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How to Target Companies Running Ads on LinkedIn

Targeting a company running ads on LinkedIn is ideal to boost your sales efforts and drive revenue growth. Let’s look at the step-by-step method in this article‍

Funmito Obafemi
Funmito Obafemi
MAR 17 2026
How to Target Companies Running Ads on LinkedIn

Table of content

What are LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads: How to Automatically Target Companies with Clay and Serper
Step 1: Set up Serper
Step 2: Integrate with Clay
Step 3: Create Search Term Formulas using Clay
Step 4: Create a Yes or No Formula
Build More Workflows with ColdIQ’s Accelerator Program
FAQs
What are LinkedIn Ads?
What are the Best Tools for Targeting Companies Running Ads on LinkedIn?

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If you have to manually target hundreds of companies running ads on LinkedIn, you’d have to invest a significant amount of time to achieve this task. What if there is a way to know this without visiting each company’s page?

In this article, you will learn how to automatically target companies running LinkedIn ads. Let’s get started.

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What are LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn ads are paid content that helps to promote your products or services on LinkedIn. Many companies create and run paid campaigns to target and reach their ideal audience.

With many influential decision-makers on the platform, LinkedIn ads remain one of the top marketing tools to reach these people and scale your business growth. Some common examples of LinkedIn ads you should look for include sponsored content, sponsored messaging, lead gen forms, dynamic ads, and more.

As a salesperson, targeting companies running these ads is ideal to boost your sales efforts and drive revenue growth. But how do you automatically know when these companies are running ads? Let’s find out.

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LinkedIn Ads: How to Automatically Target Companies with Clay and Serper

When a company runs ads, they’re looking to solve a problem, whether it’s to boost brand awareness, hire for a new role, or increase sales. As a salesperson, these ads may be sales triggers that you can leverage to your advantage.

Although it’s common to target these companies manually, you can also target them automatically. To do this, you need two tools — Clay and Serper.

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Recommended: Build more workflows with the ColdIQ Accelerator Program

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Step 1: Set up Serper

The first thing to do is to visit serper.dev and create an account there. Serper is the world’s fastest Google Search scraper API that enhances your search processes and helps you get real-time results.

It’s got an intuitive interface that makes it easy to use, even if you’re not tech-savvy. Additionally, its documentation result is clear and concise, allowing users to digest information easily. With this Search API, you can get quick responses that average between 1-2 seconds.

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To get started with this tool, navigate to “Playground” > “Webpage.” Then, click “Code.” This process allows you to get all the information you need to integrate with Clay.

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Step 2: Integrate with Clay

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Clay is a sales intelligence and data enrichment platform designed to scale your prospecting and outreach efforts. With this tool, you can generate your lead lists in a few seconds, enrich the data with their valid contact information, scrape websites with its AI agent, Claygent, and more.

As mentioned earlier, you must first get all the necessary information from Serper to target companies running LinkedIn ads. Once you’ve got that, navigate to “Add Enrichment” in the top right corner of your screen. Then, select “Tools” > “HTTP API.”

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Your screen should appear like the picture below on the right side. Input the relevant details obtained from Serper including the key and value pair, URL, and other information.

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Step 3: Create Search Term Formulas using Clay

Clay’s AI formula generator can help you create the search term formulas for the LinkedIn Ads Library. These formulas help to customize a link. If you haven’t created one, here are the formulas to use.

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  • The formula for the search name column: Take the input from the [Company Name Column] and turn all capital letters into lowercase. If the company has a space, replace each space with “+.” This will format the companies’ names into search terms.
  • Custom Link Formula: Convert the search terms into custom links. You should end up with a link like this — https://www.linkedin.com/ad-library/search?accountOwner=[Search Name Column]

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Once you have the formulas, edit the body of the HTTP API enrichment to incorporate the custom link column. This column is placed after the “url.”

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Then, add Serper results to a new column to enable the formulas to run the ads more easily.

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Recommended: Build More Workflow with ColdIQ Accelerator Program

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Step 4: Create a Yes or No Formula

Next, create a yes or no formula to filter the list and determine whether the output is positive or negative. In other words, if Serper finds a company’s ads, it shows the output in the Serper result column.

Then, the final formula translates this result to “Yes” if they’re running the ads or “No” if they’re not. You can use the result for your needs.

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Build More Workflows with ColdIQ’s Accelerator Program

If you need to build more workflows that simplify your processes and ensure you get the best result, you need to source the knowledge from top sales experts.

Thanks to the ColdIQ accelerator program, you can learn about everything you need to know about AI, cold outreach, and sales automation. Our sales experts can equip you with the necessary skills to scale your business growth. Get in touch with us today to get started.

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FAQs

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What are LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn ads are paid content that helps to promote your products or services on LinkedIn. Salespeople can leverage these ads to solve a company’s problem while increasing their revenue.

What are the Best Tools for Targeting Companies Running Ads on LinkedIn?

The best tools to target companies running ads on LinkedIn are Serper and Clay. These tools provide a simple “yes” or “no” output that prevents you from manually visiting the company’s page on LinkedIn.

Funmito Obafemi
Funmito Obafemi

Funmito Obafemi is a Content Writer at ColdIQ, specializing in AI-driven B2B sales and marketing. Her work boosted organic traffic by 389% and clicks by 69% in just one year. She turns complex ideas into clear, engaging content that drives results.

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FAQ

Look for frequent updates in their LinkedIn ad library and a consistent presence of promoted posts. These suggest ongoing advertising efforts. Additionally, patterns in ad content reveal marketing strategies and target audiences.

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