LinkedIn job title targeting: narrow titles, or broad titles with tight company filters?

Everyone gets tempted to over-specify job titles on LinkedIn. Say you sell payroll software and target only "Finance Manager": the people who actually sign off are often a CFO or an ops director, and they never show up in that filter. Narrow titles also shrink the audience so much that the ad sets struggle to learn, and cost per lead climbs for reasons that are hard to spot in the dashboard.

I'd go broader on title and tighter on company size and industry, then let the lead form questions do the filtering. Seniority filters can help, but on a small budget I'd be careful about stacking them. The test that matters is whether the broader version produces leads sales actually closes, not just cheaper form fills. Has anyone seen the opposite on a niche product?

Agreed, the lead form can't fix who sees the ad. Say you sell dental practice software and a broad title brings in office managers with no budget. The form questions only screen them out after you've already paid for the click. If the buyer is a specific role, narrowing the title targeting can help.

LinkedIn titles are free text, so the same practice owner can show up as "Owner," "Principal Dentist," or "DDS, Practice Owner," and an exact title list will miss a lot of them. Seniority and job function filters tend to catch those people better, so I'd test those before narrowing down to a single role.

Function and seniority targeting runs off LinkedIn's mapped profile fields, so it misses people too when a title is odd, like "Owner / DDS." The better check is to compare the job title answer on the lead form against each targeting segment. That shows who actually got through, not who the filter says it reaches.