New Attribution Tool: Revenue Attribution Report (RAR) ft Liz Gentile & Joanne Lee from LinkedIn Ads

All right, everyone. Well, welcome to the next episode of LinkedIn Ads Radio. Today we're going to be talking about the Revenue Attribution Report, which is a relatively new tool from LinkedIn that we're very excited for and have been using a lot. So today I want to welcome to the podcast Liz and Joe. Liz and Jo, can you start by sharing a little bit about yourself and your roles at LinkedIn?

Yeah. Awesome. Hi, everyone. My name is Joanne. I sit here on our product marketing team at LinkedIn. I really see across our measurement and experimentation product suite.

Awesome. And I work really closely with Joanne. I lead our product at LinkedIn for our down funnel and ABM measurement products.

Awesome. Well, it's great to have you guys here today. As we were talking beforehand, Liz, I remember meeting you at B2 believe in New York City there. And then, Joanne, did you say you were at B2 believe or you weren't at B2 believe this year?

No, I wasn't. I'm here in Los Angeles, so I wasn't able to make it at B2 believe.

Right. But, Liz, question for you is, where were you during the New York City earthquake the next day?

Oh, that's a good question. I don't even. I think I was in the office, actually, which is funny because we work in the Empire State Building, and people were, like, tweeting out or I guess putting out X tweets, whatever we call it these days, around, like, if you're in the Empire State Building and you hear or you feel things kind of going back and forth. So that was a funny place to be when that. When that happened. What about yourself?

I was in the hotel and had no idea, like, it was a big hotel. Didn't really. You know, I just thought somebody was dragging something heavy across, like a floor upstairs and. But I do remember stopping and being like, what if that was an earthquake? And then just kind of went about my day. And like, an hour later, the Apple notification gets sent out, like, earthquake in New York City. And I was like, oh, guess that was an earthquake.

Yeah, that one took us New Yorkers by surprise. Not. Not often we get those.

Yes. Usually those are on the West Coast. So it was. It was a surprise. But anyways, today we're here to talk about attribution and all that good stuff. So let's first by. Let's first by. Start by setting the stage and talking a little bit about, like, what are the problems or challenges in attribution and B2B marketing that led LinkedIn to creating this tool?

Yeah, I could take this one. So today we've heard that marketers really have this increased accountability to drive business outcomes, particularly in today's day and age where every single dollar counts more than ever. In fact, LinkedIn actually did a study in our 20 for B2B benchmark report and we actually found that 1 in 3 CMOs say they have a more direct role and responsibility in actually driving revenue and growth for their business. And they're actually expected to demonstrate how their marketing is really impacting the bottom line. But what we're hearing from marketers commonly is that connecting their marketing impact to sales is a really big pain point. And why this is is really because the B2B sales cycle is super long. On average, we found that it can be around 16. And there's multiple touch points in this B2B buying journey and typically involves more than one person, usually one or even multiple buying committees. But despite these longer sales cycles, what we're hearing from marketers is that they're not really able to measure beyond those six months. And historically they're very reliant on last touch attribution due to the limited tools that they have available. So as a result, they have a very limited view into the the customer journey. And there's this really big disconnect between the outcomes that marketers want to drive and what's actually being measured on their end.

Yes, that is a lot of lot of stuff going on there in the B2B sales and marketing process. Liz, anything to add?

I think Joanne covered it well. It's a really thorny topic. There's a lot of elements that go into the complexity of the user journey, specifically in a B2B context. So we know it's top of mind for those marketers to really be able to justify those business outcomes, but it's incredibly difficult to do so today.

And from my side as well, I'll say attribution is always one of the biggest question marks out there, I think. I put a poll on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago and attribution was like the number one thing. And I do that about once a quarter of like what's your biggest challenges? And attribution is always like one or two on that list for a lot of the things that you mentioned, Joanne, things that we see on our end is as we set up like our own conversion tracking, you know, the max time window when you're setting up a conversion event is like 90 days. So that 16 month window is a lot longer than 90 days. So you kind of lose a lot of tracking there. Cookies expire and like all that stuff out there and then like other things in B2B that's maybe a little bit different than like B2C is what we see often is like people might be like working on a work computer and then they're on like their own personal phone. So kind of like switching a lot of devices throughout their day and then having like multiple stakeholders in the process. Maybe it's not that first person who originally saw an ad or clicked on an ad who then took a meeting and then closed a deal those 16 months later. And that's very hard to to track when it jumps from one person to another in part of the process there. So just makes a lot, lot more a lot harder to track. So we are very grateful for some of these new tools that LinkedIn has been releasing. So let's, let's dive into the, the new RAW report. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about that raw report and then how it's benefiting businesses out there?

Yeah, I can take this one. So you and Joanne did a great job of kind of painting the broader context for the need of the demand and urgency to demonstrate this value. And it's never been greater for marketers. However, as you spoke to, it's really difficult to actually measure those down funnel metrics. So from a tooling perspective, kind of the two key issues that we saw were one, majority of the tools that are available today are very B2C centric. And two, marketing and sales often use different tech stacks that are hard to plug into one another. So double clicking a little bit into the B2C and kind of what challenges we saw there. When looking at the landscape and kind of what tools are available to marketers today, we see that measurement often centers around that top or mid funnel outcomes using more of what we call like those frontline metrics. So think of things like the CPC or the ctr. And Anthony, as you mentioned, those measurement solutions also are often grounded in shorter look back windows, things like lag last week or last month. Second part to this B2C context is we know that marketing is more complex on a B2B side so it's harder report due to needing to the connection to business outcomes like revenue pipeline driven and those longer sales cycles. So that kind of covers some of those key pain points around the B2C. And then second thinking about marketing and sales alignment here, what we really heard is like actually getting that data together, take away even the attribution of it is really difficult to do. Today and sometimes even we can see that marketing and sales have different tech stacks or at times different KPIs as well. So with those two key things in mind from a tooling perspective, what revenue Attribution looks to do is address those issues kind of head on by taking a more B2B centric approach to measuring marketers influence on those real business outcomes. Keeping in mind that we want to do this in a way that's simple to plug into the existing sales tech stacks where those outcome datas already live. So what Revenue Attribution report does then is enables marketers to understand the impact of their investments on B2B outcomes by generating and connecting their ad efforts on LinkedIn directly to that CRM data. So kind of just putting a bow on this to your original question, how does this benefit businesses? This really benefits those types of marketers that want to go beyond the last click to look and measure the impact of their marketing effectiveness on the down funnel outcomes, looking at metrics like pipeline and revenue influenced and then ultimately helping to optimize their efforts towards inflight efforts that target those same type of outcomes.

Yeah, and the two things you mentioned there that I appreciate the most of, it is like, number one is just the simplicity to set it up. It's very, very quick to set up. You connect your, your system in just a couple of clicks and then pulls in the data. And then number two is it just, you're starting with the LinkedIn, you know, the LinkedIn impressions and clicks that you're getting and you're connecting it all the way to sales and you're saying okay, what, you know, what touched each other here and making those connections, which is very hard to do otherwise because we try to, we try to set up a lot of conversion events for okay, somebody made to the website, somebody submitted a form, maybe they became an MQL in the sales process. But it's great to be able to go just end to end and say, okay, these are the impressions we delivered, this is the cells that closed. And just the simplicity of being able to set that up has been super useful.

Love to hear that.

So next is could you dive a little bit further into maybe like how the RAR works and some key metrics that customers use to help quantify their investments.

Yeah, I'll get started here and then maybe pass to Joanne. Anthony, you did a great job of kind of segueing us into this by talking about how easy it is to get it set up. So like you mentioned, it's pretty simple. You can just Go in and connect your CRM directly to LinkedIn via secure sync that we provide for between our CRM partnerships. So today that is Salesforce, HubSpot or Microsoft Dynamics. And then once we actually establish that connection to the CRM system, we then go look and analyze the CRM records as well as the engagements that happen on LinkedIn with your advertisements. So we look to see if records so the pipeline or the revenue generated from your business were actually influenced by LinkedIn ads. Specifically, we're looking to see if a member that's tied to an opportunity has viewed or clicked on the ads that You've run on LinkedIn based on what type of attribution models you are selecting in the report itself. And then as a result, kind of the output there, after we've looked at the CRM records and then looked at the member impressions and engagements, is the revenue attribution report which really provides these new LinkedIn influenced business outcome metrics, which are things like, you know, influenced revenue one or pipeline generated return on ad, spend average time to close, etc. So with those metrics in mind, maybe Joanne you can jump in a little to provide some context on how customers use or find value from some of those metrics today.

Yeah, definitely. I think Liz made it really clear exactly how the report set up as well as what types of metrics you'll have access to in just a couple of those clicks. But in practice we've really seen marketers use this report across three different areas and I'll bucket it into reporting and justifying their investment. The second being really like checking the health of their marketing program on LinkedIn. And then the last is really optimizing for return on ad spend. So in that first bucket, these metrics that Liz mentioned are really specific to B2B marketers. We haven't really had access to that on LinkedIn or B2B marketers ever before. So this is a first report of its kind and we recognize as well that marketers have access to a ton of different internal tools at their toolkit. So this report is really meant to supplement advertisers existing reporting tools like campaign manager reporting or as I mentioned, other internal tools that they might use for attribution. But what the revenue attribution report does is it allows you to report beyond surface level metrics like cost per clicks and engagements that we know often we rely on very historically and we can. The report is really set up in a way that it's really easy to either screenshot or give access to this report dashboard up to the CMO level or up to the CFO level. So it's extremely to use and check on a monthly, quarterly or even daily basis. The second way we've seen marketers use this is really to check the health of their marketing program on LinkedIn. So you have a few different views beyond just like influence revenue influence pipeline. You can actually see some of those conversion metrics. So you can see conversion rates on LinkedIn. Specifically you can see the average deal sizes on LinkedIn. So you can see actually how deals influenced by LinkedIn marketing compare to your average overall deal sizes or even deal sizes of non LinkedIn influence deals. So you can see how LinkedIn compares to your overall marketing program or even to other channels. Another view that you have access to is a funnel view, which is my personal favorite and it's super popular with a lot of marketers as well. You can actually see the quality of your leads on LinkedIn. So you can actually have a view of how many leads were influenced by LinkedIn. Of those, how many convert to open opportunities and then of those, how many are actually converting to closed one opportunities. So with this funnel metric view you can actually see, you know, are these leads actually converting? Which brings me to the last bucket is really optimizing for those bottom funnel metrics like revenue and pipeline. So I mention before, those funnel metrics you can actually identify and flag. Like let's say for example, these leads are not actually converting into open opportunities or maybe they're getting stuck at that open opportunity stage and not actually converting to a closed one. This actually flags to you. Hey, maybe there's some optimization that needs to be done to my targeting or to my marketing strategy on LinkedIn to actually drive higher quality leads that are actually going to convert to close one opportunities. In addition, we also now have campaign level reporting. So you can actually see specific test campaigns that you're launching. Or maybe you're testing a new target segment or a new ad format. You can actually see if those campaigns are actually influencing revenue and pipeline, what that campaign's return on ad spend are. So you really understand is this test campaign working? Or maybe this campaign is really, really, really effective so you know exactly where to double down and allocate those budgets based on which campaigns are driving the most revenue and pipeline.

And you just explained so much stuff there that you would expect like crazy dashboard. But what I love is like the simplicity of it that like you can like glance at it or like it's very easy to follow along. So there's a lot of Great data in here. And you mentioned screenshots. I've sent so many screenshots of the raw report at different parts of like our work. So yeah, I think the report does a great job of like structuring everything. So it's very easy to read, it's very easy to figure out what's going on because yeah, in marketing we have so many metrics we can report on ctr, CPC and like all that stuff. But this focus focuses on just what are the most important metrics, you know, revenue pipeline, sales and then makes it very easy for somebody to quickly glance at and understand what's going on. So yeah, it's been, it's been a great report to use and there's so much good info in there. Two things to kind of drill into a little bit more based on what you mentioned. One is like the usefulness of like having that company level tracking is extremely hard to do otherwise. So I think that's like one of the biggest benefits of the rar. And as we were talking about the problems is it's, you know, it's very common in like a business that maybe person A sees an ad but then forwards it to their boss or the other way around, the boss sees it, forwards it, somebody else to go check out and then somebody else goes to request a demo, maybe you know, they take the meeting and then maybe maybe somebody from finance finally, finally signs the deal. So there's often like several people involved and that's so hard to track when you're doing person level. But this then allows us to see get visibility into like that company level impact. So that's something just, I think it's like so important to highlight. And then the other part is like getting more visibility into like pipeline stats. If deals take 16 months then it can take a long time to see revenue numbers. So it depends on like what your other tools offer. But if you're just looking at revenue versus like marketing spend, it could take a while before you see anything there. So that's where it's like as a marketer myself, like it's so useful to be able to see those pipeline stats just to have some guiding, you know, some guidance along the way. Are we going in the right direction? Is pipe, is pipeline being created and then of course is pipeline turning into revenue. But at least having that guide there in the middle just really helps a lot of the, you know, interim marketing practices you're going to do.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And what I love too is like some of those conversion metrics. We've actually seen agencies leverage this report as well and love being able to use this to really set expectations with their clients. So you can see on average how many days it takes for a deal to close on LinkedIn. And what we hear from agencies is, you know, as they're given that budget to spend on LinkedIn, they're almost expected to see immediate results. But by able to use some of this data that they're actually getting from the Revenue Attribution Report, they can set expectations with their client and say, hey, like, you know, I launched this campaign, but we're seeing that it takes an average of, you know, X days. So we can expect this to close within that amount of time or see results within that amount of time.

Yeah, absolutely. And I do like the ability to then compare. What are your LinkedIn stats versus other platforms. I think that's been useful to look at and we have done that to compare, you know, hey, this is what we're seeing in the rar days to close average deal value. And then how does that compare with other things? The, you know, the benefit of LinkedIn is like the, the targeting that it offers. So we are usually trying to go after bigger enterprise deals. And then, you know, if a company says, oh, our average deal cycle is X, but we're seeing LinkedIn's taking longer, well, is it driving bigger deals? And then does that, you know, does that ROI make sense? So those are great stats to have and like, it's very nice to have that on a platform specific basis too. So lots of stuff here. Can you also walk us through the process of say somebody wants to go set up this report, what are the couple steps they need to do to go and actually create it and then see these reports?

Yeah, I can take this one, talk to it at a high level. So the Revenue Attribution Report lives in Business Manager, which is a somewhat new tool for those of you who may be a bit more familiar with campaign manager. Business Manager, Business Manager essentially gives you a view across your business. So if you have multiple ad accounts, whether it be for, you know, multiple regions, or you have specific tactics that are running in each ad account, that Business manager allows you to manage and view your reporting across all of those. So once you have your Business manager set up, which is just a few steps to create and then make sure you're claiming or sorting the correct ad accounts there, all you would need to do is go into Business Manager and then connect your CRM. That's really the only step you need to take to then give us what we need to generate that revenue attribution report that you can then use on an always on basis. Something I'll highlight here because I know it comes up a lot for our customers is yes, I'm really interested in this type of like down funnel reporting but my CRM data is really sensitive or I'm fine with giving access but maybe my legal team or my sales team is a little bit more wary. How do you make sure you do this in a way that is, you know, secure and we can feel comfortable in using these reports. So I'll just highlight here at a very high level, all the data that we have in the CRM gestions are stored securely with encryption, with data isolation, with access controls. There's a lot of nitty gritty to speak to there and I'm happy to go deeper, Anthony, as deep as you want to go there. But I think at a high level I'll just highlight that we know it's incredibly important for our customers to understand how we use their data. So all of the details of this are documented in our Help center articles and our team is always readily available to support where needed to get more details on, you know, we only have a read ingestion flow, we keep everything on the premises there. We never mix customer data, et cetera. So with that in mind, once that CRM is connected, then the report then we spoke to is generated and then it's updated on a daily basis for folks to be able to go in and view those down funnel results.

Awesome. CRM data is very sensitive. I've been through a few of these discussions of no, we're, there's no way we're possibly going to connect our CRM. But then we dive into the LinkedIn documentation which talks about how it does go through the things that you mentioned. Keeping it secure, keeping it separate. We have gotten it approved at, you know, any. On any of those discussions that we had to have. We have gotten approved on all those because of, you know, it's secure, it's separate. If a team was kind of going through those discussions, where can they go to find that documentation if they need to be sending that to their, their, to their team.

Yeah. So in business manager itself, if someone already has that created and they're looking there around the CRM connection that will link directly to the Help center article or if you just search for revenue attribution report on Help center articles that should show up there also. Happy? I don't know Anthony, if there are show notes for the podcast, but we can point to some of those articles that not only outline how we handle that CRM data in a compliant manner, but it will specifically highlight as well, what are all the fields that we ingest? We only ingest the fields as read, only that we need to generate the report. How are those mapped to your report so you can understand and make sure that the data that we're reading in and how we translate to that report is in line with how your CRM is set up, as well as definitions for each of the metrics as well, and the kind of the CRM data that we use to derive each of those metrics. So happy to share the direct link for those as well. If people want to dig in further into how we use the data and how we ingest it.

Yes, there we'll have show notes. So we'll definitely link to that in the show notes below. And then kind of the next question is, you know, sometimes we've shared the dashboard and some of these, and some people are usually surprised, like, wow, you can, like, make this connection. And like, we can see this data here. And then their next question is like, okay, I need to go double check this first. So my question for you guys is, how does LinkedIn make sure that the data that they're presenting is accurate and useful in the raw report?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's one that we get all the time as well, whether it be directly from customers or from our sales teams as well, to make sure they can explain what the report is doing and that these metrics are actually accurate and useful to their customers. So the two key things I think about when I think about making sure we have accurate and useful metrics are transparency and optionality. So transparency, optionality, those are the name of the game when we think about transparency. To me, it's really about outlining and making sure we all have a clear understanding on how are we generating these metrics. Right. If you don't understand kind of how, how it's being made, then it's hard to trust the metrics that you're seeing. So I spoke a little bit earlier, but in our help center, we have outlined, you know, here are the exact fields that we're ingesting here, how we use each of these fields and then derived metrics that we have in the Revenue Attribution Report. Here is how we calculate them. So we aim to keep these as simple and clear as possible, because that will also aid us in having that transparency of being able to what each of those metrics actually mean. And then second, when I talk about optionality, first, we always take a B2B centric approach. So it doesn't mean you should be able to select any maybe attribution method, especially if it's not that B2B centric. However, we know that our customers vary greatly in how their data is set up in their CRM, how they report and then ultimately how they think about attribution. So you know, one company might be able to say hey, if I have any clicks from LinkedIn, that counts as I've influenced this revenue. Where another one might say no, I need multiple clicks or I need multiple views from several people, et cetera. So with that in mind and the nuances and needs of our customers, we really want to give as much flexibility to customize the report in a way that makes the most sense to each business. So with this in mind, I'll maybe list a few examples and Anthony would love to hear from you as well on customizations or ways that you cut the report for your customers. But a few things we have here are look back windows. So we spoke before that. Typically in B2C these are a bit more centered around a weekly or a monthly. In the revenue attribution report, we allow you to look up to six months back and we continue to hear actually that's not even long enough. So that's something we'll definitely be looking into and you'll see coming in the future. Another option here is attribution threshold. So I spoke to, you know, people have different ways that they report or actually can claim influence for a deal or pipeline. So we support multiple levels of influence based on, you know, many touches or they must have a click from the member that is tied to that opportunity. And then lastly another example here I'll give is CRM data filtering. So we hear from customers sometimes. Hey, in our CRM, you know, we have all of our deals, but this includes net new deals and new business that's coming in. But it also includes maybe recurring business. And some of those marketing teams say, you know, we can't really claim credit for those recurring. That's a bit more on our sales team to drive. So for them, if they want to, they can set up the report in a way that only filters and actually pulls in those net new deals or new business so that they can report against that. But yeah, Anthony would love to hear from you as well on any of that optionality or transparency. What works there also things that I know you have a lot of ask on your wish list there for how we can continue to improve upon that. That.

Yeah, yes, I remember. So when we were at B2 believe there was when we were talking about the RAR, I was like oh there's this one feature that'd be great to have in the rar. And you were like well you should probably check in about a month from now. So those different like drop down features, those have been great to have there because like we have different accounts take different approaches. Some are more direct response which is like okay this person needs to click to our website and then convert there. So then I'm going to use an engagements filter versus other. Others go the more demand gen route which is more of the zero click experience. Like we're using more video, more content and feed and we don't really care if people click or not. We want to like educate them there. So then we'll use more of the impression based attribution. So just having that filter has been like super useful. So we, we, you know we'll switch that depending on what type of approach and accounts taking. So yeah, that's been, that's been useful. I did have a question on the lookback window. Can you explain to listeners how that look back window works in terms of like calculating their metrics?

Yeah, definitely. So maybe I'll give an example here so it's just a bit easier to follow. Let's take the default look back window which we have as 180 days or six months here. If you're looking at then let's say a specific deal that has been closed won. What we will do then is go into that CRM record and look at for this deal what day did it close on and then we look at six months previous to it to find any engagements or impressions from members that are associated with that deal before it was was closed. One similar logic applies as well when you think about pipeline. So something that hasn't closed yet, right? We don't have the close date but before it was opened. We look six months previous to that and see have members associated with that pipeline deal engaged with that marketing content and then same same idea for the leads there. So we're always looking before kind of the main activity based on where that is in the funnel happened to then make a story around how LinkedIn helped to influence in terms of the touch points that came before that event.

And it's useful to have that depending on what somebody's sell cycle tends to be and we know they're usually long and then the other one I'll kind of touch on a little bit further is those deal types one to break into because. Yes, especially at bigger companies, like they might have like several different deal types and several different pipelines that are working. So it is useful to be able to check and uncheck which ones we want to include in our reporting or not. So that's been a great addition to have too, because I know a lot of teams do ask about that.

Yeah, that's great to hear. And I do remember that conversation at Be to Believe, it's not typical that I'm having a conversation with someone and they're asking for something that I get the pleasure of being able to be like, actually that's already being built, that's coming soon. So it was really exciting for, for me to hear that as one of the top ask and kind of bring that back to the team to center us around like, hey, this is something customers and people in the field actually need and we're able to deliver.

And then I'm sure you guys get to talk to a lot of companies or customers. Are there any case studies that come to mind or success stor stories that you'd want to share? Sometimes I think for other marketers it's, it's useful to hear a story about maybe how a company used this and how they incorporated it into their marketing operations for them to think about how they might use it as well.

Yeah, happy to chime in here. I mean, we've heard a ton of really great feedback from our customers ever since launching this report and a lot of really great customer success stories that are starting to come up. But one in particular comes to mind that I wanted to highlight. It was this enterprise B2B SaaS company and they were actually looking to expand to a new market. So what they, they did, as any marketer would do, is that they really invested in brand awareness on LinkedIn. This is because again I mentioned they're a B2B company, so they really love the ability to target B2B decision makers on LinkedIn. So they really doubled down on their brand investment on LinkedIn to expand to this new market. But what they struggled with was that they were really unable to understand if their brand efforts were really helping them to break into this new market. So their CFO was calling their budgets into question. Their CMO was wondering like, was this the right marketing strategy to take into place? So what they did with their sales pod was they actually leveraged the revenue Attribution report. So within a couple of easy steps of just connecting their CRM to LinkedIn's business manager, they were able to generate the revenue attribution report. And with this report they were actually able to see the direct impact that these new brand campaigns, that this new strategy had on their pipeline and revenue. In fact, they actually saw that overall LinkedIn influence deals had 10% shorter deal cycles, 14% larger deal sizes and they were 8% higher likelihood to close compared to deals where LinkedIn was not part of that customer journey. What this really showed them is like these are amazing numbers, right? Like LinkedIn as a channel generates more qualified leads and these leads actually are converting to close one deals in a shorter timeframe. So with these insights, the marketing team was able to not only justify their ad spend to their cfo, but it also gave them the data backed confidence to really double down on the strategy and actually shift some of their budgets more to LinkedIn as a channel because they knew that this was working. So as a result of more efficiently and effectively being able to allocate their budgets and their marketing program, they've actually reported to us that their business is growing more than 2x in the last year, which is is crazy as we know in these economic times.

That's a great example. We haven't talked about like branded here at all today. It's been all like sales and attribution and that's always a very hard discussion for when we talk to companies is like getting approval, brand ad spend. Everyone always wants to be driving for demos, driving for applications and stuff like that. And brand is some of the hardest budget to get. But this now gives you some more insight into is that having a positive impact into our campaigns and everything else that's going to on. So I think that's a great, great call out. One other thing I'll add in as we were talking about, so going back to like you had talked about that. This also has a campaign level breakdown. What I think is really cool is what I've done a few times. I've copy pasted all the campaigns that are listed there and then if you're using naming conventions, maybe you have multiple campaigns that go to the same audience. So we'll usually name campaigns. Part of the name will be like what's the audience? So you might have different segments, you might have, have. You might name it by industry, you might name it by job function or something. So I'll copy paste those out and then calculate on a combined view to get some directional data on terms of is, you know, financial services having a higher roas, or is, you know, software development having a higher roas, or is targeting the engineers or is targeting the salespeople giving us a higher roas? So that's been a very interesting insight to get to. Is is taking all those campaigns that it's very nice that breaks it down for us and then re aggregating those based on our naming conventions to get some of those directional data. So you just made me think about that too.

Yeah, I think I love that hack. And as you mentioned before, like, the report is extremely simple, gives you a really easy bird's eye view. But there's so much that you could do with the report and so many different hacks and things. So I love these best practices and if we're posting this, would love people to comment as well, like some of their best practices and tips on how they use the Revenue Attribution Report.

All right, so we've covered a lot about what the RAR does and all the great data that's inside of it. So my question is, what's next for the rar? Is there anything coming down the pipeline that marketers should know about?

Yeah, I can speak to this in the roadmap a little bit. Maybe. I'll start by just like bringing us back to where we kind of started with Joanne, giving that broader context of the marketing space in general and what folks are trying to do. So we know from many studies, hearing from many marketers, and then specifically there's a study from the B2B Institute, which is a LinkedIn think tank, that says of marketer leaders that were surveyed, more than 50% of them have reported that the need to drive revenue has intensified greatly over the past few years. So hearing that is probably not a surprise to anyone listening. But we only expect this pressure to continue to grow, making measuring these business outcomes and the ability to do so easy and seamlessly more imperative than ever. So with this, we want to make sure that we continue to invest in Revenue Attribution Report, which is kind of our flagship attribution and down funnel reporting product, to make sure we can actually serve all of our customer needs and that it can really plug into a marketer's measurement suite that they have. So with this in mind, kind of to achieve this, what we've heard as two key themes that have come out based on conversations, you know, with our sales team, with customers, people like you, Anthony, in the industry is, number one, making sure that we meet customers where they are today. And then number two, is improving the actionability of the results that they're getting with something like Revenue Attribution Report. So I'll double click into those a little bit when we talk about meeting customers where they are. To me this means making the report compatible with how customers data is set up. It makes it means making it compatible with how they define or think about attribution. And then lastly making the report readily available where they already do reporting today. So we talked a little bit back about how Revenue Attribution Report is available in Business Manager. However, we know that most folks already use other reporting tools, whether it be LinkedIn's campaign manager, whether it be partner there. So we want to make sure that these metrics can seamlessly flow into those surface areas to enable you to look at these down funnel metrics next to maybe some of the more vanity metrics that you look at on a day over day basis as well. So coming down the pipeline here you'll definitely see metrics availability in things like Campaign Manager, you'll see an expansion of partnerships to get more out of your report, et cetera. And then second, speaking a bit to the actionability piece, Anthony, you gave a great example of this hack that you do of taking the campaign level data and copy pasting it in. And I'm sure you have like a very complex workflow that goes into making this happen that you've maybe been able to make work a little bit more seamlessly today. But what we want to do is make this easier for all of our customers to do at a more scaled manner. So introducing that granular campaign level reporting kind of sets the foundation for us to be able to do so. The two big things I see coming here is one making sure we give you better insights into what parts of your marketing are actually working. So for us this means measuring what's actually working by investing in smarter, more data driven attribution models and then two, also enabling those optimizations. So, so you spoke to the optimizations, but they're done in a pretty manual way. Today what we're doing is looking at how can we automatically highlight some of those trends that you're seeing. So think of this as LinkedIn straight up just telling you what are the themes for the types of campaigns that end up generating the most revenue to be used as input for more of those real time optimizations, what audiences are resonating, what types of creatives are resonating, what type of formats are resonating, et cetera. So you can optimize this and then ideally also use this as input to a longer term strategy there those are the key ones. Anthony, I would love to hear from you. Do those resonate? Do we miss any big pieces? We always want to check along the way. And I know this is our previous conversations of making sure what we're building is in line with kind of what our customers top needs are as well.

Well, I just want to say that last part there sounds like so interesting and exciting. I know LinkedIn's been doing so much around AI that now if you can take rock our data and then pull that back into like campaign manager to make recommendations for people, it's like as you're setting up your campaign, it's like, oh, you're, you have these settings but based on what we see in your sales data, maybe you want to try xyz. Like just that right there, like seems so powerful to have into the mix there. So I am very excited for that. I don't know where that is on the roadmap or how soon that'll be out, but I would love to see that come into LinkedIn campaign manager. And then all the rest of the things you mentioned are all super useful too. So I know I play around whenever we're setting up a new account or something, I always go into the, the partnerships or the business connections, whatever that button is called, and I'm always like, okay, what's new in here? And I'll always like scan down the list to see what's new to see if there's anything else I need to go check out because it's been great to see a lot of those come out. The RARA lives in the business business manager, so you need to be inside business manager to get access to it. But now through those partner accounts you can see set up dashboards that pull in RAR data and then you can share that with like stakeholders and stuff. So that's been super useful to have as well. So yeah, overall I'd say those are all great things. We're very excited to see the future of both the RAR and just measurement and conversion tracking at LinkedIn. It's great that LinkedIn puts such a focus on this. As marketers, we are very appreciative of that. And more, more tools are always great. So we'll, we'll keep close eyes on the raw report and all that good stuff. So Liz and Joanne, any, any last remarks before we close this episode out?

No, I'll just end with really appreciate you having us giving us the opportunity to chat a little bit more about Revenue Attribution Report in the same way that you know, I've said to you, we love that feedback, whether it be positive, whether it be negative, whether it be, you know, here's how I'm using it and doing those manual optimizations, or here's what I need to make this report work for me. We love getting that feedback. So anyone who may be listening, please do reach out and share that with us as we work to kind of make sure this can be a flagship offering for all of our customers. Joanne, anything else to add from your end?

Yeah, I think you summed it up really well. We really appreciate being on this podcast and as Liz mentioned, like, even success stories of what's been working, what's not been working, feedback on what, what more you'd like to see across our measurement suite. We're very receptive and customers like you are the ones who really help us make this product something that works for you all. So definitely don't hesitate to reach out.

Awesome. And I'm sure you can find Liz and Joanne on LinkedIn. Actually, I know you can find Liz and Joanne on LinkedIn, so feel free to ping them there or leave a comment when we post this. So thanks again, Liz and Joanne, for coming on the podcast and for all the marketers, go, go try out the raw report.