How We’re Helping B2B Marketers in a Changing Privacy Landscape

Consumers expect more control over their data, government bodies are requiring privacy changes to account for these expectations, and companies around the globe are thinking about how to still reach their audiences with relevant content. And as a result, we’re seeing an evolution in B2B digital advertising. Some of you may feel uncertain about how to navigate the changes -- that’s normal. But, we’re here to reassure you that we’re in it with you, and we’re eager to help you continue to reach your business goals with privacy front and center. We think of this as a privacy-first approach to B2B digital advertising, and it builds on our members-first principle that guides the development of all of our solutions.

Helping You Reach and Understand B2B Buyers Through First-Party Data

With nearly 800 million members across 200 countries, our platform is a thriving community powered by professionals looking to connect, learn, create and share content, and find new opportunities. Our members trust how we use their information to help you more accurately reach your intended audiences and measure their engagement with the advertising campaigns you create with us. We have always worked hard to earn this trust, especially by limiting our reliance on and use of third-party data for advertising - never profiling members on the basis of what they do off of LinkedIn. Continuing in the same spirit of trust, we are introducing new approaches that help provide online consistency across channels and devices, all while limiting or even eliminating the use of third-party personal data on our servers. This is a work in progress, and your feedback fuels how we iterate and build new methods.

So, with a limited group of customers, we’re beginning to test one of several new approaches - Group Identity for B2B. With Group Identity for B2B, we leverage our first-party data to group members together based on shared professional identity attributes, such as seniority and industry. This process helps you reach your intended audiences across channels, like the LinkedIn Audience Network, without the need for individual-level tracking across sites. We know that to get this right for each of you, across both mobile and desktop, and amidst evolving privacy changes, we need to introduce a variety of flexible products and features. 

Further Investing in B2B Measurement

Reaching your audience is only one part of effective digital advertising - B2B measurement must evolve, too. As part of the many approaches that we’re exploring, we also are applying technologies to measure campaign success and understand the buyer’s path to purchase. To help you more effectively measure your campaigns, we are:

• Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Measure Conversions with High Accuracy. We're starting to test how to leverage machine learning models that can estimate and report campaign conversions across channels with a high degree of accuracy by using data from across our platform. We are currently testing this with a limited group of campaigns, and there's no need to change the way that you analyze your campaign results at this time.
• Attributing Offline Conversions. To help you measure performance for actions taken offline, in the months ahead we’re also supporting attribution of offline or offsite conversion events to LinkedIn campaigns. 
• Collecting Conversions Using First-Party Cookies. To help you continue to measure campaign conversions, we’ve updated our Insight Tag to collect conversions using first-party cookies

Exploring How to Help You Continue to Drive Results at Scale

Despite changes in how you reach prospective buyers, we know you need to drive results. So, we’re exploring how we can help you continue to optimize your budgets, effectively and more accurately reach your audiences, and measure campaign conversions in a privacy-first way

• Continue to Reach First-Party Audiences. In addition, we are testing multiple approaches to enrich our Matched Audiences suite so marketers can continue to reach first-party audiences with their content across LinkedIn and the LinkedIn Audience Network. We will have more to share here in the coming months. 
• Unlock Effective Results with On-Device Processing. Keeping data locally on users' devices helps with privacy as an individual's third-party data is not shared with our platform. We are exploring ways to use on-device processing to help you effectively measure your campaign conversions and, soon, have the ability to target your audiences.
• Optimize Your Campaign ROI with Privacy-Focused Tools. We are building products to automatically optimize your campaigns to collect quality conversions and generate cost-effective results across placements and throughout the funnel.

How Can You Take Action? 

Because some of the solutions described above are still in their testing phase, there is no need for you to make changes to your campaigns at this time. However, if you’re using a LinkedIn Insight Tag for campaign conversion tracking or targeting, we advise that you take a few moments to enable first-party settings on your Insight Tag. Doing so will ensure you can continue to measure your campaign conversions and reach your audiences at scale in the months ahead as we evolve our platform alongside industry privacy changes.

In It Together

Reinventing B2B digital advertising is not simply about what we can do today, but rather considering how we look to the future. And, we know that figuring out what is best for B2B marketing is a journey -- a journey that we’re excited to take with all of you. We’ll continue to share more as we keep testing, discussing, and iterating the future of identity for B2B.