Uncovering Company-Level Impact: Rethinking Social Attribution with Chris Golec and Emily Gustin

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Artman, joined today by my co-host, Mike Rizzo. It's been a while, Mike.

It has been a while, and I am sorry. Just been deep in the throes of community building, certification planning, Mopsapalooza, which I think we'll, we'll, we'll touch on during the episode today.

So let's get into it because we've got a lot to tackle. So today we are tackling one of the toughest challenges in B2B marketing, proving ROI for social. For years, much of our traffic and engagement came from— that came from social has ended up lumped into buckets like direct or other, but that's starting to change. So joining us today to talk about that are 2 guests, which is a little bit unusual for us. So joining us again is Chris Golick. He's the founder and CEO of Channel 99, and many of you already know him. Also joining is Emily Augustin, who is a business development manager at LinkedIn, and she's leading LinkedIn's measurement and attribution partnerships, and she is working directly with Channel 99 on new solutions that provide company-level visibility into paid and organic engagement. Chris, Emily, welcome. Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks for having me.

All right. Well, let's start with some definitions. And I think, Emily, when we talked before, we were talking about, you said something like view-through attribution. So why don't we start with that? Like definitionally, what does that mean to you? And why, especially given your experience having worked with marketers in your previous roles at LinkedIn, like what do you like? Why do you think that's relevant for B2B marketers today?

Sure. I mean, I think the definition of view-through attribution or view-through clickless engagement would be stuff that is not tracked, you know, with a click and not tracked via UTM. So if you think about marketing measurement, like, I don't know, an iceberg, I'll give that metaphor for today. This would be the stuff below the waterline that you oftentimes don't see, but it makes the iceberg what it is. And it's very relevant for B2B and for LinkedIn marketing because in B2B you have very long sales cycles. So it's important to understand more than just the last few clicks. And it's also very relevant with respect to LinkedIn marketing because you're reaching real decision makers. You know, you're targeting people by the criteria that's on their LinkedIn profiles. You know that when you have view-through events, they're coming from very real professionals, right? This is not traffic that you should just do away with when you're doing your marketing measurement.

Got it. Okay. Yeah, I like the iceberg analogy. Depending on what it is, I use the duck one too sometimes, you know, all the, like all the activity is happening below the surface, but iceberg seems like a better one for this. All right. So Chris, kind of tying this together with what you're, you're seeing and hearing from your customers and, you know, what is it that you've been hearing from them that's led to this integration Between Channel 99 and LinkedIn?

Yeah, I mean, a big problem for B2B marketers is the fact that 70 or 80% of all their website traffic comes through from an unknown source. And so a lot of this is all view-through traffic, and a lot of these legacy attribution tools have ignored it. To me, you're not going to get the right answers if you're ignoring the largest customer signal. And as it relates to organic social, that kind of attribution or engagement is really high-value intent signals. And so the integration is really helping us understand, you know, taking that, you know, those, that level of engagement out of the direct bucket and properly assigning it to LinkedIn, you know, whether it's organic or paid social.

Is it, I'm just curious because in my, like what I've been noticing lately when I'm working with teams who are trying to grow their audience, right? It feels like social is like the only place where you can do that without running into serious issues with privacy and restrictions. So like, is it becoming a bigger issue that you're seeing, Chris? Emily, you too? Like, I don't, just because it feels like the growing an audience is becoming harder and harder without going through social.

Well, I'll just, I'll, I do know that people are clicking less so that the amount of view-through is actually growing. And the level of view-through attribution that we see is typically 4 or 5 times greater than people clicking. And so it's significant and it changes ROI metrics significantly.

I'll just add on to that. I mean, we know that social or LinkedIn for B2B social is a really critical means of reaching a potential buyer. We talk a lot in advertising about reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. And that's something that can be done uniquely on social and on LinkedIn if you're trying to, you know, drive a B2B purchase. And organic social is particularly interesting. We've done a bunch of studies at LinkedIn. What we've seen is that those who interact with your company page, the brand's presence, organic presence on LinkedIn, tend to have higher intent, which makes sense. It's sort of a proxy for, you know, you could think of it almost like a G2 page Or, or some of the other B2B industry spots where you might go and do research. So that type of engagement is super relevant. It's important to drive if you're a marketer. It's also important to understand if you're doing measurement.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So, um, super sorry, I'm gonna jump in.

Go ahead, Mike.

It's really interesting to like think, think about this idea of view-through. I mean, just from, from Where I sit, you know, on the community side, we're constantly trying to engage with our audience in as many ways as we can. And I'm in this little, I don't, we refer to, we have a silly name for this small group of founders that we're in. There's like 4 of us and we're constantly trying to figure out like, how in the heck do we get anyone's attention with the message that we want to put out there? And, you know, LinkedIn happens to be our predominant choice of social platform to use to do so. And, you know, and lately, like the sort of like changes in the way LinkedIn's algorithm has been working has certainly had a significant impact on the way we used to perceive and measure the success, quote unquote, air quotes for those of you just listening, the success of our efforts. And so I'm particularly excited to to hear about like what's going on at LinkedIn and with Channel 99 sort of layering on with the two of you kind of playing nice together. Because it is hard to measure like the success of what's going on because it is, it is completely different than it was just like 2 years ago, roughly, right? Where we were seeing tens of thousands of impressions and all kinds of other interactions on the thing. And now if there's a way to actually measure some of this back to Your organization, right? And obviously for us, it's just about like putting the good message out about the community and getting more community members in. But for B2B organizations, you know, driving that traffic back to your website with real intent and signal, like that's really, really exciting. So I don't know. I'm just like, I'm excited to hear that there's kind of a, obviously something's been cooking underneath the water that I am going to use the duck analogy. The duck's feet have been moving very quickly over at LinkedIn, it sounds like. And And I'm just, I'm excited to hear it. So yeah, anyway.

Yeah, I think that's a fair segue to, you know, what the heck are we launching with Channel 99? And I'll just say that I think for a long time, platforms like LinkedIn didn't really provide a ton of engagement data to fit in with the source of truth platforms that we know that advertisers are using for measurement. Things have changed and we're able to provide that data in a privacy first, you know, way by looking at things at a company level. And so whether you're thinking about, you know, organic engagement that you're driving or interactions with your paid ads, we now pipe LinkedIn engagement data into B2B analytics and attribution platforms like Channel 99 so that you can get that full picture of the buyer journey. You can see below the waterline, you can, you know, duck's feet, whatever you want to, we want to use there. Night vision goggles, whatever you want, right? How you can actually get a picture of how a company moved from, let's say, organically engaging with your brand to perhaps engaging with your paid ads, but they weren't yet, you know, a company you might have been calling on or you might have pipeline tracked in your CRM for all the way through into that kind of close one, you know, final conversion event that everybody's trying to measure. And just to like be clear about what we did not do in the past, which is the change that we're making here, is we didn't provide that full suite of of touchpoints at the company level. We'd let you look at LinkedIn paid marketing data by, you know, top X number of companies you reached or engaged, but we never gave you the full pipeline of every engagement event at the company level. And since views are so important, since the B2B sales cycle is so long, we felt like it was about time to give marketers that visibility that they deserve and that will help to, you know, make their efforts a lot more successful if they can use the intelligence.

That's really cool. Sorry, I want to double-click and I apologize to take us off script just a little bit. I want to double-click on, because I know we have really good questions we want to ask you, but I want to ask this question. The idea of company-level data, and I don't know if that's like Chris or Emily or both, can we sort of unpack that just a little bit? Like, and more specifically, I think if I was a MoPro, marketing operations professional, RevOps professional, Very familiar with using data attribution, all kinds of things in these, in these various products. If there's now a data layer that we have access to and you're calling it this company-level information, my next immediate question is, do you mean the employees who are associated to said company? And then it rolls up in aggregate. So the compliance piece is basically protected in that way. So like I now work at, okay, cool. I'm seeing head nods. So I'm going to stop asking the question and just ask that.

Yes, that is the answer to your question is we aggregate, you know, individuals' member profiles up to a company that they belong to. And we share this data for marketing measurement purposes explicitly and only in a way that would be, you know, extremely privacy compliant. So we won't report out on engagements unless there's a certain minimum number of those engagements. We won't report them out until companies are a certain size. So you're never able to deanonymize the traffic even when combining it with other data sources. What this to do is provide an input to measurement that is accurate because we know that user-level signal is sparse. That actually makes sense for B2B marketing because we know that it's not just an individual that drives a purchase. It's a, you know, more like a buyer group of several individuals at a company and signal that can be gathered from other places that are not just LinkedIn, right? Like this practice has been going on for a while in the world of account-based marketing. I think LinkedIn's seeing the industry shift more toward that approach to marketing, and we are able to provide a signal into it that we hope can just make advertisers more successful while being privacy, you know, first.

Yeah, I think, Mike, second part to your question though, it does make attribution, it kind of turns it on its head, 'cause quite often what happens, people will read a, you know, organic post and then they'll search on Google and then come to the website and paid search gets the credit when in fact the first touch was organic social. So you gotta be able to map that whole journey.

Well, it's interesting, Emily, that you, you, I was gonna, I actually was thinking in my head, this is like, sounds like something that would tie in with the concept of buying groups in ABM, a topic that we've actually had guests on recently talking about. So I think, I think Again, just going into like how hard it is to reach people individually now, like, I think that's really powerful. So if you can target that based on the person and what their role may be in whatever it is your service or product is gonna provide, right? And where they'd be an important piece of that buying group or decision-making group is huge. So, yeah. So, Chris, maybe Like, what is it like, Emil, you've kind of hit a little bit on like, what are some of like, from a marketplace standpoint, what has changed? But like, is there like, from a technology standpoint, Chris, like what else is like, what other changes have you seen out there that are like, have you excited about what this has to offer?

Well, number one, I think view-through attribution happens across all channels. Email, display, content syndication, social is one of the most important to solve because it is one of the higher intent signals. And, you know, I obviously came up through account-based marketing, but at the end of the day, it's the same thing. It's company level. And I would say, you know, CRM systems are all architected based on companies and accounts. Sales teams are all organized around companies and accounts. So it really helps align sales and marketing teams together.

Yeah, it's like, for me, it feels like going back to the old school way, right? Named accounts and selling and all that. That is, I deal with this all the time with marketing and sales teams where we talk about attribution in terms of people, but sales, I think this is part of the disconnect between sales teams and marketing teams when it comes to attributions because At the end of the day, salespeople think about accounts and opportunities. They don't think of— people are sort of coming along for the ride, right? So if this is helping to bridge that gap, it feels like— so maybe talk about this a little bit, maybe Christy first and then Emily, but like, how has company-level attribution shifted? Like, how's that going to change, do you think, or are you already seeing a change in how people think about influence, reach? Impact, kind of all like up and down the funnel?

It's a good question. I mean, I think we're— everything is becoming account-centric. It doesn't necessarily mean ABM, because it's more of a strategy of measuring everything at the account level. And really understanding, yes, pipeline impact and revenue is number one, but there are a lot of other measures along the way of looking at channel efficiency. Like, what does it cost to engage a target account channel by channel? And how do I look at that on a level playing field that's unbiased? And so that's why, you know, our partnership with LinkedIn helps us do that for the customer. And it's a great leading indicator to get to pipeline.

I would just add, I mean, I think a few points that this all helps you kind of refine your audience-based strategy. I think, what we've been seeing for the past few years is B2B marketers have moved toward really centering around the account as source of truth versus an individual, right? So, you know, from planning to activation to measurement, there is now this pretty clear flywheel, right, where company or account, whatever you want to call it, is at the center, right? It's that currency that's transacted and bought and then measured upon. And so this makes the flywheel even tighter. Now, this is the norm for B2B, which makes execution a lot smoother. I think for the industry, it improves the focus on reaching the right audience. There was always kind of that concept of spraying and praying in marketing where any impression or any unique individual that you reached is equal. And this may be true for some brands in B2C, though even there, I don't know that it works that well, but it's certainly not true for B2B. You know, you need to find companies that are actually a fit for your product or they're in market or could be in market for your product. For that impression to be, you know, impression that you want to spend a dollar on. And so I think how this all comes together, if we are focusing from planning to activation to measurement around, you know, a priority audience of accounts, is it makes everybody work better together, right? Your brand and demand team, organic team, as well as sales and marketing, right? Because you're marching toward the same goal. So everyone can be trying to kind of like move the ball forward.

Yeah.

Together playing their own role versus kind of like finger-pointing about why didn't this group do this or do that, or could we be doing better here or there? You're architecting your strategy around one common goal, one common set of metrics, which at least makes the strategy and the execution easier.

Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's what's unfortunate is I still think spray and pray, although nobody, like, it's still, I still run into teams, right? Really trying to guide them to narrow the aperture of their target so that it's a better match for what they're doing. But then they get concerned about the volume, right? Because I think they're so trained into, it's a volume game in quotes, right? And I think everyone's bought into the idea. Like, I don't hear a lot of people arguing against the idea of whether you call it ABM or account focus, right? Or like that. But it does feel like we're at a, maybe this is a tipping point because we actually had another episode recently about MQAs, right? Which kind of aligns with this. And it feels like, like, do you think this is like maybe the beginning of the end for individual level lead attribution kind of stuff? Like, Emily, you've worked a lot with different marketers, right? What's your sense for what people are thinking about that these days?

Well, first I would just say, you know, with respect to like a targeting or audience strategy, you know, we don't need to think even as literally as you need to have a priority account list of 1,000 or 100,000 accounts, right, that you're going after. It could be a type of company.

Yeah, great.

I think the focus is on finding the type of business that would be well suited for you to sell into. And that might mean actually broadening your aperture, right? Like thinking about like who is the ideal customer profile here? And then what are the myriad of companies that they could work at or types of companies. So I think you could actually end up getting even broader, but just smarter and broader using, you know, a company-based strategy. And in terms of lead-level attribution, listen, I don't think that it will ever go away, but I think that B2B marketing and sales will evolve for the better, which is always the hope. I mean, for marketing, you know, MQLs, MQAs, they're not the only metric that matters and they, they never should have been. But similarly, like events that are tracked in your CRM, even if it's a closed won deal, aren't the only metrics that matter, right? It's important to understand the full journey because that's where you, where you can recognize where am I wasting spend? Where am I not driving efficiency? And each point matters to get the thing that you want in the end, right? So I think the MQL, the MQI, whatever you wanna call it, is just one step along that process. And I think for sales, you know, there's an understanding now that like, this is not just an individual that you're trying to reach, right? So whether it's a marketing qualified lead or sales qualified lead, it's important to be marketing and to be selling into a buyer group and then to probably update if you really care about the tracking, your CRM hygiene accordingly. So you're not just focusing on one person at the target company that you wanna sell into, right?

Yeah.

So I think lead metrics will never go away. They're an important middle stage of the funnel. But I think it's about not only focusing on that metric, understanding the full journey, and not thinking that it's only about one individual.

Yeah.

It's an and, not an or. I love— yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love, I love all this. I like, I would love to see a world where, you know, uh, uh, there's a, for lack of a better term, a dashboard, a report, a moment in time where the team has said, guess what? Here was our goal to lay a foundation of coverage to reach these sort of ICP accounts. And here's what we did and here's how many impressions we got. And oh, look at how many net new connections our sales team got with people at these companies. Those connections are now in place. They may not actually be names in our database, but just the fact that there's a one-on-one connection with, you know, 10% of our total sort of effort right now is headed the right way, right? Like, that is just a huge win. And like, never once have I had a conversation with a group of people that's— that brought those 2 things together, right? Like, if our sales team is making a connect on LinkedIn with somebody, right, because we're able to sort of see view-through, and, and then we just like aggregate some new data together, says, oh yeah, Chris is now a first-degree connection with Whatever, 20 people across our 150 accounts that wasn't there before, right? We have to guess that that's not just because they thought Chris looked like a really cool guy, even though he is, right?

Yeah, I think it bolsters the case for organic. It also bolsters the case for brand advertising as well, right? Because if you're able to link, like somebody saw a brand advertisement, they're an account that I care about. We know how we move them down the funnel. We've always known that brand was important and that brand worked, right? But we never knew how to justify it or really how to measure it. So I think it, you know, whether it's organic, whether it's brand, it makes a case that again, each of these things are critical and they all pass to the next. I don't know, Chris, what you think about that.

Yeah, I mean, the number of times I've heard customers ask, I want to target just the CIOs at the Fortune 500. I'm like, you're going to target your way out of business.

You and everyone else.

Yeah.

So I think, I think this notion of buyer groups is really exciting and compelling, especially for like pipeline acceleration. And it's just the innovations are just getting tighter and tighter.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's nice to see the sort of pendulum swing a little bit back toward, you know, to your point, Emily, right? Like back toward brand and the importance of getting that coverage, right? And we've all now sort of come to fruition with the idea that not every CIO or CTO is going to be actively on LinkedIn waiting for that email to come in. And then, you know—

But they want your nurture email.

But they definitely want your nurture email. And, you know, on top of that, I think it's just nice to see that we've, I don't know, The whole tech sector has had this re-equating with, you know, it's not growth at all costs, right? And, you know, we're talking about sort of an expanding and narrowing of aperture for your target accounts and all those things. And I think all of that is in the vein of you're doing your best to not spray and pray anymore, to Michael's point. But like the Part of the shift is like the funding changed in the market, right? The buyer behavior has changed. And then on top of that, technologies like this are now enabling us to do things that are fundamentally different, which is really, really, really cool. If I could just like, I'm going to just share a nugget from our State of the MoPro research from this year for this, for the listeners, right?

Early preview.

Sneak peek, little early preview. So Key finding number 6 from our data says that AI and attribution tools are the top investment priorities for the next 12 months. We had over 61% of the teams say that they're planning to invest in AI or machine learning-based tools, and 45% of them are going to invest in marketing attribution or reporting tools. And it's saying that the— it's reflecting sort of a broader trend. About 68% of our RevOps teams are also planning to invest in advanced analytics and AI. So like everybody's honing in on this idea of how do I understand what's going on through the data layers that I have access to now? And they're thinking about, you know, this attribution problem, right? This account-based targeting problem. And I think it's very, very clear from our—

Well, it's interesting because I mean, I was like struck by your idea. Like I agreed with the idea, like you don't have to have a prioritized targeted set of accounts to target. Like that's one of the pushbacks I've always given to sales teams or other marketing teams who've come to me and said, to do ABM because what they're thinking about is buy technology, right? So I love that idea that like you don't have to do that. And I hadn't really thought about like you could open the aperture there on your targeting, especially when you've got technology that enables you to do it. It's almost like, I think I was realizing after that you said that, that I'm still thinking in the model of I'm targeting people as opposed to companies or accounts.

Yeah.

It's like, even I, even though we've been talking about it, like, even for me, it's like, it's hard to break out of some of these habits and get into that mindset that it's, you know, to get into the combination of the two, to your point, right? The lead stuff is never going to go away. I think that's also true. Yeah.

I mean, I also think, I mean, for the sake of what Channel 99 and LinkedIn are doing, enabling you to To find those targets in new ways and measure them in new ways, I think is just, I mean, that's a win on the alignment side of your sort of broader go-to-market strategy, right? And then educating your sales team on here's who we're sort of going after. Let's try to make connections into these accounts, but it never replaces the fact that there's a very important step of the being like myopically focused on a particular account and its particular journey. Right. If it just had funding rounds and all this other stuff, they're hiring, they're firing, they've just acquired new tools. Uh, the person graduated from USC, like stuff like that will make the difference in building the relationship and being able to like use the specific right language, which is exactly what a salesperson wants to go do. But if we can like—

Sure. A good salesperson wants to—

Similar companies across the way. Yeah, a good salesperson. Exactly. Anyway, sorry, I'm rambling. And so far this has been a fun thought experiment to go through.

Well, I just think to your point, Mike, on the rise of attribution tools or marketing measurement over the next few years, one, that's exciting. Chris and I are probably both pumped to hear that. 2, those type of tools allow you to abstract the like higher level finding of what type of businesses should we be going after? How should marketing be connecting with sales? Like, How do we make this actionable so that we generate demand and then revenue for our business, which is the goal of B2B marketing, if not all marketing? And so I think the rise of GenAI has made marketing measurement actually really exciting because measurement is nothing if it can't be actioned on and then used to improve your performance. So I think the technology that we already have in place in the last few years, what's coming down the pike, in the next few, along with the data that's available via solutions like this, allows you to get those like higher level findings for how should my business orient sales and marketing, right? This isn't just about measurement for measurement's sake. It's like, what type of accounts should we go after? Who could be a fit for our brand? Those are super important questions to ask.

And then once you know those accounts, you know, what are the best channels?

Yep.

You shouldn't guess. It should be right in front of you.

I'm trying to rack my brain. Like, I know of examples that I've run across. I can't remember where, where, you know, you think of your business as this is our target audience. And if you're paying attention to data, you get surprised that these people in this other industry that we never thought about, or these roles that we never thought about, are looking at our tool. And it, like, it could open up a new possibility for where you're taking your product or service, right? And so I think that's because— sorry, Mike, I cut you off.

Oh no, no, it's a it was that's yeah, no, I agree. I've you know just to that just to that point, it's it is hard for organizations that you know I think of Mavenlink, for example, when I was there, like there were countless moments that the founder would come over and like be like, all right, we're going to be da da da for da da da da da da da, and it would just like change, you know, in the early days. And so the reality is is like as you know. There's probably a time and a place where technology like this is really strong. It can give you the right signal along the way, but if you haven't quite probably figured out like what your target market buyer fit actually looks like, you might struggle just like any other startup. But I think where that takes me next, and Emily, and forgive me for being totally ignorant to to some of the capabilities that LinkedIn is unleashing with Channel 99 here. When I think about demand gen, which I appreciate that you said generate demand, it is not leads, and that is a fundamentally different thing. When I think about those sort of like relationships between demand gen teams that are often doing ad campaigns and conversion usually ends up being like a core focus, right? So the conversion pixel fires when the form is submitted or something like that. Is there a or maybe this is for Chris, is there a version of that where like LinkedIn learns a little bit about what is converting through Channel 99's integration? Like there's like a conversion pixel, so to speak, a success metrics that's passed back that helps this new capability find more, I guess.

So I think that's the hope. Right now, the way that this integration works is we provide our engagement data at the company level to a platform who's an expert in measurement and also has, you know, CRM outcomes synced to the platform like Channel 99, right? And they're able to sew this together to say basically, okay, all these company engagements from LinkedIn and then these company-level, you know, tracked outcomes in the CRM, we believe there's a certain correlation between the two. That's attribution, right? In the future, what we'd like to enable is for some of the aggregate information about that attribution that would be in Channel 99 to be passed back to LinkedIn. So we would have some understanding of, You know, what were the largest deals driven or the campaigns that contributed to those deals where LinkedIn, you know, favorably, you know, won credit, let's say, so that we can keep our machine oriented toward driving more of those deals toward the, you know, most performant campaign types and assets and all of that stuff. So good question. I think it's a good one to now have out there in the industry. Hopefully it'll get things moving a little bit faster to be able to cover that full circle.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's just an, it's, I think, I think any, any fairly, um, versed technical marketer who's dealt with these conversion metrics, like might end up in a place where they're like, well, how do I, how can I tell it what is success? But I think the abstraction layer, so to speak, uh, where all this data comes together from the data pipe that is, that is LinkedIn in Channel 99, I feel like that's a really sweet spot for, for Channel 99. Like you guys, I know you guys are working on tying all that stuff together and giving the end user the ability to sort of make those decisions themselves anyway, which doesn't, you know, then you pipe back data right into like, here's more of my targets that I'd like to go after. So, but that's cool. It's good to know that there's thoughts around it. It's definitely naturally where my brain went, like as we were thinking of like success, measuring success around. This motion in the market.

Yeah, I think there'll be a lot more interoperability with MCP servers and the ability to execute campaigns automatically and optimize campaigns. And it's not always just pipeline. It could be, you know, targeting efficiency, like what percentage of my impressions are reaching the right accounts and what does it cost me to engage a target account? These are all great leading indicators of Pipeline influence.

Yeah. So I'm— I know this is— we're still in the early days of this kind of being rolled out, but I'm curious, like, what, do you have any examples or stories where you maybe twofold, like where you've seen success, right? Where companies, your customers or members, right, are seeing success for this or anything that's been a surprise?

I'll just start by hitting kind of some of the findings from the beta and then takeaways. And Chris, I'll pass to you. But to help, you know, the listeners understand kind of the magnitude of the change of the type of data that we're sharing over and the results that we're seeing, when we egress this company intelligence data to the 5 partners that we're launching this solution with, They were able to see almost 300% more companies that have been reached by LinkedIn. And what that connected to was almost 100%, 96% more sales qualified leads across, again, all of those 5 partners using a range of different attribution models, 81% more closed won deals that were touched by LinkedIn, and 43% then lower cost per acquisition. So essentially LinkedIn's cost at driving a deal to close halved. With this data incorporated. So that's like the magnitude of the change, which I think was not surprising to us. We see or hear from our customers a lot, like, listen, I know that you are working because if I take you out of the mix, things pretty much stop. But it's hard for me to actually prove that. And I think by giving out these company-level touchpoints to be included in measurement, we've seen is, yeah, there's a lot more coming from LinkedIn than people thought.

Yeah.

The biggest takeaways or most interesting things that I heard when speaking with a bunch of our, you know, beta customers were one, kind of the agility that these marketers had at being able to optimize kind of in real time toward what was performing, right? So wanting to go and create, let's say, new audiences or refine the audience that they're currently targeting so they can try to drive deals from pipeline to close with this. Type of intelligence. And the other was, you know, a little unexpected for me, which was the impact for, let's call it like brand marketers or those with upper funnel goals. So I expected that like this was going to be a hit with demand gen marketers. Great. You can see how stuff is converting to these CRM outcomes and you can drive, you know, your campaigns to be more efficient from there. Brand, we have so many verbatims from customers saying like, This makes the case for my brand investment because rather than just looking at like impressions and reach as kind of my standards for success, I can now think about the concept of like on-target, you know, reach and engagement, right? Did I get in front of a priority account that I wanted to and how much did it cost to do so? So being able to win new budgets, you know, kind of within the month that this data was provided for brand advertising, which was crazy exciting to me.

Chris, how about you?

Oh, sorry.

No, just reflecting. It's like, I think I approached LinkedIn about 18 months ago because we had this tracking pixel to solve view-through attribution. And my whole message was, and I'm obviously preaching to the choir, I'm like, you guys are generating so much engagement and not getting credit for it. Nobody's getting credit for it because it's sitting in this direct bucket. And while the A tracking pixel wouldn't work for various privacy reasons. There was discussions around an API in development. So that's how this all came to be. And solving view-through attribution, you can't just do it with one channel. It has to be solved across all channels so that it is kind of a source of truth.

Right.

But to Emily's point, the factors we're seeing are like 3 or 4x when you consider view-through. And the other key factor is targeting efficiency, like what percentage of these companies are in my addressable market. And you'll see huge differences of looking at LinkedIn social versus paid search, for example, which is also a great intent signal. But if 80% of those clicks aren't from companies that will ever buy anything, You got to factor that into your cost per target account.

Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting, Emily, you brought up 2 things that really caught my attention. One was the ability to like speed and agility. Like this gives these teams who are prepared for it. I'm not sure that everyone is, but they can move quickly. Like they can see results and move quickly. It's one of the, like, that's huge. And then I'm sort of blown away about this, like to you, like I'm surprised about the connection to brand. Um, like how, how is, are you expecting that now as you go into like, start talking about this with other people? Like, are you expecting this to help with like budget, especially as we're going into like budget season, right? People are planning for next year. Like, how are you, are people starting to use this for their budgeting, both for brand and demand stuff now?

Yeah, we've seen, so for demand, you know, that's kind of again where I expected this to hit and to be a super useful marketing tool. So what we've seen is people want to make quick optimizations, right? And that normally looks like shifting budgets around from channel to channel based on this data. The other would be deploying net new audiences or refining, you know, an existing audience. Those are both kind of like demand-centric budgeting, you know, approaches. For brand, what we've seen is like, you know, brand tends to be forecasted, how much budget do I need based on region frequency? And so.

Yeah.

Now, rather than just thinking about, again, an eyeball is an eyeball is an eyeball, where that's the way you're forecasting how many total individuals can I reach, we've seen the concept of like on-target reach being used as the baseline for brand budgets, right? So the first movement that I saw was people saying, oh my gosh, brand is working better than I thought it was. Okay, I should be dedicating some more budget here. The second was, I'm going to plan around this with this data as like this seed of my forecasting and my budgeting, right? How large should my audience be? Who should I be trying to get in front of? And then how much of that audience do I need to reach? What type of frequency do I need to reach them with in order to eventually drive them down funnel? So, I mean, this launched in beta earlier in the summer. It's been, you know, just a few months, but seeing both the immediate and then the longer-term budgetary movement, from both brand and demand-focused advertisers, I think is a testament to how different this type of intelligence is from what existed before and how helpful it is to a marketer.

Yeah. The other, other factor there, Emily, too, is it's not just the reach. It's, you know, given the contextual relevance of the LinkedIn platform, the level of engagement for that same audience also is way higher versus kind of a broad-based You know, display type platform.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so let's maybe shift gears a little bit to the marketing ops professionals who are out there listening or watching. If they were like, oh, this is something that would pique interest with our teams, right? What, like, what should they be doing to prepare for taking advantage of this? Chris, maybe, you know, with whether it's with Travel 99 or something else, but like, what are they like? What should they be thinking about And maybe what could they, what would you advise them to be like, how to talk about this with their marketing leaders, with their sales leaders?

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you the number one thing when they can show their CMO or their marketing leaders that spend a lot of time putting out thought leader content, that it's influencing and turning into pipe. And these are the companies, the rubber hits the road. So, and everybody gets that. And, you know, the CMOs love to see that and they haven't been able to see that before. So that's number one. I think the other piece is, you know, really taking the focus on quality of what's being generated, not volume. And that's where I keep on harping on, you know, targeting efficiency and making sure you look at view-through attribution because it, the, all the KPIs change. By 3 or 4x. So completely different than what the numbers were last year.

I just add on to that. I mean, I think there's always been an issue doing full funnel marketing, right? And so if you're able to be that kind of change agent that's able to help link different groups so that you can actually have a full funnel approach from brand to demand, tracking against the same metrics, moving companies from, you know, an engaged account to pipeline to revenue with greater efficiency than you did before. To Chris's point, something that will actually speak to dollars in and dollars out. That's a really, really powerful place to be if you can be that person. So, plus one to that, you know, impact on revenue always matters. I think being able to bring together teams around this type of data is what makes it actionable and also makes you kind of the hero internally. And I'll just plug for those you know, especially practitioners who are interested in getting a sneak peek at what this looks like and how to use it, we have kind of a bite-sized version available in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager tool. It's called Companies, and you can look at, you know, much of this data in an abbreviated form. You don't get as much of it as you do via the API in the Campaign Manager tool. So if you're wondering like, what is this account-level signal that I can see? How might I want to think about it for measurement, for activation purposes? Go ahead and play around in the campaign manager tool. As long as you have an ad account and you've spent a little bit on marketing, then you can get access to this today. And then, you know, partners like Channel 99 who are really like what's needed in order to zoom out, look at things across channels, incorporate all the signal that you need to in order to get a correct answer about what's driving what. You take it from there and you can make things even stronger.

Yeah, I, again, forgive me for being ignorant on product capabilities. And Chris, I think this bodes for, we need to do a no bullshit demo with our community so they can really see what's going on, you know, in the product and what it does when we're talking about across multi, you know, multiple channels and touchpoints, right? At the Channel 99 level. From my head, where my head is going around this idea of like, I was, I heard you say it, right? Like, hey, when, when your thought leader is making a post, I can tell, we can sort of start to understand, is that making an impact and an impression on the individuals who work at the accounts that we want to be selling to? And so, you know, that means my CMO, my CEO, my CRO, they're the ones creating content, which I think Ideally, they're the ones creating content or they have somebody helping them to create content to put it out there. And I think this starts to change the, you know, well, over a decade ago, we saw this like rise of the social media marketer. This is a totally new sort of opportunity. I think that's going to come up backed by data enabled by an API layer and what Channel 99 is doing. And I'm I'm wondering though, like, and this is probably just better suited for like an offline conversation or maybe a no bullshit demo, but I'm like, I really want the ability. Not every post is going to be about the company, right? And so I kind of want to get to a place where I imagine Channel 99 can fit in and I could say, hey, when my SVP of sales is posting, I can tag different sort of engagement types or efforts as like brand focused versus just personally focused or whatever. And then I can actually go back and say, hey, which one of these 2 is sort of making a bigger impression in the market? Because I think that stuff matters, right? Where this data layer is coming in from LinkedIn and you've got these capabilities coming in from Channel 99 and we're saying, hey, you're going to be doing all these different kinds of things. And just to start, we're going to be able to uncover something that is totally, totally new to be able to roll that up in a new way. But you're probably going to want to start going like layers deeper to be able to segment out, right? Like, well, not every post obviously is just going to be promoting the company's capabilities, right? And I kind of want to understand the difference between that. We're seeing like technologies out there that are scratching at this idea. Like this influencer marketing type of play, right? And so anyway, I would just love to get to a place where like our audience starts to think about, oh, well, how could I report back on this stuff?

Right.

And Chris, I don't know if you like from 99th perspective where you guys are at.

Well, we had—

getting a little nerdy here.

That's okay. We, I mean, we did a fairly limited pilot, but it was very clear the companies that were active in thought leadership content were by far the most efficient in generating pipeline versus their spend. It wasn't the companies necessarily just spending the most that were going to generate the highest returns. It was the ones that were also very active in putting out thought leadership content. And we're measuring this, just to be clear, at an aggregate level for the company versus individual by individual. Right, right.

Yeah, right.

Does it also— sorry, sorry, does it like really point— like, does that include though at the company level the individuals who are part of that company who are posting about that, or could it— can it vary?

I'll hit that one. So what we report on now is paid and organic engagement at the company level. For organic, it would be interactions with you as an advertiser's company page post. So if your CMO from his personal LinkedIn page is posting, right, and it's not sponsored by the brand and ties back to the brand's company page, that action is not going to be tracked. And again, paid and organic, this stuff is only at the company level. Our intention from LinkedIn is never to give data out about people, you know, individuals engaging, especially with your organic content, you know, people are not on LinkedIn to be tracked so that their, you know, organic comments, for example, get put into a bunch of paid reports.

Right.

What I think we're trying to do with this tool is help you like think about a, a 2 by 2 where you're able to kind of put brands into a few quadrants. One would be like brands that are engaging with our organic, but we're not targeting them with any paid, you know, brands that are engaging with organic and you are targeting with paid, but they're not in your CRM. There's no way Maybe sales isn't calling on them. There's no open pipeline. Then you have ones that are engaging across both, and there is you know kind of some open pipeline against. And then you might have those that are in your CRM, but you're not marketing to at all, right? So it's that type of intelligence which lets you steer your paid and organic marketing ship to its best effect. We don't want to go kind of poking around on Emily's individual post or individual comment because. Our goal is to give businesses intelligence in, you know, a way that protects the LinkedIn member experience.

Sure, that makes sense. Well, and to me, what my head goes to is like the implications, even with the metrics you described, right, in terms of understanding LinkedIn's effect on pipeline revenue. Like, if you assume that there's also individuals within that company who are both posting their own content, but also content about the company where they're at, right? Those numbers are only going to go up, right? So I think that's kind of where I was going. Well, you kind of hinted at this like a little bit, like both of you, like, but why don't we end with like, where do you see this going? Like, what's kind of, what's the, do you have any plans or vision for where these products and solutions are going to go? Whatever, pick your timeframe, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months beyond. Emily, you want to go first?

Yeah.

Yeah. Sure. I think, you know, an ideal state, and we're already seeing this start to happen today, the measurement and activation bits will become, you know, much closer connected, right? So being able to take this intelligence in and look at who's engaging with your brand and automatically make updates to your audience, LinkedIn audiences. So that you can either address, you know, those that you haven't in the past with pay that you probably should be, or optimize your audience, maybe trim some names out that, that, that you don't want to target anymore. That's kind of the first horizon, I think, for this thing. And I think longer term where we'd love to go with it is, you know, the topic that Mike brought up earlier, which is, you know, we're bringing all this account-level, company-level data into a platform like Channel 99, who does great measurement, then bringing back some of that signal to LinkedIn again. at the company totally aggregate level so that we can optimize our machine to be most efficient at driving those outcomes for the buyer. And I think that's in everybody's best interest so long as it can be done in a privacy protected way, which is, you know, the core of this solution.

Yeah. And just to, I was just gonna say almost the same thing, like audience activation and having Audiences that are dynamic by nature. So if an account is in my addressable market but not in my pipeline, I may want to push that audience or that list of companies to my SDR team to call into, versus if they are in my pipeline, I might want to retarget to the buyer groups on LinkedIn. And these audiences change daily. Especially if you're a large company and have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people per month. month coming and to set it and forget it and have all this stuff automated is, it's, you know, that's gonna be amazing for marketers. And the other piece to Emily's point, like pushing other signals back to LinkedIn so it further refines their engine. So all the better.

Terrific. Wow. It feels like we just scratched the surface, but I think we're gonna have to call it a day. So first off, Mike, thanks for joining again. I'm looking forward to this. Emily, Chris, thank you so much. It's been fun. If folks want to— this is going to be— I know where this question is going to go, but if folks want to keep up with what you all are talking about or what you're doing, what's the best place for them to do that?

It would be LinkedIn.

Yeah.

They're interested in joining the partner program as well.

Got it.

And I would say channel99.com. And I'd also say that Emily and I are going to be presenting at the MOPSA conference later this month, so love to have you guys attend.

Awesome.

We're looking forward to that one. Uh, thank you both for joining today. It was fun to talk to you, and we'll go a little deeper at MOPSA on, on some of these capabilities. I think, um, some sneak peeks are in order and all that stuff. So if you haven't registered, folks, uh, grab your ticket. It'll be a good one.

That's right. All right. Thanks to you again, everyone. Uh, thanks for our audience for continuing support us. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, as always, you can reach out to Mike, Naomi, or me, and we'd be happy to talk to you about it. Till next time, bye everybody.