LinkedIn retargeting audiences are one of the most underused tools in ABM. Most B2B marketers set up a single website retargeting audience, run the same ads to everyone who visited any page, and call it a day. That approach misses the entire point of what retargeting audiences can do for account-based campaigns.
I’ve spent over $490K running ABM campaigns on LinkedIn and retargeting audiences consistently produce my highest engagement rates and lowest cost per opportunity. The key is understanding the different types of retargeting audiences LinkedIn offers, how to build them strategically, and how to layer them with your company lists so you’re only retargeting people from your target accounts – not everyone who happened to land on your website.
In this guide, I’ll walk through every type of LinkedIn retargeting audience, how to create each one, and how to use them specifically for ABM campaigns.
LinkedIn retargeting audiences are groups of people who have previously interacted with your brand in some measurable way – visited your website, watched your video ads, opened a lead gen form, engaged with your company page, or attended a LinkedIn Event. LinkedIn tracks these interactions and lets you create audiences from them inside Campaign Manager.
These audiences live under the “Matched Audiences” section of LinkedIn’s targeting tools (see our full guide on LinkedIn matched audiences for more). Unlike company or contact list uploads, retargeting audiences are built automatically based on engagement signals. You set the rules, and LinkedIn populates the audience as people interact with your content.
For ABM, retargeting audiences solve a critical problem: identifying which accounts are actively engaging with your brand and serving them the right next message. Cold campaigns create awareness. Retargeting audiences turn that awareness into pipeline.
LinkedIn offers six types of retargeting audiences. Each captures a different engagement signal, and each has different implications for ABM.
Website retargeting lets you target LinkedIn members who visited specific pages on your website. This requires the LinkedIn Insight Tag to be installed on your site. Once active, you can create audiences based on:
For ABM, I create separate website retargeting audiences by intent level:
The lookback window matters. LinkedIn allows 30, 60, 90, 180, or 365 days. For ABM retargeting, I typically use 90 days for high-intent pages (to keep the audience fresh) and 180 days for broader site visitors (to maintain sufficient audience size).
If you run video ads on LinkedIn, you can retarget people who watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 97% of your video. This is exceptionally useful for ABM because video completion rates are a strong indicator of genuine interest.
Tim Davidson explains why video view retargeting is powerful for ABM funnels: “You can run remarketing off of [TLAs]. So, if it’s a video, 97% video views of that ad – usually higher intent.”
Someone who watched 97% of a 60-second thought leader ad about your product is significantly more engaged than someone who scrolled past a static image ad. I use the following thresholds:
A key advantage of video retargeting: it doesn’t require the Insight Tag. The engagement happens entirely on LinkedIn, so there’s no reliance on third-party cookies or website tracking.
LinkedIn lead gen forms open natively in the LinkedIn feed. You can create two types of retargeting audiences from them:
For ABM, the “opened but not submitted” audience is particularly valuable. These are people from your target accounts who took action but didn’t complete the conversion. A well-crafted retargeting ad can recapture them.
Target people who visited your LinkedIn Company Page or interacted with your organic posts. This audience has shown interest in your company specifically – they sought you out, which makes them warmer than people who merely saw an ad in their feed.
The lookback windows available are the same as website retargeting (30-365 days). For most B2B companies, company page audiences tend to be small, so I recommend using 180 or 365 days to ensure you meet LinkedIn’s minimum audience size of 300.
If you host LinkedIn Events (webinars, workshops, virtual roundtables), you can retarget people who registered for or attended your events. This is a high-quality audience because event registration is a strong intent signal – these people actively signed up to hear what you have to say.
For ABM, I use event retargeting as a warm-up step before sales outreach. Someone who attended your webinar and is at a target account should get follow-up retargeting ads with related content, and your SDR should be reaching out within 48 hours.
You can retarget people who engaged with your single image ads or document ads – clicks, likes, comments, or shares. This captures people who interacted with your content even if they didn’t visit your website. It’s a useful middle-ground between cold audiences and high-intent website visitors.
Creating retargeting audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager follows the same general flow for all types. Here’s the step-by-step process:
Alternatively for retargeting highly engaged accounts, you can use ZenABM engagement score in your company accounts list (de-anonymized target companies scored by engagements with your LinkedIn ads):
For website retargeting specifically, you’ll need to install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your site first. It’s a JavaScript snippet that goes on every page – most marketing teams add it via Google Tag Manager. Once installed, LinkedIn begins collecting visitor data and you can create page-specific audiences.
Note that retargeting audiences aren’t retroactive for website visitors – LinkedIn only starts tracking visits after the Insight Tag is installed. For other types (video, lead gen form, company page), LinkedIn can pull historical data up to 365 days back, so those audiences often populate right away.
This is where retargeting audiences become truly powerful for ABM. On their own, retargeting audiences include everyone who triggered the engagement signal – including people who aren’t at your target accounts. For ABM, you want to retarget only people from companies on your target account list.
The approach is straightforward: use your company list as the primary targeting layer, then add your retargeting audience as an additional filter. This creates an audience of people who are both (a) at companies on your target list AND (b) have engaged with your brand in a specific way.
Here’s how I structure it in practice:
| Campaign Type | Company List | Retargeting Layer | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warm retargeting | Full target account list | Website visitors (all pages, 90 days) | Re-engage accounts showing interest |
| High-intent retargeting | Full target account list | Pricing/demo page visitors (90 days) | Push toward conversion |
| Video engagement retargeting | Full target account list | 75%+ video viewers (180 days) | Deepen engagement with interested accounts |
| Pipeline reactivation | Closed-lost/churned list | Any site visit or ad engagement (365 days) | Recapture lost opportunities |
The pipeline reactivation play is one of the highest-ROI retargeting strategies I run: 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. Retargeting them with ads that address their original objections or highlight new features can reactivate deals that you thought were dead.
The whole point of having different retargeting audiences is to tailor your messaging. Someone who watched 97% of a product demo video should see a different ad than someone who visited a blog post once. Here’s how I map retargeting audiences to ad content:
LinkedIn requires a minimum of 300 matched members for any campaign to deliver. Retargeting audiences for ABM tend to be small because you’re filtering for specific engagement signals within an already-narrow target account list. If your audience is too small, you have three options:
Exclude people who have already converted. If someone booked a demo, they shouldn’t see demo request ads. If someone became a customer, exclude them from all prospecting retargeting. Upload your customer list and active opportunity contacts as exclusion audiences.
Max Herzeg is direct about this:
“Audience expansion — don’t use that. And LAN — don’t use it either.” – Max Herzeg, former LinkedIn employee
This applies doubly for retargeting campaigns. Audience expansion on a retargeting campaign defeats the entire purpose – LinkedIn will start showing your retargeting ads to people who never actually engaged with your brand. Always turn it off.
Because retargeting audiences are small, frequency builds up fast. Each person in your retargeting audience will see your ads many more times than people in a cold campaign. Rotate 3-5 creative assets per campaign and refresh them every 2-3 weeks. Monitor frequency in Campaign Manager and pause creatives that have exceeded 3 impressions per person.
Retargeting audiences in ABM shouldn’t exist in isolation. When an account appears in your high-intent retargeting audience (pricing page visitors, multiple video views, form openers), your sales team should be notified. At Userpilot, we push engaged accounts from ZenABM into our outbound workflows so SDRs can reach out while retargeting ads keep the brand visible. This combination of ads plus direct outreach is what makes ABM retargeting fundamentally different from standard remarketing.
For the full strategic framework on how retargeting fits into your ABM funnel, read our ultimate guide to running ABM on LinkedIn.
After auditing many LinkedIn ad accounts, I see the same retargeting mistakes repeatedly:
1. Not layering retargeting with company lists. If you retarget all website visitors without filtering for your target account list, you’re spending budget on people outside your ICP. Always combine retargeting audiences with your company list for ABM campaigns.
2. Using only one retargeting audience. Many teams create a single “all website visitors” retargeting audience and run the same ad to everyone. This ignores the massive intent difference between someone who visited your pricing page and someone who read a blog post.
3. Leaving audience expansion on.
This setting is often enabled by default. For retargeting campaigns, it completely undermines your targeting by adding people who haven’t actually engaged with your brand.
4. Ignoring closed-lost and churned accounts. Many companies start all their ABM campaigns targeting cold accounts. But as I noted, closed-lost and churned accounts are often the highest-value retargeting audience because they already know your product. Many companies start from a completely cold list of accounts. This is a common mistake, because they are just so much harder to convert.
5. Setting lookback windows too short. A 30-day lookback window on a niche ABM retargeting audience often results in fewer than 300 members, which means LinkedIn can’t deliver the campaign. Use 90-180 days for most ABM retargeting audiences.
For a deeper look at audience penetration and how to estimate how much budget you need for your retargeting campaigns, check out our budget planning guide.
How aggressively should you retarget? The answer depends on the warmth of the audience. Max Herzeg provides clear benchmarks: “For cold audiences, I recommend 30-50% penetration per month. For warm audiences, it should be 70 to 90% audience penetration per month.” – Max Herzeg
Since retargeting audiences are warm by definition, you should aim for 70-90% penetration per month. This means your budget needs to be sufficient to reach most of the people in your retargeting audience at least once a month. Gabriel Ehrlich reinforces the frequency principle: “You want to reach as much of your audience as possible, as often as possible. 4 or 5 times a month would be great.” – Gabriel Ehrlich
At the same time, remember that narrow retargeting audiences come with higher CPMs. Our benchmarks show narrow audiences (under 100K members) cost $100-200+ per lead – but they convert at 2-3x the rate of broad audiences. For retargeting, the higher cost per impression is almost always justified by the conversion uplift. Check the LinkedIn ABM Benchmarks Report 2026 for detailed performance data by audience size.
LinkedIn requires at least 300 matched members for any campaign to deliver, including retargeting campaigns. If your retargeting audience is too small, extend the lookback window (e.g., from 30 to 180 days), broaden the retargeting trigger (all website visitors instead of specific pages), or combine multiple retargeting signals into one audience.
No. You only need the Insight Tag for website retargeting. Video view retargeting, lead gen form retargeting, company page retargeting, event retargeting, and ad engagement retargeting all track interactions that happen natively on LinkedIn and don’t require any website tracking code.
Yes. You can combine retargeting audiences using OR logic within the matched audiences section. For example, you can target people who visited your website OR watched 75% of your video. This is useful for building larger warm audiences when individual retargeting segments are too small for ABM.
For website retargeting, LinkedIn begins populating the audience within 48 hours of the Insight Tag being installed, but it isn’t retroactive – only visits after installation are tracked. For video, lead gen form, and company page retargeting, LinkedIn can pull historical data up to 365 days back, so these audiences often populate immediately after creation.
Run retargeting as separate campaigns. This gives you independent budget control, lets you tailor creative specifically for warm audiences, and allows you to track retargeting performance separately from cold campaigns. Mixing cold and retargeting audiences in one campaign makes it impossible to optimize either effectively.
