LinkedIn Ads Targeting by Skills
Use self-reported expertise to find people who understand the problem your product solves.
What is Skills targeting on LinkedIn?
Skills targeting on LinkedIn lets you reach people based on the skills listed on their profile. This is fundamentally different from every other LinkedIn targeting dimension because it reflects what people know and do — not where they work or what their title is. For B2B SaaS advertisers, skills targeting is most powerful as a qualification layer added on top of other dimensions. It helps you separate the generic "Marketing Director" from the "Marketing Director who uses Salesforce and knows marketing automation" — which is a much better prospect if you sell martech.
How skills targeting works
LinkedIn members manually add skills to their profile from a predefined taxonomy of recognized skills. Other members can then endorse those skills, which increases the skill's visibility on the profile. When you target a skill in Campaign Manager, you reach anyone who has listed that skill on their profile — regardless of how many endorsements they have. This means the data is self-reported, which introduces both signal and noise. A person listing "Python" as a skill might be an expert developer or someone who completed a single online course.
LinkedIn's skill taxonomy includes tens of thousands of skills across every industry and function. However, the taxonomy is uneven — mainstream skills like "Project Management" and "Data Analysis" have massive audiences, while niche skills like "Revenue Operations" or "Product-Led Growth" have much smaller but potentially more valuable audiences. When searching for skills in Campaign Manager, try both broad and specific terms. You might find that a niche skill perfectly describes your ICP, even if the audience is smaller than you would like.
When you search for a skill in Campaign Manager, you are searching LinkedIn's standardized skill taxonomy — not doing a free-text search of profiles. This means the skill needs to exist as a recognized option in LinkedIn's system. Most common professional skills are included, but very new or highly specialized skills may not be available yet. LinkedIn periodically adds new skills to the taxonomy, so check back if a skill you need is not currently available.
Effective targeting combinations
This three-layer combination produces some of the highest-quality audiences available on LinkedIn. Start with job function to define the department (e.g., "Information Technology"), add seniority to set the authority level (e.g., "Director and VP"), then layer in skills to qualify expertise (e.g., "Cloud Computing" or "AWS"). The resulting audience is IT leaders with cloud expertise — a precisely defined buyer persona for cloud infrastructure products. The audience will be smaller than two-layer targeting, so ensure you have sufficient reach before launching.
Skills combined with company size helps you reach people whose expertise matches their company's likely needs. For example, a 500-person company with a "Salesforce Administration" skilled employee likely has a meaningful Salesforce deployment with real budget behind it. A 5-person company with the same skill likely has a basic Salesforce setup with minimal investment. By combining skills with company size, you can estimate not just that someone uses a tool, but how seriously their company invests in it — which is a proxy for budget and buying intent.
Combining skills with industry targeting lets you reach people with specific expertise in a specific vertical. "Data Analytics" skill + "Healthcare" industry targets healthcare data analysts — people who understand both the technical domain and the industry context. This is powerful for products that require domain expertise to evaluate. Your ad copy can reference industry-specific use cases that only someone with both the skill and the industry background would appreciate, driving higher engagement and conversion rates.
- Use Skills as a Qualification Layer, Not a Primary Filter: Skills targeting is most effective when used to narrow a broader audience, not as a standalone targeting dimension. Targeting everyone with the skill "Marketing Automation" gives you a huge, unfocused audience of people across all seniority levels, company sizes, and functions. But targeting "Director-level" + "Marketing function" + "Marketing Automation" skill gives you marketing directors who specifically work with marketing automation tools — a highly qualified audience for a martech product. Think of skills as the third layer that sharpens your first two layers.
- Target Competitor Product Skills to Reach Active Users: One of the most powerful applications of skills targeting is reaching people who use competitor products. If you sell a Salesforce alternative, target people with the skill "Salesforce.com" or "Salesforce Administration." These people are active users of a competing product, which means they understand the problem space, have budget allocated for this category, and might be open to switching. Combine competitor skills with seniority targeting to reach decision-makers who use the competitor, not just end users.
- Build a Skill Cluster Instead of Targeting One Skill: Do not target a single skill in isolation. Build clusters of related skills to expand your audience while maintaining relevance. If you sell a data analytics platform, target a cluster: "Data Analysis," "Business Intelligence," "SQL," "Tableau," "Power BI," "Data Visualization." People who have any one of these skills are likely relevant to your product. Adding 5-10 related skills to a campaign can double or triple your audience size without meaningfully diluting quality, because all the skills in the cluster indicate the same underlying expertise.
- Check Audience Overlap Between Skills Before Launching: Many skills have significant audience overlap. People who list "Content Marketing" often also list "Social Media Marketing" and "Digital Marketing." If you add all three to a campaign, you are not tripling your audience — you might only be increasing it by 30-40 percent because the same people appear in multiple skill audiences. Use Campaign Manager's audience size estimate to check the incremental audience gained from each additional skill. This helps you forecast reach more accurately and avoid overestimating your addressable audience.
Common mistakes to avoid
Over-Relying on Self-Reported Data
The biggest limitation of skills targeting is that it depends on members accurately representing their skills. Some people list skills they barely know to appear more marketable, while others neglect to add skills they use daily. A software engineer who uses Python every day might not have it listed as a skill because they never bothered to update their profile. Conversely, someone who took a weekend course might add it immediately. Skills targeting will always have a meaningful false-positive rate (people who listed the skill but do not truly have it) and a false-negative rate (people who have the skill but did not list it). Accept this imprecision and use skills as one signal among many.
Targeting Skills That Are Too Broad
Skills like "Management," "Leadership," "Communication," and "Microsoft Office" are listed on millions of profiles and provide almost zero targeting value. They are so generic that including them in your campaign is equivalent to not using skills targeting at all. Your audience will be massive, unfocused, and no more qualified than a random sample of LinkedIn users. Stick to skills that are specific enough to indicate genuine domain expertise or tool proficiency — "Kubernetes" is useful, "Technology" is not.
Using Skills as the Only Targeting Dimension
Targeting a skill without any other dimensions creates an audience of everyone who has that skill — from interns to CEOs, from 2-person startups to Fortune 500 companies, across every geography. Even a specific skill like "Salesforce Administration" has hundreds of thousands of members when targeted globally. Without seniority, company size, or job function filters, most of these people will be irrelevant to your campaign. Always layer skills on top of at least one other targeting dimension to control who in the skill audience you actually reach.
Frequently asked questions
How many skills can a LinkedIn member add to their profile?
LinkedIn allows members to add up to 100 skills to their profile, though the platform prominently displays only the top 3 skills (which the member can pin). For targeting purposes, it does not matter whether a skill is in the top 3 or buried at position 50 — if it is on the profile, the member is targetable. In practice, the average active LinkedIn user has 10-30 skills listed. Power users and job seekers tend to have more skills listed, while passive users have fewer. The number of skills on a profile does not affect targeting — the member simply needs to have the specific skill you are targeting.
Do skill endorsements from other members affect targeting?
No. LinkedIn's ad targeting does not differentiate between a skill with zero endorsements and a skill with 99+ endorsements. If the skill is listed on a member's profile, they are included in the targeting audience regardless of endorsement count. Endorsements affect how skills are displayed and ranked on a profile (which influences recruiter search results), but they have no impact on ad delivery. This means a member who added "Machine Learning" to their profile yesterday with no endorsements is equally targetable as someone with 50 endorsements for the same skill.
Can I target skills that members have not listed but likely possess?
No. LinkedIn's skills targeting is strictly based on explicitly listed skills. There is no inferred skills feature in the advertising platform. If a member's profile shows 10 years of marketing experience, multiple marketing job titles, and marketing certifications — but they never added "Marketing" as a skill — they will not appear in a marketing skill targeting audience. This is a known limitation and one reason skills targeting works best as a supplementary layer rather than a primary one. To reach people who likely have a skill but have not listed it, use job title or job function targeting instead and accept the broader audience.