The LinkedIn Industry Reclassification and What It Means for Your Audience Strategy
Scott Schnaars
LinkedIn Changed How It Categorizes Industries. Here's What to Do About It.
LinkedIn's algorithm can now override the industry category on a company page if it disagrees with what the company entered. If you have not audited your industry-based targeting lately, you may not be reaching who you think you are.
A heads-up from the Exit Five community (https://www.exitfive.com/community) flagged this change, and the reaction in the thread was consistent: most teams had not heard about it and had no process for catching it.
The practical impact: if LinkedIn's algorithm reclassifies a company from Software to Information Technology, any campaign targeting the Software industry either gains or loses that company from the audience without any notification. Multiply that across thousands of companies in your target market and the audience drift can be significant.
What an audience audit should cover after this change:
- Pull a sample of companies from your current LinkedIn audience and verify their industry classifications match your ICP definition
- Compare your current audience size against the audience size when you built the campaign. Unexpected changes are a signal worth investigating
- Check the industry breakdown in your Campaign Manager reporting and compare it to your intended ICP distribution
- Set a quarterly cadence for full audience reviews rather than waiting for a performance problem to trigger the investigation
Platform changes are constant. Most teams find out about them months too late, when the performance decline has already happened and the cause is buried under weeks of optimization decisions built on bad targeting data.
Yirla flags targeting drift in your LinkedIn campaigns before it shows up as a performance problem. (https://www.yirla.com/en/platform)
