targetingCriteria Object

Article
05/08/2023

LinkedIn uses member facets to define a segment of members who will be either included or excluded from an advertising campaign's targeting.

targetingCriteria provides a generic AND / OR construct to include and exclude different targeting facets when defining the audience for an Ad campaign. targetingCriteria is attached to a campaign and is replacing the now deprecated targeting object.

Note

If you use targetingCriteria field to specify targeting criteria for a campaign, you cannot use the targeting field. Furthermore, if an existing campaign is ever updated using targetingCriteria , you must use targetingCriteria going forward, since this field permits more expressive criteria.

Structure

The basic structure for a targetingCriteria object is as follows:

{
    "targetingCriteria":{
        "include":{
            "and":[
                {
                    "or":{
                        "urn:li:adTargetingFacet:{facet1}":[
                            "{facet1_value1}",
                            "{facet1_value2}"
                        ],
                        "urn:li:adTargetingFacet:{facet2}":[
                            "{facet2_value1}",
                            "{facet2_value2}"
                        ]
                    }
                },
                {
                    "or":{
                        "urn:li:adTargetingFacet:{facet3}":[
                            "{facet3_value1}",
                            "{facet3_value2}"
                        ],
                        "urn:li:adTargetingFacet:{facet4}":[
                            "{facet4_value1}"
                            "{facet4_value2}"
                        ]
                    }
                }
            ]
        },
        "exclude":{
            "or":{
                "urn:li:adTargetingFacet:{facet5}":[
                    "{facet5_value1}"
                    "{facet5_value2}"
                ],
                "urn:li:adTargetingFacet:{facet6}":[
                    "{facet6_value1}"
                    "{facet6_value2}"
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}

Rules

The include object contains a single encompassing array object called “and” .
The exclude object contains a single "or" object. It does not support the same "and" array object in the include object.
Each element within this “and” , contains at least 1 or many “or” objects.
Each “or” object can contain a collection of adTargetingFacets .
Each adTargetingFacet supports a list of pre-defined, standardized values.
Within a single adTargetingFacet , all values in the list are OR’d.
The exclude values in the list are OR’d.

Order of evaluation

The include object is evaluated before the exclude object.
The include object cannot be empty and is evaluated first.
The exclude object can be empty. (in which case no further processing is required)
The set of members specified by the exclude object is filtered from the set of members specified by the include list.
The resulting set of members will be used for targeting. (provided the number of members is greater than **300).

Convert your desired audience to Targeting Criteria

To create a targeting criteria describing your desired audience, please follow the guide for /adTargetingFacets and /adTargetingEntities to find the most fitting adTargetingFacets and values within the adTargetingFacet.

How to display Targeting Criteria

To display a targeting criteria in a human readable format, adTargetingFacet urns and adTargetingEntity urns must be converted to localized names. To do so please use the urn-to-name resolver API.