Microsoft Advertising has added a setting that lets advertisers running Audience campaigns show their ads only to people whose LinkedIn profiles match a chosen company, industry or job function. Until now, LinkedIn data inside Microsoft's platform could only raise or lower a bid; it could not stop an ad from reaching everyone else. The change was reported by PPC News Feed on October 27, 2026, and it now appears in Microsoft's help documentation on LinkedIn profile targeting under a section titled "Bid only vs. Target and bid." Search, Dynamic Search Ads and Microsoft Shopping campaigns are left out. For those, LinkedIn targeting remains a bid adjustment and nothing more.

In Short

Microsoft lets advertisers use what people list on their LinkedIn profiles, such as their employer, their industry or their job, to decide who sees ads on Microsoft's websites, apps and partner sites. Until now that information could only make Microsoft bid more or less for those people, and the ads still showed to everyone else as well. In one type of campaign, Audience campaigns, advertisers can now tell Microsoft to show the ads only to the people they picked, while ads next to search results keep working the old way.

What Microsoft's documentation now says

Microsoft's help page on the feature carries no publication date. Its new section sets out two modes and draws a hard line between campaign types.

"For Search campaigns, Dynamic Search Ads campaigns, and Microsoft Shopping campaigns, LinkedIn profile targeting is always Bid only," the page states. "Your ads can still show to everyone, but the bid adjustment applies to people who match your selections."

Audience campaigns get a choice. "For Audience campaigns, you can choose Bid only or Target and bid," according to Microsoft. "With Target and bid, your ads show only to people who match your selections, and you can still adjust bids for them."

The distinction is mechanical but consequential. Under Bid only, a LinkedIn attribute works as a bid modifier: the ad stays eligible for every impression the campaign would otherwise win, and Microsoft raises or lowers the bid when the person on the other side matches the selected company, industry or job function. Under Target and bid, the attribute becomes a filter. People who do not match are removed from the eligible audience, and the bid adjustment, if one is set, still applies to those who remain.

Microsoft describes the setup in five steps. Advertisers select Campaigns from the navigation menu, open the Audience campaign and ad group, select Demographics and then Company, Industry or Job function, add their targets, set a default bid adjustment if they want one, and finally choose Bid only or Target and bid under a field called Targeting setting before saving. PPC News Feed summarised the same path as Campaigns, Audience campaign and ad group, Demographics, Company, Industry or Job function, Add, and Targeting setting.

The placement of the control is telling. LinkedIn profile targeting is set in the Demographics tab of a campaign or ad group, not attached as an audience list. The help page's navigation nonetheless lists it among 14 entries under "Types of audiences," between remarketing lists based on UET parameters and similar audiences. Others on that list include in-market audiences, Customer Match, predictive targeting, impression-based remarketing, custom segments and audience generation with Copilot. LinkedIn profile targeting is the only entry built on what people declare about their employer and occupation.

Exclusions and edits

A separate nine-step procedure covers editing. From the Demographics tab, advertisers pick Company, Industry or Job function, open the Campaign tab, select the targets to change and choose Edit. Four actions are offered: Enable, Exclude, Delete or Change bid adjustment. The Exclude option, offered in a procedure Microsoft says applies to most campaign types, already lets advertisers keep ads away from a named company, industry or job function. What Target and bid adds is the reverse: a way to keep ads away from everyone outside the chosen group.

What changed, and when

PPC News Feed framed the update as a break with the past. "This change marks a significant shift from previous settings where LinkedIn targeting was only used for bidding adjustments, without the ability to narrow the audience," the outlet wrote. It credited Hana Kobzová with spotting the change.

Microsoft's own earlier documentation supports that reading. A version of the same help article on Microsoft Learn, marked as last updated on July 27, 2026, described LinkedIn profile targeting as bid only rather than target and bid, and stated that it would not narrow an ad's audience. That version already listed Audience campaigns among the supported campaign types, so the restriction applied to them too. In April 2025, a Microsoft Advertising support specialist answering a question on Microsoft's Q&A forum told an advertiser that the platform did not support target and bid for LinkedIn profile targeting. That exchange concerned standard search ads.

The change therefore landed at some point between late July and October 27. Neither the help page nor PPC News Feed's report gives a date. Microsoft's monthly product post for October, published on October 28, did not mention LinkedIn at all; its targeting news concerned Performance Max, where age and gender targeting became generally available and device targeting was rolling out to all advertisers. PPC News Feed links only to the help page, and the help page does not say whether the setting is available to every account or in every market where LinkedIn profile targeting runs. The page links to a separate list of countries where the feature is available but does not reproduce it.

What an Audience campaign buys

Audience campaigns run on the Microsoft Audience Network, which Microsoft built around native advertising. When the network launched in May 2018, Bing Ads placed native ads across MSN, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Edge and partner sites. Display formats followed. In October 2024, Microsoft listed LinkedIn profile targeting among the audience options for its display ads, alongside predictive targeting and impression-based remarketing, with manual CPM, Enhanced CPC and Maximize conversions with target CPA as bidding options.

The difference between the two modes matters more on these placements than in search. A search ad is triggered by a query, so the keyword already defines who might see it, and a LinkedIn bid adjustment refines an auction that is narrow to begin with. An Audience campaign has no query. Without a delivery restriction, LinkedIn attributes could only tilt the auction inside whatever wider audience the campaign was built on, and the ads continued to serve to people with no professional match at all. Target and bid closes that gap for the native and display inventory, and only there.

That is why Microsoft's choice to keep search, Shopping and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns on bid only matters. For advertisers whose LinkedIn targeting sits on keyword campaigns, nothing has changed.

Three attributes, with gaps

Microsoft's targeting rests on three attributes. Company, with examples including Microsoft, Alibaba.com and KLM Royal Dutch Air Lines. Industry, with finance, broadcast media and law enforcement given as examples. And job function, such as sales, accounting or purchasing.

The coverage is incomplete, and Microsoft says so. "Not all possible companies, industries, and job functions are available for targeting," the help page states, adding that the lists are being expanded. Company targeting also requires manual work: advertisers have to add company lists inside the platform, and "at this time, importing lists from external files or other platforms is not supported," according to Microsoft. The July version of the Learn documentation set a ceiling of 1,000 companies in a single ad group or campaign.

Those limits bear directly on account-based marketing programmes, which work from named lists of target companies. Under Bid only, a company missing from Microsoft's lists simply receives no bid uplift; the ad can still reach its staff. Under Target and bid, a company that cannot be matched falls outside the campaign's reach altogether. The stricter setting makes the completeness of Microsoft's lists a direct constraint on delivery.

Eight years of bid-only

LinkedIn data has sat inside Microsoft's ad platform for most of the period since Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, and it has always worked the same way. In October 2018, LinkedIn profile targeting arrived on Bing search ads as a beta for specific clients, available only in the US, covering company, job function and industry, and limited to bid-only targeting, with exclusions promised for later. Exclusions have since arrived, as the Exclude action in the current edit procedure shows.

In September 2020, Microsoft Advertising extended LinkedIn profile targeting to both search and audience campaigns in markets including the US, the UK, Australia, France and Germany, with data covering more than 100 industries and 80,000 companies. Coverage at the time described the controls in terms of bid modifiers for specific industries and job functions.

The newest campaign type on Microsoft's list is Performance Max. Microsoft rolled out Performance Max campaigns globally in March 2024, with optional audience signals meant to aid optimization. The current help page lists Performance Max among the five campaign types that support LinkedIn profile targeting, but with a caveat: "Not everyone can use LinkedIn targeting for Performance Max campaigns yet." For Performance Max, editing is handled through audience signals rather than the Demographics tab, and the help page's Bid only versus Target and bid section does not mention the campaign type at all. Whether Performance Max will ever get a restrictive mode is not addressed.

The exclusivity claim

Microsoft's help page opens with a strong statement. "Microsoft Advertising is the only advertising platform (other than LinkedIn) that allows you to target potential customers based on their LinkedIn profile information," it says.

The statement is framed around campaign targeting inside Microsoft Advertising. It does not capture how the data is sold in 2026. Microsoft shut its own demand-side platform, Microsoft Invest, on February 28, 2026, after announcing the closure in May 2025. Since then, LinkedIn professional data has been offered to programmatic buyers through Microsoft Monetize, Microsoft's supply-side business, inside other companies' buying tools. In May, Amazon Ads and LinkedIn brought job title, industry and seniority data to Microsoft Monetize streaming inventory on Amazon DSP for US advertisers. A week later, on May 14, Microsoft extended LinkedIn-fused connected TV audiences to Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk and Microsoft Advertising, with a minimum spend of $50,000 over 30 days and a minimum audience of one million members on the external routes. On October 22, five days before PPC News Feed's report, LinkedIn's job title targeting reached Google's Display & Video 360 for US connected TV buys.

In each of those cases the inventory runs through Microsoft Monetize, so Microsoft remains part of the transaction. The buying interface, however, belongs to someone else. LinkedIn attributes are now available to buyers who never log into Microsoft Advertising.

The connected TV question

The help page lists five campaign types: Search, Dynamic Search Ads, Microsoft Shopping, Audience and Performance Max. Connected TV is not among them.

That matters because of how the May expansion was first described. PPC Land's May 14 report said Microsoft Advertising had extended LinkedIn profile targeting into connected TV campaigns. PPC News Feed, which reported the same expansion on May 15, later updated its article to say Microsoft had clarified that LinkedIn profile targeting was not available for Microsoft CTV campaigns, and that the original interpretation came from confusion between LinkedIn CTV Ads and Microsoft Monetize. The current help page is consistent with that clarification. LinkedIn audiences can be bought for streaming television through the Microsoft Monetize deal routes; LinkedIn profile targeting, as a setting inside a Microsoft Advertising CTV campaign, does not appear in Microsoft's documentation.

Why it matters for B2B advertisers

Microsoft's help page names only one other place where advertisers can target this profile data directly: LinkedIn itself. Microsoft's version of the offer has been LinkedIn attributes layered onto search and native inventory. On native placements, bid only made that layer imprecise, because spend continued to flow to people outside the target group.

Target and bid changes the trade-off rather than removing it. A campaign restricted to matched profiles reaches fewer people, and its volume is capped by how many of the target audience Microsoft can identify through LinkedIn data and by which companies, industries and job functions appear on Microsoft's lists. A bid-only campaign reaches more people at lower precision. Microsoft has not published match rates, minimum audience sizes or any performance data for either mode, so the size of that trade-off is unknown.

The timing also coincides with a change in how Microsoft reports the two businesses. In its results for the quarter to September 30, published on October 28, Microsoft folded LinkedIn Marketing Solutions into a single Search and advertising revenue line with Bing, Microsoft Edge and MSN. That line grew 10% to $6.55bn, and Microsoft no longer publishes a growth rate for search advertising on its own. LinkedIn's advertising revenue and Bing's are now one number in Microsoft's accounts.

What the documentation leaves open

Several questions remain unanswered by the help page:

  • the date the Target and bid option became available, and whether it has reached every account;
  • the markets in which it works, since the help page points to a separate country list;
  • any minimum audience size for a Target and bid campaign, a threshold that applies on the Microsoft Monetize connected TV routes;
  • whether search, Shopping or Dynamic Search Ads campaigns will ever get a restrictive mode;
  • whether the 1,000-company ceiling in the July documentation still applies;
  • when Performance Max access to LinkedIn targeting will reach all advertisers, which the help page says is coming "soon" without a date.

The documentation now describes how the setting works, but not when it arrived or how widely it is available.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Microsoft Advertising, for advertisers using LinkedIn profile targeting by company, industry or job function. The change was reported by PPC News Feed, which credited Hana Kobzová with spotting it.

What: Audience campaigns can now use a Target and bid setting, which shows ads only to people whose LinkedIn profiles match the selected attributes while still allowing bid adjustments. Search, Dynamic Search Ads and Microsoft Shopping campaigns remain bid only, meaning ads can show to everyone and the bid adjustment applies only to matching users. Performance Max access to LinkedIn targeting is still incomplete.

When: Reported on October 27, 2026. Microsoft's documentation still described the feature as bid only in a version last updated on July 27, 2026; neither the current help page nor PPC News Feed's report dates the change.

Where: In the Demographics tab of Microsoft Advertising, under a Targeting setting field, for Audience campaigns running on the Microsoft Audience Network's native and display placements across MSN, Outlook, Edge and partner sites.

Why: Under bid only, LinkedIn data could tilt bids but not prevent ads from reaching people outside the target group, a limitation most visible on native and display placements that have no search query to narrow them. The new setting lets B2B advertisers trade reach for precision on that inventory, within the limits of Microsoft's incomplete company, industry and job function lists.