LinkedIn Changed How It Categorizes Industries. Here's What to Do About It.

LinkedIn Changed How It Categorizes Industries. Here's What to Do About It.

LinkedIn can now override the industry designation on a company page if its algorithm disagrees with what the company entered. The Exit Five community (https://www.exitfive.com/community) flagged this recently, and it is worth understanding exactly what it means for your campaigns.

The short version: audiences you built based on industry targeting may have quietly shifted. LinkedIn does not send notifications when it reclassifies companies. You find out when you audit, or you find out when performance starts drifting in a direction you cannot explain.

Here is how to audit your targeting:

• Go to Campaign Manager and pull the Companies Reached report for your most important industry-targeted campaigns. Look at which industries are actually represented and compare them to your intended targeting
• Pull a sample of fifty to one hundred companies from your reached audience and verify their current LinkedIn industry designation. LinkedIn Company Insights shows what LinkedIn currently believes the industry to be
• If you find misclassified companies, build an exclusion list. Excluding wrong-industry companies is often faster than waiting for LinkedIn to reclassify them
• Add audience verification to your campaign launch checklist and your quarterly review. This is not a one-time fix

The most frustrating part of this change is that it affects campaigns you built and configured correctly. The targeting was right when you set it. LinkedIn moved the target.

The only way to stay ahead of it is to check regularly.

Yirla tracks changes in your LinkedIn audience composition so silent targeting drift gets flagged before it becomes a budget problem. (https://www.yirla.com/integrations)