Exclusions — ZenABM Docs

Exclusions are the fastest way to stop wasting ad spend. They keep companies, job titles and industries that are not a good fit out of all or some of your LinkedIn campaigns and ad sets.

Managing exclusions and pushing them to LinkedIn.

How it works

You can select the scope an exclusion applies to: specific ABM Campaigns, or LinkedIn Ad Sets/LinkedIn Campaigns.

ZenABM automatically applies the exclusion to the target scope and keeps it updated daily (at midnight GMT). Within LinkedIn's system, exclusions are applied to all ACTIVE Campaigns (Ad Sets) that match your selected scope.

ZenABM lets you scope an exclusion however you want, but LinkedIn itself only accepts exclusions on individual ad sets. That is a native LinkedIn limitation. So if you scope an exclusion to an ABM Campaign or a LinkedIn Campaign, we work out which ad sets sit underneath it and apply the exclusion to each one.

Applying an exclusion happens in the background and might take a few minutes.

You can set up to 200 exclusions per Ad Set (LinkedIn's limitation).

What you can exclude

Companies: by name, or from your list of engaged LinkedIn companies.
Job titles: including bulk matching to catch variations of a role.
Industries: whole categories that aren't a fit.

Choosing the scope

You decide how widely an exclusion applies:

Team-wide

Applies everywhere. Best for global "never advertise to" lists like customers or competitors.

Campaign or ad set

Applies to a specific campaign or ad set. Best for play-specific tuning.

ABM campaign

Scoped to an ABM Campaign so a program only reaches its intended accounts.

How to set it up

Add exclusions

Search for the companies, job titles, or industries to exclude, one at a time or in bulk.

Set the scope

Choose whether it applies team-wide or to specific campaigns, ad sets, or ABM campaigns.

Sync to LinkedIn

ZenABM pushes the exclusions to your ad account. Activity logs show what changed, and you can retry anything that didn't apply.

Best practices

The common use cases are competitors, current customers, partners, and your own company.

You can also exclude companies without opening this page: from any company's own page, by asking Zena, or through the MCP server and the REST API.

Budget Savers

Turn off LinkedIn Audience Network and Audience Expansion, on current and future campaigns.

Bids, budgets & decaying ads

AI-assisted bid and budget changes, and pausing ads that have started to decay.

Job Titles

Find the titles worth excluding.

Companies

Find the accounts worth excluding.