5 UNDERUSED WAYS TO USE THE LINKEDIN COMPANIES TAB FOR B2B PAID MEDIA
By introducing the Companies tab, LinkedIn gave us all access to a well of information that can be a game-changer for any account, but especially for marketers who are doing ABM marketing. Yet, this is the tab that gets constantly underused. A lot of people recently made posts about it – this article is my take on the Companies tab and how I found the ways for it to work for our clients.
1. Build Dynamic Lists of Reached, Engaged, and Converting Companies
There is a major difference in the level of awareness and intent of people who saw your ad one time and people who already converted 2-3 times. Targeting them with the same content in the same ad set might be what’s holding you back – and the Companies tab has a functionality to change that.
Inside the Companies tab, you can create company lists based on thresholds you define - for example, companies that received at least 10 paid impressions (Reached), companies that generated at least 5 clicks or engagements (Engaged), or companies that completed a conversion action (Converting). When creating a list, you choose between dynamic (updates automatically as campaign data changes) or static (a fixed snapshot useful for reporting at a point in time).
My recommendation is to test dynamic lists – they will (as expected from them) dynamically shift the companies that gain or lose engagement to the different lists you create. Test dynamic lists with different engagement thresholds – this might not work straight away, but once you find your sweet spot, it’s one of the best tactics to use. 100+ Impressions and 10+ Paid Engagements in a month is what I put as a High Engagement threshold for the ABM campaigns with 2-3 months of maturity.
2. Create Tiered Lists by Engagement Level
The Companies tab also shows an Engagement Level score for each company — a more refined signal than just counting clicks or impressions. It factors in the breadth and depth of interactions across your audience at that company, giving you a relative sense of how warm an account actually is.
You can use it as a filter when building dynamic lists, or simply as a way to prioritise which accounts to focus on. Either way, the output is the same: a tiered view of your account universe where you match content and messaging to the actual temperature of each account; bottom-of-funnel content for the hottest, awareness plays for the coldest.
It can also be a cool reporting option to share with your Sales team – proactively reaching out to the companies with Very High Engagement level can do wonders.
Note: test Engagement Level dynamic lists against lists built on the number of Impressions and Clicks. With some clients, Engagement Level-based lists will perform worse because they take into account the entire headcount of the company and not your ICP within it. So the Engagement Level can be Low but you actually reach 80% of your ICP.
3. Measure Organic Uplift for Demand Gen Reporting
One of the most evident effects of running Brand campaigns is organic uplift. Companies who had no idea about your brand previously start to follow you on socials, share your posts and interact with your content. There is usually a clear correlation between the paid activity and the organic uplift that follows – and this can be a strong reporting layer for your Brand Awareness or ABM campaigns.
Companies tab includes the data on organic performance and makes it easy to compare it with the paid impact. The newly added lookback window of 365 days can help you to make the reporting picture fully complete even with B2B-typical long conversion windows.
4. Cap Impressions by Company
You know a situation when you open your Demographics tab and see that Amazon consumed 40% of your campaign’s Impressions? Frequency is one of the harder things to control in LinkedIn campaigns, especially in smaller B2B audiences where the same companies keep getting hit. One way to fix this is by building a dynamic list of companies that have received (as an example) over 500 Impressions in 30 days, and then excluding that list from your campaigns.
This gives you a basic impression cap at the company level, making sure your budget keeps moving toward accounts that haven't been over-served yet rather than hammering the same companies repeatedly. A downside to this: behemoths like Amazon or Google can hit even a limit of 1000 impressions pretty quickly so you need to find a good spot of the lookback window and the Impression limitation that you want. If you 100% want to target extra-large enterprises, I would simply create a dedicated ad set for them.
5. Use the Companies Tab for ABM Reporting
This is probably the most powerful use case of the Companies tab, and the one that immediately comes to mind. For ABM campaigns, standard metrics like CTR and CPL tell you very little — what you actually want to know is whether your target accounts are engaging and moving in the right direction. The Companies tab answers both, and works best in combination with the LinkedIn Revenue Attribution Report, which connects ad engagement to pipeline and revenue.
Specifically, you can report on target account activity over time, engagement levels, and what percentage of your ICP has been reached vs. engaged. This is the kind of reporting that maps to pipeline language rather than media metrics — and makes the value of LinkedIn spend much easier to defend to a CMO or VP of Sales.
Outro
The LinkedIn Companies tab is one of the most account-centric tools available inside any paid media platform — and it's native, free to use, and available to anyone running LinkedIn campaigns. That said, if you want to go deeper, there are paid alternatives that make your life considerably easier — Fibbler, our go-to choice, immediately comes to mind.
Whether you're running a full ABM program or simply trying to make your LinkedIn spend work harder, these five use cases give you a practical starting point. Pick one, implement it this week, and build from there.
