LinkedIn Matched Audiences: How to Upload Contact and Company Lists

The short answer

You have a list of leads, customers or target accounts, and you want your LinkedIn ads to reach exactly those people. LinkedIn Matched Audiences is the feature for that. You upload a contact list or a company list, LinkedIn matches the rows to member accounts, and the result becomes an audience you can target or exclude in an ad set.

The upload itself takes a minute. What goes wrong is everything around it: a header someone renamed, a list that is too short, an audience that sits at “< 300 members” and never runs, or a list that quietly expires. This guide covers each step in the order you will meet it.

What LinkedIn Matched Audiences are

LinkedIn’s Get started with Matched Audiences page sorts these audiences by where the data comes from:

• Uploaded lists. A contact list (people) or a company list (organizations). This guide is about these two.
• Retargeting. People who visited your website (tracked by the LinkedIn Insight Tag, a small piece of LinkedIn code on your site), watched your video ads or engaged with your Company Page, among other actions.
• Third-party data. Lists sent in by a marketing partner connected to your ad account.

Two changes are worth knowing. LinkedIn says its lookalike audiences have been discontinued: you can’t create new ones, and existing ones no longer update. The same page also says Matched Audience sizes may be limited in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. If most of your buyers are in Europe, expect smaller audiences than the same list would give elsewhere.

There is also a ceiling: an account can hold up to 1,000 audience segments across Matched Audiences and predictive audiences.

Contact list or company list?

Both use the same upload screen, but they do different jobs.

A contact list finds specific people. Use it to reach leads from your CRM, win back past customers, or exclude current customers from ads meant for new prospects.

A company list finds the employees of specific organizations. This is the base of account-based marketing (ABM): you name your target accounts, and LinkedIn shows your ads to people who work there. You then narrow it with job function or seniority, so you reach the buying team instead of everyone from reception to the warehouse.

The numbers come from LinkedIn’s contact list and company list help pages.

A quick way to decide: if your sales team talks about “accounts,” start with a company list. If they talk about “leads” or “contacts,” start with a contact list. Many B2B advertisers run both, for example a company list to reach new people at target accounts and a contact list to exclude the people already in a deal.

How to build the contact list file

Start from LinkedIn’s own CSV template. You can download it from the upload help page or inside Campaign Manager after you choose Contact list as the list type. It has seven columns: email, firstname, lastname, jobtitle, employeecompany, country and googleaid.

The headers are where most uploads fail. LinkedIn says that changing or removing template headers will cause an error when you upload. So leave an empty column in place instead of deleting it, and don’t rename firstname to “First Name” to make it look tidier.

What each row needs. LinkedIn needs at least one way to find the person: an email address, a first and last name, or a Google AID (the advertising ID of an Android phone). When you match on names, adding the company name makes the match more accurate. A row with only a first name can’t be matched.

Emails. LinkedIn recommends lists with at least 10,000 personal or professional email addresses. That is a recommendation, not an upload rule. It exists because only part of any list matches a member, and you need 300 matches to run.

Hashing. Hashing turns an email into a fixed code (SHA-256) so the raw address isn’t stored. You don’t have to do it for a Campaign Manager upload: LinkedIn says unhashed emails are hashed locally in your browser before they are saved. If your company insists on hashing first, the email column is the only one that may hold hashed values. LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences API guide says to lowercase each address and remove all spaces before hashing, so your results match what LinkedIn gets. LinkedIn’s troubleshooting page also warns about hidden characters in hashed lists.

Encoding and size. Save the file as a CSV with UTF-8 encoding (in Excel, choose “CSV UTF-8”). UTF-8 is the text format that keeps names like Zoë or Müller intact. The file needs at least 300 rows, and one list holds at most 20 MB or 300,000 records.

Filling the template by hand from a CRM export is slow and easy to get wrong. The contact list template formatter for LinkedIn maps your columns to the seven headers, cleans the emails, turns country names into two-letter codes and saves a UTF-8 file, all in your browser.

How to build the company list file

The company template has ten columns: companyname, companywebsite, companyemaildomain, linkedincompanypageurl, stocksymbol, industry, city, state, companycountry and zipcode. The header rule is the same: keep all ten, spelled exactly as in the template.

Each row needs at least one of the first five: name, website, email domain, Company Page URL or stock symbol. The more you fill in, the better the match. LinkedIn’s best practices page asks for the company name and the Company Page URL, and its troubleshooting page calls the Page URL the most efficient way to match.

Three habits make a company list match better:

1. Use readable Page URLs. LinkedIn wants the URL that ends in the company name, such as linkedin.com/company/northwind-traders/, not one that ends in a number ID.
2. Write websites as plain domains. northwind.example is cleaner than https://www.northwind.example/about?utm_source=crm. Watch for Facebook pages or Gmail addresses typed into the website field, because they point to the wrong company.
3. Add location for common names. “Summit Group” could be dozens of firms. City, state, country and ZIP code help LinkedIn pick the right one.

LinkedIn recommends 1,000 or more companies, organizations or schools for company targeting. The upload limits match the contact list: at least 300 rows, at most 20 MB or 300,000 companies.

If your account list lives in a CRM, the company list upload template tool for LinkedIn turns it into the ten-column file. It cuts websites down to domains, tidies Page URLs and merges duplicate companies. It can also build the list from a contact export by reading the email domains.

How to upload a list in Campaign Manager

The steps are the same for both list types (Upload company and contact targeting lists):

1. Open your ad account in Campaign Manager.
2. Click Plan in the left menu, then Audiences.
3. Click Create audience and choose Matched Audience.
4. Select Company / Contact, then click Next.
5. Name the audience, pick the List type, and click Select list to choose your CSV.
6. Click Agree & Upload.

Give the audience a name you will still understand in six months: what is in it and when you exported it, such as “Contacts – open deals – 2026-10”. Each upload creates its own audience, so a second file becomes a second audience.

While it builds. LinkedIn says generating the audience can take up to 48 hours, and on rare occasions longer. The status shows Building in the meantime. You don’t have to wait to set up the campaign. LinkedIn lets you add a building audience to an ad set, and the ad set starts delivering on its own once the audience reaches 300 member accounts (best practices). If the list is still building after 72 hours, LinkedIn’s troubleshooting page suggests uploading it again as a new audience.

If it fails. A Failed status means LinkedIn found a problem with the file or with the segment a partner sent (status definitions). For an uploaded file, LinkedIn’s troubleshooting page suggests three checks: the headers are correct, they contain no special characters, and the file was saved as CSV.

Why your LinkedIn audience is too small

The number that matters is 300. An audience must match at least 300 member accounts before an ad set can use it. Below that, the list name turns gray and shows “< 300 members” in the Last audience count column (LinkedIn Help).

Notice what is counted: member accounts, not rows. A company list of 400 small firms can match most of the companies and still come out under 300 members, because each firm has only a handful of staff on LinkedIn. A contact list of 2,000 emails may match only part of them. LinkedIn doesn’t publish an expected match rate, so treat your first upload as the test.

Location can push you under the line. Location is a required targeting setting in every ad set, so a list that matches 350 members worldwide can fall below 300 once you pick one country. Look at the audience size after you set the location, not before.

Ways to get over 300:

• Add more rows. A longer list gives LinkedIn more chances to find members.
• Add more match fields. Name plus company for contacts without an email, and Page URL plus website for companies.
• Combine segments. LinkedIn lets you select several audience segments in one ad set when a single one is under 300, such as two contact lists from different sources.
• Switch list type. In our experience, if you only have a few hundred names at your target firms, a company list of those firms usually reaches more people.

The minimum is not the target. 300 lets an ad set start. LinkedIn’s audience size guidance suggests a minimum of 50,000 to drive results, and 300,000 for Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging. A tightly matched list rarely reaches that on its own, and for retargeting or ABM that can be fine. Just expect fewer impressions, and plan your budget and results around a small audience.

Keep your lists fresh

An uploaded list is a snapshot. New leads don’t appear in it, and closed deals don’t leave it. LinkedIn also tidies away lists nobody uses (status definitions):

• Archived: the audience hasn’t been used in an ad set or changed for 30 days. You can reactivate it.
• Expired: the audience hasn’t been edited or used in an active or draft ad set for 90 days. The data is no longer available, and the list must be uploaded again.

To update a list, go to Plan › Audiences, open the More menu next to the audience and choose Edit. LinkedIn’s edit and delete page says you change a company or contact list by uploading it again with your updates. There is no option to add or remove single rows, so keep a master file. The status shows Updating while the new version processes.

If you refresh lists often, a data integration may save time. LinkedIn’s marketing partner page explains how to find a partner in its directory; you then set up the connection with that partner directly. LinkedIn says a partner list can take up to a week to arrive, with an average of 48 hours or less. Developers can also send lists through the Matched Audiences API. There, emails must be SHA-256 hashed before upload, because the Campaign Manager screen isn’t doing it for you.

A simple monthly routine works for most small teams:

• Export fresh contacts and target accounts from your CRM.
• Run both files through the formatters so headers and encoding are right every time.
• Update the existing audiences through Edit, so you don’t have to swap audiences inside your ad sets.
• Check that every audience sits in an active or draft ad set, so nothing reaches the 90-day expiry.

The same CRM export can feed your other ad accounts too. For Google, read why a Customer Match list comes out small. For Meta, see how to format a customer list for Facebook Ads.