What is this?
Exclude Company is an Opteo Improvement for LinkedIn Ads. When a specific company is consistently generating poor results compared to your campaign group average, Opteo recommends excluding it — stopping your ads from showing to people at that company and redirecting your budget to better-performing audiences.
Why exclude companies?
LinkedIn lets you target people by the company they work for, making it one of the most precise targeting options available for B2B advertisers. But when you're targeting by industry, job title, or other broad criteria, individual companies inevitably end up in your audience that aren't a good fit for your product.
This can happen for a range of reasons — a company might be too small, operate in a niche you don't serve, or simply never convert despite receiving consistent spend. Without digging into company-level segment data across multiple campaigns, these budget drains are easy to miss.
Opteo does this analysis automatically, surfacing the specific companies worth excluding so you can act on them in one click.
How does this Improvement work?
Opteo analyses company performance across your LinkedIn campaigns using up to 365 days of data — the longest lookback window we use across any platform, which reflects LinkedIn's lower traffic volumes compared to search platforms.
We flag a company for exclusion when:
Its CPA is more than 2x higher than your campaign group average
Or its ROAS is less than half your campaign group average
It has enough impressions for the data to be statistically reliable (minimum 30, scaling higher for accounts with more conversions — LinkedIn campaigns require a higher impressions threshold than other platforms before Opteo will act)
When those conditions are met, Opteo shows you the performance data for that company alongside your campaign group average, and lets you exclude it with a single click. The exclusion is applied at the campaign level via the LinkedIn Ads API.
If a company is still a target account — for example, if you're running an ABM campaign and want to maintain visibility even without conversions — you can dismiss the Improvement.
Technical notes
Why this recommendation appeared:
Company CPA is more than 2x your campaign group average, or ROAS is less than half your campaign group average
The company has sufficient impressions to meet LinkedIn's higher data confidence threshold
The campaign is active and the company segment is enabled
Why you might not see this recommendation:
All companies in your campaign perform within acceptable ranges
Insufficient impressions data — LinkedIn campaigns often need more data than other platforms before Opteo can make a confident recommendation
Only one company is active in the campaign (Opteo won't recommend excluding your only audience segment)
How the analysis works:
Looks back up to 365 days of LinkedIn campaign data
Compares company performance against the campaign group average (cost, conversions, and conversion value)
Applies a higher minimum impressions bar for LinkedIn than for Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, reflecting LinkedIn's lower traffic volumes
Exclusions are applied at campaign level