new campaign launch:
If your ABM audience feels too small, here are better alternatives to audience expansion:
Use your win-loss analysis to identify account characteristics that predict success, then build a larger list based on those signals. As I often tell bootcamp participants:
“Do your win-loss analysis, and understand which types of companies you usually win.” — Emilia Korczynska
Instead of using audience expansion, combine your company list with LinkedIn’s native targeting attributes. You can target specific job titles, seniority levels, and functions within your target accounts. This keeps you focused on the right accounts while reaching more people within them.
Rather than expanding to new accounts, focus on deepening engagement with accounts already showing interest. Our ABM framework at ZenABM uses engagement-based stages to move accounts through the funnel:
“Our ‘aware’ stage is typically based on 50-plus impressions.” — Emilia Korczynska
“Our interested stage is built based upon 3-plus clicks in the last 30 days plus website visits.” — Emilia Korczynska
Learn more about how to set up a proper LinkedIn ABM campaign structure that does not rely on audience expansion.
No. For ABM campaigns, audience expansion should always be disabled. It adds non-target accounts to your audience, which wastes budget and degrades algorithm performance. If your audience feels too small, expand your target account list deliberately instead of relying on LinkedIn’s algorithm to find similar accounts.
No, they are different settings. Audience expansion broadens who sees your ads within LinkedIn by adding similar users to your targeting. The LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN) extends where your ads appear by showing them on third-party websites and apps outside LinkedIn. Both should be disabled for ABM campaigns.
LinkedIn requires a minimum of 300 members per campaign. For ABM, you need to ensure your company list and targeting criteria produce at least 300 matched members. If your audience is too small, consider adding more accounts to your target list or broadening the job title targeting within your target accounts.
Go to LinkedIn Campaign Manager, open each campaign, and check the Audience settings section. Look for the “Audience Expansion” checkbox. If it is checked, your ads are being served to people outside your defined targeting criteria. Also check for the LinkedIn Audience Network toggle in the Placements section.
It might increase CPM slightly because you are targeting a more specific audience. But your cost per qualified engagement and cost per pipeline will improve significantly because every impression goes to an account that matters. Higher CPMs with better targeting almost always outperform lower CPMs with wasted reach in ABM.
