Microsoft Ads B2B Targeting Tutorial: LinkedIn Company, Industry, and Job Function

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If you’re a B2B advertiser looking for highly targeted ads beyond Google, you need to take a serious look at Microsoft Ads. Because of its connection to LinkedIn, Microsoft Ads offers unique targeting capabilities that Google simply does not have — the ability to target by specific job titles, companies, and industries.

Google will still deliver the majority of your leads. I’m not saying otherwise. But we’re finding that Microsoft’s LinkedIn-powered targeting is a genuinely unique way to go after specific companies and individuals within your ideal customer profile. It’s an underutilized source of leads that most B2B advertisers are ignoring.

Setting Up LinkedIn Targeting in Microsoft Ads

Within your Microsoft Ads account, start by building out an audience campaign. Once you’ve created the campaign and built your ads, navigate to Demographics. From there, you’ll see three tabs: Company, Industry, and Job Function.

You can use any of these individually or layer them together for more precise targeting.

Targeting by Job Function

Select your ad group, and you’ll see a wide range of job function options to choose from. Pick the job functions that align with your ICP, then set your bid adjustment (increase or decrease by percentage).

The key decision here is between two targeting modes:

• Bid Only — equivalent to Google’s “observation” setting. Your ads can still show to others, but you adjust bids for the selected audience.
• Target and Bid — limits your ad reach exclusively to the selected audiences. If you really want to go after a specific audience, this is the setting to use.

Targeting by Industry

The same process applies for industry targeting. Select your ad group, choose from the available industries, and set your bid strategy.

One thing to note: Microsoft doesn’t have every industry that LinkedIn’s own ad platform offers. You won’t find all the granular industry categories you’d see in LinkedIn Ads directly. But it still provides solid high-level targeting for most B2B use cases.

Targeting by Company

This is where it gets really powerful. If you have a list of specific companies you want to go after, you can search for them by name and add them directly.

A few things we’ve learned about company targeting:

• Enterprise companies (1,000+ employees) — you’ll find virtually all of them
• Mid-size companies (500–1,000 employees) — most are available
• Smaller companies (under 500 employees) — availability is less consistent. We’ve found some companies with 50–100 employees, but they appear less frequently

Keep this in mind when planning ABM-style campaigns — the larger the target company, the more reliable the targeting.

Combining Microsoft Ads with Intent Data

Here’s a strategy we’ve had real success with. We use a software called The Genius that leverages intent-based marketing to identify companies actively researching your services. For example, if you’re an SEO agency, The Genius will deliver a weekly list of companies that have recently been researching and evaluating SEO agencies.

What we do with our clients is take that list of intent-identified companies, load them directly into Microsoft Ads company targeting, and run highly targeted ads to those specific businesses. When someone is already in-market and you put a relevant ad in front of them on a platform they use daily (Outlook, MSN, Bing), the conversion potential is significantly higher.

Key Takeaways

• Microsoft Ads offers LinkedIn-powered targeting that Google cannot match — job function, industry, and company name
• Use “Target and Bid” when you want to restrict reach to your exact ICP
• Company targeting works best for mid-to-enterprise businesses — smaller companies (under 500 employees) are less consistently available
• Layer targeting dimensions (company + job function + industry) for precision
• Pair with intent data tools to target companies already in-market for your services
• Don’t expect LinkedIn-level granularity — but what’s available is more than enough for most B2B campaigns

Microsoft Ads’ LinkedIn integration remains one of the most underutilized tools in B2B advertising. If you’re only running Google Ads, you’re leaving a genuinely unique targeting channel on the table.