LinkedIn retargeting ads let you serve ads to people who have already interacted with your brand – whether they visited your website, engaged with previous ads, or watched your videos. For ABM campaigns, retargeting is where the real pipeline gets built. Cold targeting puts accounts on the map, but retargeting is what moves them toward a conversation with sales.
I have spent over $490K on LinkedIn ads running ABM campaigns through ZenABM, and retargeting consistently produces the highest conversion rates and lowest cost per opportunity in my campaigns. In this guide, I will show you how to structure LinkedIn retargeting ads for ABM, which retargeting audiences to use, and how to avoid the mistakes that waste your retargeting budget.
In ABM, you are not trying to generate random leads. You are trying to build awareness, trust, and engagement with a specific set of accounts until they are ready to have a sales conversation. Retargeting ads are what keep your brand in front of accounts after they have shown initial interest.
The problem I see with most ABM programs is that they only focus on cold outreach – cold ads, cold emails, cold calls. When an account finally shows interest, the follow-up is manual and inconsistent: When accounts are starting to engage with your ads and show interest, don’t just leave them to their own devices, engage them.
LinkedIn retargeting ads automate that engagement. When someone from a target account visits your website or clicks on an ad, retargeting keeps them seeing relevant messages without any manual effort from your team.
Website retargeting shows ads to LinkedIn members who visited specific pages on your website. This requires the LinkedIn Insight Tag to be installed on your site. For ABM, I recommend creating separate retargeting audiences for different page types:
You can combine website retargeting with your company list to create a powerful ABM retargeting audience: people from your target accounts who visited high-intent pages on your site.
If you run LinkedIn video ads, you can retarget people who watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 97% of your video. This is useful for ABM because video completion signals genuine interest – someone who watched 75% of a 60-second video about your product is far more engaged than someone who scrolled past a static ad.
LinkedIn lets you retarget people who opened your lead gen form but did not submit it. These are people who were interested enough to click but dropped off before converting. Retarget them with a different offer or a lower-friction CTA.
You can retarget people who engaged with your LinkedIn single image ads – clicks, likes, comments, or shares. This creates a warm audience of people who actively interacted with your content.
Target people who visited your LinkedIn Company Page or engaged with your organic posts. This audience has shown interest in your company specifically, making them warmer than general ad clickers.
The key to effective ABM retargeting is matching your ad message to the engagement stage of the account. At ZenABM, we use a stage-based framework:
Our ‘aware’ stage is typically based on 50-plus impressions.
Accounts at this stage have seen your ads but have not engaged meaningfully. Your retargeting ads should focus on educational content and thought leadership. Use thought leader ads to build credibility and trust.
Our interested stage is built based upon 3-plus clicks in the last 30 days plus website visits.
These accounts are actively engaging. Your retargeting ads should shift toward product-specific content, case studies, and social proof. This is also where you should activate your sales team for outbound outreach.
Accounts showing engagement across multiple channels — ad clicks, website visits, email opens, content downloads — are ready for conversion-focused retargeting. Offer demos, free trials, or consultations.
We’re pushing all the interested stage accounts into Clay, and we have a workflow that searches for ICPs.
This integration between retargeting and outbound is what makes ABM retargeting different from standard remarketing. You are not just showing ads to warm audiences — you are coordinating ads with sales outreach for maximum impact.
How much of your LinkedIn ads budget should go to retargeting? The general benchmark is to keep 20-30% of your budget reserved for retargeting audiences. But for ABM, I would argue the split should be even more aggressive toward retargeting.
Here is how I typically allocate ABM budgets:
| Campaign Type | Budget % | Audience Type | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold awareness | 40-50% | Target account list (cold) | Build awareness and initial impressions |
| Engagement retargeting | 25-30% | Ad engagers, video viewers | Deepen engagement, build trust |
| Website retargeting | 15-20% | Website visitors from target accounts | Drive conversions |
| Pipeline retargeting | 10-15% | Closed-lost, churned, active opps | Reactivate and accelerate deals |
The exact split depends on your funnel stage distribution. If you are just starting ABM and have no warm audiences, you will need to allocate more to cold campaigns initially and shift budget toward retargeting as engagement builds.
Your retargeting ads need different creative than your cold campaigns. Here are the principles I follow:
Retargeting audiences are small, which means frequency builds up fast. Max Herzeg shared a clear guideline on when creative fatigue sets in: “Per creative asset, it’s usually 2.5 to 3 impressions per creative per user when I see results declining.” – Max Herzeg, former LinkedIn employee and Founder of Comrade
For retargeting campaigns, you need a rotation of 3-5 different creative assets to avoid fatigue. Refresh them every 2-3 weeks for your smallest, most targeted audiences.
Do not show the same ad to someone who just discovered your brand and someone who visited your pricing page. Retargeting ad creative should escalate through:
Exclude people who have already converted from your retargeting campaigns. If someone booked a demo, they should stop seeing demo request ads. Use your CRM data to build exclusion audiences and upload them as matched audiences, or exclude individual companies from all your campaigns in ZenABM with one click:
While most marketers think of retargeting as “people who visited my website,” the highest-value retargeting audience for ABM is often your closed-lost deals and churned customers: I’m seeing best results from campaigns targeting closed-lost deals and churned customers.
These accounts already know your product. They went through your sales process or used your product. The reasons they did not buy or left may have been addressed – new features, pricing changes, or their own circumstances may have evolved. Retargeting these accounts with ads that address their original objections is one of the highest-ROI plays in ABM.
For detailed guidance on how to set up the complete ABM funnel with retargeting, read our ultimate guide to running ABM on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn allows retargeting windows of 30, 60, 90, 180, or 365 days for website visitors. For ABM, I recommend 90 days for website retargeting and 180 days for ad engagement retargeting. Shorter windows can shrink your audience below the 300-member minimum, and longer windows include stale engagement data.
LinkedIn requires at least 300 matched members for any campaign to deliver, including retargeting campaigns. If your retargeting audience is too small, combine multiple retargeting signals (website visitors + ad engagers + video viewers) into a single audience, or extend your lookback window.
Yes. One of the most effective ABM retargeting approaches is overlaying website retargeting with your company list upload. This targets only people from your target accounts who visited your website — the highest-intent segment possible. It requires both the LinkedIn Insight Tag and a company list upload.
Retargeting audiences are typically small, so frequency builds quickly. Rotate 3-5 creative assets per campaign, refresh creative every 2-3 weeks, and monitor frequency in Campaign Manager. As Max Herzeg noted, results start declining at 2.5-3 impressions per creative per user.
Yes. LinkedIn allows you to create retargeting audiences based on Company Page engagement, including people who visited your page or engaged with organic posts. This is a valuable source for ABM retargeting because it captures people who sought out your brand organically.
