Janhavi Nagarhalli

Imagine working hard for months to close the deal with a prospect, only for them to churn in less than a year. There could be several reasons, such as:

• Poor customer service
• Choosing a competitor's solution 
• Users not achieving their KPIs

Reducing customer churn is vital for businesses because it ensures customer satisfaction and boosts profitability. The best way to avoid high churn rates is to predetermine the customers at a churn risk. 

In this article, we'll detail how customer churn prediction is the key to reducing churn and keeping the cash flowing in 💸

What is Customer Churn Prediction?

Customer churn prediction involves analyzing data to detect customers likely to cancel subscriptions. SaaS businesses use this analysis to identify at-risk customers, leading to cost savings and improved customer lifetime value.

Analyzing churn through data-driven insights can help your business understand patterns and provide a roadmap for improvement. For example, if your surveys reveal that your platform has a complicated onboarding process – you can direct users to your onboarding specialist to assist them.

Why is Customer Churn Prediction important?

Losing customers is always costly. However, the costs involved go beyond the revenue lost from the customers who leave. It also includes the marketing expenses required to find new customers to replace the old ones. In many cases, the amount spent on acquiring a new customer is not covered by the amount paid during their time with the company. This means that customer acquisition is usually more expensive than customer retention.

Plus, unhappy customers share their experiences with others, impacting the company's reputation and customer acquisition budget. Businesses must predict churn and take action beforehand to prevent customers from leaving. 

Once you know a customer is going to churn, you can take actions such as:

• Providing more targeted re-engagement campaigns
• Launching incentives such as loyalty programs that encourage them to stay 
• Creating educational material that is tailored toward their specific needs
• Ensuring accessible and improved customer support 

How to Build a Customer Churn Prediction Model

Creating a churn prediction model can help businesses retain customers and sustain growth. Using data analytics and machine learning, companies can identify which customers are likely to leave and take action to prevent it. 

Here are the key steps to develop an effective churn prediction model ⬇️

1. Data collection and review

Ensure that the data is accurate by handling missing values, removing duplicates, and converting it into a suitable format for analysis. Before moving on to calculations, reviewing the data for accuracy and validity is crucial. Every piece of customer info is valuable in the upcoming churn calculations, so it's worth ensuring accuracy.

2. Model selection

Select an appropriate machine learning algorithm for churn prediction, such as logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, or gradient boosting machines. Split the data into training and testing sets, train the model, and tune hyperparameters to optimize performance. Evaluate the model using testing data and cross-validation. Deploy the model into production to make real-time predictions and prevent churn.

3. Use an automated predictive model

Do people with lower NPS scores tend to leave more? Are they evaluating competitor solutions? You can predict who might leave by spotting these signs in the data. You must use machine learning with a dataset containing all the information you have about customers who stayed and those who left. The algorithm learns from this historical data to understand how different factors relate to churn. Then, it can predict if future customers with similar behaviors might leave or stay.

💡Factors can help you identify customers evaluating competitor solutions by helping you track when they visit their G2 pages. 

4. Establish retention strategy

Optimize your retention strategy by prioritizing actions based on the probability of customer churn. When customers first sign up, use checklists and personalized help to ensure they understand and use the product. As they keep using it, watch out for signs they might leave. For instance, if they're not using a feature they need, you can send them helpful tips to get them back on track.

5. Track results regularly 

Continuously monitor the churn prediction model's performance and update it with new data periodically to ensure it remains effective as customer behavior evolves. Before introducing any further changes to your plan, collect enough data to measure the real impact of your efforts.

Your churn model will provide probabilities for various customer segments. It's essential to keep testing new strategies and recording the impact on these segments. While creating a mathematical model of churn requires time and resources from your team, each test can help you create a better model for the future. 

6 Customer churn prediction best practices

Now that you know how to build a churn prediction model, here are a few handy tips you must remember to prevent customer churn:

1. Segment Customers

After obtaining your data, it's time to shift your focus towards the users and begin segmenting them. Since users have distinct needs and usage patterns, they don't churn for the same reason. Hence, it's essential to categorize them into separate segments. You can segment them based on their:

• Demographics, such as location, region, company size, and the year they signed up for your company.
• Behavior and usage, such as how often they log in, whether they use a particular feature more or less, or whether they have completed the onboarding process.
• Contract terms include pricing plans and whether customers signed up for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly deal.

You can design retention strategies and marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments by segmenting customers based on their churn likelihood and characteristics. Domain knowledge or clustering techniques can help you define meaningful segments.

2. Monitor product usage data of existing customers

Product usage data captures how and when customers use your software. Important data points include feature usage, customer behavior, clicks, and other metrics such as time-to-value and product stickiness.

To build an effective model, it's important to consider some key product usage data points such as:

• Monitor feature usage data to show users' engagement with your product's features, indicating popularity and relevance.
• Observe users’ actions within your product, like when they use it, how long they use it, which features they engage with, and how they progress through it.
• Track the number of times a user clicks or interacts with a UI element, such as a button, checkbox, text area, or menu.
• Track other product usage data such as time-to-value, product stickiness, interactions, and more.

3. Keep an eye on customer success metrics

Understanding your users' success with your product is crucial in determining if they will continue using it. Surveys such as NPS and CSAT can be used to measure customer success. An NPS score of less than 7 or 8 means you may need a win-back campaign or value incentive to change their attitude towards your product. NPS measures loyalty and willingness to recommend, while CSAT measures customer satisfaction. Conduct these surveys periodically to track customer success and satisfaction.

4. Gather customer feedback regularly

Apart from gathering feedback through conventional ways, you can use various other forms of customer feedback to gain insights into their experience with your product or service. For example, in-app surveys can provide you with contextual input from users. You can use them to find out about your customer's overall satisfaction with your product, their experience with a particular feature, any issues they may have faced, or even the features they would like you to add or implement. This can be very helpful in understanding the general sentiment of users and identifying areas of improvement or strengths.

To promptly address issues and demonstrate responsiveness to user input, incorporate real-time feedback loops within your product. Acknowledge the feedback received through in-app surveys and communicate any actions taken to address user concerns.

5. Enhance customer experience

You can streamline the customer experience using automated onboarding, self-service options, and personalized support. Furthermore, you should use customer feedback to identify areas of improvement and proactively address any customer dissatisfaction rather than reacting after the fact.

6. Improve customer service

Respond promptly to inquiries and complaints, offer helpful advice, and measure performance using metrics like support tickets, call center response times, and social media interactions. Monitor these metrics to gain insights into customer service trends and effectiveness.

Wrapping up

Reducing customer churn is crucial for businesses as it directly impacts long-term revenue, customer loyalty, and overall business stability. However, understanding why customers leave requires analyzing data and tracking various metrics over time. Effective churn analysis involves monitoring overall customer turnover rates and identifying factors contributing to attrition.

Businesses can use advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to identify potential churners and implement targeted retention strategies.

If you still spend time randomly sending emails to prospects in your account list with a generic pitch slap, you’re selling wrong. An effective sales strategy is all about driving consideration for high-intent prospects at the right time with the right pitch, whether they’ve just signed up, completed a demo, or are suddenly showing interest in your product again. 

However, the major hurdle is the tedious process of manually finding contact data, syncing CRMs, and personalizing emails for every prospect on the list. 

Enter: Automation. 

A sales automation workflow helps busy sales teams turn prospects into pipeline by streamlining business processes and ensuring that you reach out to prospects promptly. 

In this article, we explain the different types of automation workflows we can create for your sales teams ⬇️

Creating sales automation workflows using Factors: Case Study 

At Factors, we create custom workflows for customers to simplify data transfer so that their sales teams can effectively act on the data. For this, we make these signals available in the format that the salesperson needs in the tool of their choice. Here’s an example of a workflow we set up for a CreativeOps company:

This workflow demonstrates the process of transferring Factors data to create a contact in HubSpot, which is then pushed to Apollo to be added to their email sequences. 

The Problem

Our customer wanted to ensure their salespeople could promptly act on these signals to build pipeline. Since they used HubSpot and Apollo, they requested a custom workflow that could sync new leads from the accounts that Factors identified on their website and organize this data in a specific way such that all accounts received personalized emails based on the deal stage. For example, if 50 companies visit the customer’s website, they want to automate the process of identifying their leads from each account and adding them to their outreach sequences. To accomplish this, we built a custom workflow with 4 different criteria to streamline their outbound efforts.

The Solution

We used webhooks and make.com to create multiple workflows for the following scenarios:

1. The account identified is a new company
2. The account is an existing company in the CRM that was identified as “closed lost.”
3. Existing company in the CRM but with no deal associated 
4. The contact doesn’t exist in the CRM 

💡Learn more about using Webhooks with Make.com

Here’s a detailed explanation of how each of the above workflows operates:

1. The account identified is a new company

The first branch involves identifying the new account and creating a new company on HubSpot. While Factors cannot identify user-level data due to privacy concerns, we can potentially identify the leads associated with the account via job titles. 

The brand has included 25 job titles under its ICP, so now, our customer can automatically identify relevant contact data via Apollo, add the email IDs to their CRM, and send out outreach emails based on their website activity (e.g., visited paid landing page, pricing page, etc.). 

💡Factors allows you to send personalized outreach emails to your prospects based on how they engage with your brand. 

2. The account is an existing company in the CRM 

We set up this workflow branch to identify leads who visited the website after getting marked as “closed lost” on Hubspot. Here’s how you can set up the filter on Make.com: 

The customer wanted to re-engage with closed, lost accounts older than 90 days. In this case, we again re-route to Apollo to identify and add potentially new leads associated with the account to an email sequence. The workflow also automatically adds the existing contacts from Hubspot to the sequence. 

3. Existing company in the CRM but with no deal associated

This part of the workflow follows a similar process to the one mentioned above, with the only difference being that we automate contact creation on HubSpot as an additional step.

4. No contact exists in their CRM

We set up a filter to identify accounts that visit the company’s website but aren’t associated with any contacts in HubSpot.

In this case, we automate identifying leads via Apollo and update contacts on HubSpot before pushing them to an email sequence. 

The Result

Our workflows simplified their outbound process. Instead of manually identifying accounts by deal stage and writing out emails, they could effortlessly send personalized email sequences automatically via Apollo while simultaneously identifying and updating new leads within their CRM. 

Build stellar workflow automations with Factors

Every company's sales team operates differently and has multiple tools in its tech stack. Instead of having your account data in messy and disparate systems, it’s critical to have a custom workflow that saves you the time and effort spent on sales outreach. 

Factors’ sales automation workflows are a boon for busy sales teams who want to skip tedious tasks and focus on generating revenue for the company. We create customized workflows that integrate with the right tools and use your data to its maximum potential. Speak to our team today to understand how you can automate your business processes with Factors.

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If you’ve landed on this article, chances are you’re looking for an intent data tool to improve your marketing efforts and drive pipeline for your company. 

While Koala is a great tool for beginners to experiment with intent-based marketing, many other platforms offer a wider set of features that can take your marketing game to the next level.
Scroll ahead to find 7 Koala alternatives that you can consider for your business ⬇️

Why look for a Koala alternative?

Koala is an AI-powered buyer intent data platform that helps businesses identify and prioritize their most promising sales prospects based on their website interactions and engagement. The tool was launched in 2022 and is relatively new compared to other lead scoring tools in the market. 

Koala offers a range of features such as:

• Visitor identification: Identify and track how prospects interact with your website by analyzing historical pageviews, events, and form-fills.
• ICP Scoring: You can assign an ICP score based on various demographic and technographic data points, such as company size, industry, ARR, among others.  
• Intent signals and engagement scoring: Capture intent data and prioritize leads based on how engaged they are with your product.
• Alerts: Get Slack alerts when an ICP account interacts with your website.
• Automations: Sync intent signals to your CRM and route high-intent leads to the assigned sales reps. 

However, since it is a new tool, it doesn’t have all the features a marketing team might need to build out their GTM motion:

Koala offers a free plan with a 250-account limit, and its paid plans begin at $350/month.

This pricing might be steep for early-stage companies, especially when other tools on the market are cost-effective and offer more features. 

4 Factors to consider when looking for a Koala alternative

Robust integration options: Since Koala only offers integrations to Hubspot, Salesforce, and Apollo, you must look for a tool that seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack.

Custom workflow automations: Find a tool that allows you to build custom workflows that automate your sales and marketing processes across your CRMs to save time. 

AI-powered insights: Don’t just consolidate data and reports; understand the ‘why’ behind your numbers and learn how you can improve with AI-powered insights.

Extract intent data from multiple platforms: Your prospects conduct research beyond your website before they make a purchase. Invest in a solution that gives you intent signals from relevant sources such as LinkedIn, review sites, communities, and the like. 

Top 7 Koala alternatives

Want to find the right tool and boost your marketing ROI? We’ve done the research for you and compiled a list of the 7 best Koala alternatives you can browse to make the right decision.
P.S.: We’ve ranked these tools in alphabetical order to ensure impartiality. Let’s dive in 🏊

Clearbit

Clearbit is a data enrichment platform that provides businesses with intent data about their customers and prospects. The key things Clearbit does are:

• Data Enrichment: Clearbit integrates with various tools like CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and websites to automatically enrich customer and prospect data with detailed company and contact information. 
• Lead Scoring and Routing: Clearbit's data and AI-powered algorithms allow businesses to score and route leads based on fit and buying intent signals. 
• Intent Tracking: Clearbit's IP intelligence data allows businesses to identify anonymous website visitors who match their ideal customer profile and show buying intent signals.
• Dynamic Form Shortening: Clearbit can reduce form friction by automatically populating form fields with enriched data, requiring users to only provide an email address.

Why Clearbit is a good alternative to Koala

• The form-shortening feature isn’t available in Koala. 
• Clearbit has greater integration options.
• Clearbit also offers auto prospecting, a feature that’s yet to arrive in Koala.

Limitations

• Clearbit doesn’t integrate with LinkedIn, which makes it difficult to transfer data between the two platforms.
• The setup process is relatively trickier than other products.
• Users have reported that the new UX updates make the platform difficult to use. 

Pricing 

Clearbit’s pricing is currently unknown. You have to fill out a form and contact their sales team for further details. 

Factors.ai

Factors is an account intelligence and analytics platform that helps you grow pipeline by identifying sales-ready accounts and using data to create marketing campaigns that resonate with your target accounts. We have partnered with 6sense and Clearbit for industry-leading IP data, identifying up to 64% of anonymous companies.

Why Factors is a good alternative to Koala

• Factors can pull intent signals from LinkedIn and G2, which gives greater visibility into high-intent accounts considering your solution. Plus, you can unify all your account-level data from multiple sources.
• Our newest segment insights feature allows you to gain a broader understanding of how different user segments resonate with your product. 
• Factors also can help you personalize your cold outreach based on intent data, thereby taking your sales strategy to the next level.
• Use Factors to create custom workflow automations to simplify your business processes across multiple CRMs.
• The account and engagement scoring features allow you to assign a value to every interaction an ICP account has with your website. You can now prioritize accounts with high scores to close deals faster. 

Limitations

• Factors doesn’t offer information at a user level due to privacy and compliance regulations.

Pricing 

💡Learn more about our pricing here.

Leadfeeder (now Dealfront)

Leadfeeder (now known as Dealfront) is a website visitor identification tool that identifies anonymous high-intent accounts and sends them to your sales team. Combined with Echobot, Dealfront is a popular tool in the account intelligence space used by 10K+ customers worldwide. 

Why Leadfeeder is a good alternative to Koala

• If you are based in Europe, Leadfeeder is a better option for your business.
• Leadfeeder has better reporting capabilities for customers looking to go deeper into account analytics.

Limitations

• The product is limited to identifying website intent data.
• Leadfeeder does not offer funnel analytics and signal reports.
• Users have reported that they’d prefer more filters when segmenting their lead list. 

Pricing 

💡 Also read: 5 Leadfeeder Alternatives For Visitor Identification In 2024 

Lead411

Lead411 is a B2B data provider that offers buyer intent data with Bombora. They offer a set of features such as:

• Intent topics: You can classify and set between 5-25 intent topics.  
• Lead prospecting: Lead411 has an in-built prospecting tool to streamline the outbound process.
  CRM Enhancer: Automatically update your CRM with the latest data.

Why Lead411 is a good alternative to Koala

• Lead411 offers a comprehensive contact database and triple verification, a feature currently missing in Koala.
• They also offer a Chrome extension so you can identify and find phone numbers and emails in no time.
• If you’re looking for a tool to also boost your outreach, Lead411 offers multi-channel outreach and sales engagement to improve your outbound processes.

Limitations

• Users have found that even verified contacts may not be accurate at times.

• The data can be difficult to manage because the platform doesn’t have the capabilities to sort it out into multiple manageable lists.

Pricing

Snitcher

Snitcher unmasks anonymous companies visiting your website. The platform helps you understand their interests and convert them into qualified leads by tracking visitor behavior and enriching leads with details. Snitcher’s key offerings are:

• Website deanonymization: Sintcher’s “identify” turns your anonymous website traffic into actionable leads and information in real-time.
• Google Analytics enrichment: Snitcher adds context to Google Analytics data by enriching the numbers with company identifications. 
• Lead segmentation: You can segment your leads into audiences and run relevant marketing campaigns.

Why Snitcher is a good alternative to Koala

• Snitcher’s white label service is great for agencies who want to provide their clients’ sales teams with high-quality leads.
• Snithcer gives you a deeper insight into how you can optimize your ad spend across LinkedIn, Google and Facebook.
  

Limitations

• Users have reported that the filtering setup can be improved to navigate the platform easily.

• The pricing is higher than most account intelligence tools since they charge with usage-based pricing

Pricing

Warmly

Warmly is an AI-powered sales orchestration tool that offers website identification and allows you to tailor your outreach based on intent data. It offers multiple features such as:

• Autonomous Sales Orchestration: Capture buyer intent to personalize engagement across email, LinkedIn, and live chat.
• Scales Sales Capacity: Allows engaging with every target account visiting the website via multi-threaded conversations without needing to add headcount.
• Orchestrates Tech Stack: Consolidates tools, workflows, and actions to instantly capture decision-makers’ interest by integrating with Warmly.
• AI Chatbots: AI Chat automatically scrapes your account’s website information to create personalized, proactive chat messages to prospects.

Why Warmly is a good alternative to Koala

• Warmly is a better Koala alternative if your SDRs and AEs are looking to improve their sales game 
• Koala lacks the AI chatbot feature, which can play a major role in closing deals on behalf of your sales teams

Limitations

• If you’re looking for a product with more marketing-related use cases, Warmly may not be the best option. 
• The pricing is higher than most of the tools on this list. Users have stated that it’s a huge jump from the free plan

Pricing 

💡Also read: Top 10 Warmly.AI Alternatives | Compare Pros, Cons & Pricing 

Zoominfo 

Zoominfo is a comprehensive B2B contact enrichment and analytics solution that offers a suite of products for sales and marketing teams. You can use Sales OS and Marketing OS to find high-intent prospects and send personalized outbound campaigns. 

Why Zoominfo is a good alternative to Koala

• Zoominfo offers data enrichment services, a feature that’s currently missing in Koala
• They offer conversation intelligence to help sales teams analyze every demo call and refine their sales strategy accordingly.  

Limitations

• Multiple users on G2 have stated that the tool has a steep learning curve, which isn’t ideal for agile marketing teams who want to use the platform for their day-to-day activities
• The contacts provided by the tool could be outdated, thus hampering your outreach efforts

Pricing 

Since Zoominfo doesn’t publicly display its pricing, you can learn about it here: ZoomInfo Pricing, Alternatives & Overview | 2024 

Choose the best Koala alternative today

Investing in intent data software depends on your company's needs. SMBs who are new to account intelligence may prefer a slimmed-down platform like Koala. However, if you’re looking to create a well-rounded GTM strategy while aligning your sales and marketing efforts, Factors.ai is the one for you.

Speak to our team today to find out how you can best use intent data for your marketing campaigns. 

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The current state of B2B LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn is the place for B2B marketers to engage with key accounts and decision-makers. Unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has a large user base of professional users who include precise details of job title, seniority, and department. 

Simply put, LinkedIn is the perfect place to run ABM campaigns that educate the market about the problem you solve and how you solve it best. Whether you’re a small startup looking to promote your product to a new market segment or an enterprise aiming to build brand awareness, LinkedIn is the key. 

And while there’s no doubt that LinkedIn ads can help you attract high-qualified leads, there could be a few reasons why your leadership team might be skeptical of LinkedIn as a marketing channel:

1. LinkedIn ads are expensive: As of 2024, the average CPC of LinkedIn ads ranges from $4 to $6, which is relatively pricier for SMBs looking to add LinkedIn to their marketing strategy. The CPMs could also be higher, depending on how niche your audience is. 

2. Hard to measure ROI: LinkedIn only tracks ad clicks and impressions, which doesn’t give a complete view of how your ads impact pipeline. One such example includes demo ads, where marketers typically face low conversion rates, mainly because users are less likely to sign up for a demo call while scrolling through social media. 

3. Limited control over how you show your ads: LinkedIn campaign manager allows you to upload a target account list for your ABM campaigns. However, if you want to show your ads to specific accounts showing higher intent and aren’t present in your CRM, it’s an uphill battle of scouring your tech stack and integrating data to ensure your ads are displayed to the right accounts. 

So, does this mean LinkedIn ads aren’t worth it? No, quite the opposite. ❌

Ignoring the channel altogether is a major risk, as you’ll miss out on many high-value deals. While other platforms, such as Google ads, help convert 5% of the in-market buyers, you’ll still lose out on 95% of the opportunities by not directly engaging with key stakeholders.

Source: LinkedIn

How to do LinkedIn ads the right way?

If you want to make the most bang for your buck, invest in a solution that gives you a complete view of how LinkedIn impacts your revenue and helps you optimize your spend. 

At Factors, we currently offer LinkedIn attribution, which allows you to track how LinkedIn influences pipeline, but now we've decided to take it up a notch!

Presenting: AdPilot

AdPilot finally answers every B2B marketer's long-standing question: “Are we doing LinkedIn ads right?” We’ve built out an exciting set of features that can help you generate 2x ROI from your ad campaigns: 

Audience Builder

Manually building lists across Apollo and Zoominfo is tiring, and you also tend to miss out on accounts with high buying intent. Not to mention, your data is spread out across multiple tools. With our new Audience sync feature, you can sync all your data across multiple platforms to create accurate audiences on LinkedIn and target the right accounts without the extra effort. 

Smart Reach

Naturally, your audience list will include companies of varying sizes, and some are bigger than others. We audited 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts and found that 80% of your ad impressions are taken up by the top 10% of the accounts. Why miss out on potential revenue with this lopsided distribution of impressions?

With Smart Reach, you have all the power. You can control how ads are shown to your audiences so that every account on your list has the chance to view your ads and make the right buying decisions. 

💡Learn more about our research here: Resolving LinkedIn’s Frequency Capping Paradox

Campaign Automation

Advertising is all about pitching your product to the right people, be it online or offline. Instead of displaying your ads to prospects who aren’t currently looking for a solution, use intent-based impression control and allocate your ad budget accordingly to target high-intent and in-market buyers. 

LinkedIn True ROI

Do you remember the last time you clicked on a LinkedIn ad and booked a demo straight away? Neither can we because social media channels like LinkedIn never show the complete picture of how prospects make their buying decisions. So, how do you prove LinkedIn’s true ROI to leadership?
Since every ad click doesn’t equal revenue, Factors offers view-through attribution. This gives you a granular view of how target accounts view your ads and interact with your website, giving you an accurate idea of how LinkedIn affects revenue generation.  

💡You can learn more here: Measuring LinkedIn True ROI: Click vs View-through Attribution

LinkedIn CAPI

When you’re A/B testing your ads and finally find success, you naturally want to repeat the process and continue getting positive results. 

As a LinkedIn Marketing Partner, we could always pull LinkedIn data into factors for better reporting, but with the new LinkedIn CAPI integration, you can send conversion data back to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Now, you no longer need to rely on guesswork to scale and optimize your ad campaigns. 

Join the waitlist today

No marketer likes to see their ad budget wasted on unqualified leads. Quit letting siloed data and inaccurate audience lists get in the way of your ad performance. With AdPilot, you can use data-driven insights to effectively target the right accounts and boost your LinkedIn ROI in no time. Speak to our team today to learn how AdPilot can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.

When you think of launching an ABM campaign, it’s natural to consider running LinkedIn ads. All you need to do is build and upload an audience list of your target accounts and launch your ads… right? Unfortunately, creating audience lists isn’t a walk in the park. 

Your ability to maximize the value of your ads depends heavily on how you target them. If you want to build the perfect audience list, you need to look through mountains of data across multiple tools and Excel sheets while manually categorizing it according to your campaign goals. 

Luckily, we have “Audience Builder” to prevent you from wasting your money.

In this article, we’ll show you how using Audience Builder is an effective way for you to target your audience on LinkedIn 🎯 

Audience targeting: why the old way doesn’t work 

Marketers typically build multiple audience lists for several different marketing initiatives, such as:

• ICP lists
• ABM lists
• Retargeting lists
• Webinar lists
• Intent data lists
• SDR lists, etc. 

You might rely on LinkedIn’s native targeting filters to build your target account list. However, this comes with a set of challenges, such as: 

• LinkedIn native targeting filters don’t include intent data, making it difficult to specifically target high-intent accounts 
• LinkedIn’s job titles and industry tags are still being updated, so you might unintentionally target accounts that don’t fall under your ICP. 

Of course, you can also build target account lists outside the platform via Apollo or Zoominfo and upload them to Campaign Manager. However, building out and vetting this list while sorting through different data sets would be time-consuming. Let’s say you want to build a list excluding your existing customers or those who have already signed up for a demo. It becomes tedious to scope out and filter every single account. Plus, you also have to continuously update this list every day according to when prospects book demos. 

Now that’s A LOT ☠️

Abhishek at Descope explains why they faced a challenge when creating audience lists for their LinkedIn ad campaigns:

“Most tech companies have very complex buying groups with multiple stakeholders where the decision-maker and influencer differ. We were looking for a scalable way to craft the right message for the right buyer role at the right organization size without blowing the company’s budget.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

For all these reasons, you need a tool that consolidates and integrates all your account data across multiple tools and automatically creates an audience list of accounts interested in your solution. Fortunately, your search ends here!

Introducing Audience Builder 

Audience Builder allows you to build any audience from your Factors data and automatically sync these lists directly to LinkedIn. Let’s show you how: 

Segment your audience lists based on intent data

Let’s say you want to show your ads specifically to accounts who visit your pricing page. You can use the event as a trigger to add them to a LinkedIn audience. Now, you can show ads to product-aware accounts, aiming to engage them further after they've shown interest. 

You can skip the guesswork and leverage the power of intent data to target the accounts genuinely interested in your product. You avoid wasting ad spend and can have your GTM team prioritize the right prospects to meet your pipeline targets

Sync data from multiple sources 

Every marketing team uses various tools across their tech stack, each with different capabilities. However, syncing data across these tools to create an airtight audience list can be tricky. 

Let’s say you use Salesforce. Since Salesforce doesn’t have a native sync with LinkedIn, you have to manually sort and build the list before uploading it to Campaign Manager. Plus, Salesforce doesn't offer website intent data or G2 intent data, so you cannot filter accounts that are genuinely interested in your solution. That’s where Factors comes in. 

We help you unify end-to-end B2B customer journey data from G2, Linkedin, CRMs, and MAPs, giving you insights into every customer segment, their intent signals, and how to reach them effectively.

Here’s an example of how Descope uses the Audience Builder feature to build their lists:

“Factors provides granular visibility into accounts visiting our website as well as their engagement across G2 and other channels. Accordingly, we receive tons of insight into account activity without the need for form submissions or sign-ups. 

Based on this, we’ve created 3 audience segments: Top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. These audiences are pushed into LinkedIn campaigns and served tailored ads based on their sales cycle stage.”  – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope

Audience Builder use cases

Now, you can leverage every bit of GTM data to create and activate the most relevant audiences. Here are a few ways you can use this shiny new feature to supercharge your LinkedIn ads:

• US-based software companies with 500+ employees that visited the pricing page >2 times and are not in the CRM: When ICP accounts visit a high-intent page like your pricing or demo booking page, they are far more engaged than just regular website visitors. You can create a list of such accounts in your CRM and launch a retargeting campaign where you can use ads to drive consideration for your product. 

• ICP accounts that clicked on a search ad but failed to convert: Suppose a set of accounts clicked on a search ad that includes a feature keyword. You can use this data to push these accounts to a list that shows ads related to the relevant feature. Plus, you can add a condition to exclude companies who booked a demo. 

• Enterprise Software and IT services companies that engage with more than 5 pages of your G2 category: When you notice accounts engage with your G2 page, they are evaluating your solution. Create a list targeting decision-makers and launch an ad campaign highlighting your best reviews and case studies. 

• ABM target accounts that viewed LinkedIn ads and then visited the website: Prospects that visit your site after clicking an ad are likely problem-aware, so you can create an account list and add them to a sequential ad campaign to move them further down the funnel. 

Once Descope used Factors to build audience lists, they saw positive results and could easily target their ICP accounts without sifting through loads of data across their tech stack:

“Factors is already playing a key role in helping us make our LinkedIn paid spend more efficient. Even if one person from a specific account visits our website, Factors helps us target decision-makers and the larger buying committee as a whole to ensure that all the right people from a target account see our ads. Ultimately, this helps our LinkedIn ad budgets go that extra mile.”  – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Join the waitlist today

Building a solid audience list is key to targeting your ideal prospects. With AdPilot, you can use data-driven insights to effectively target the right accounts at the right time and double your LinkedIn ROI. Speak to our experts today to learn how AdPilot can revamp your LinkedIn ads strategy.

When you run an ad campaign on LinkedIn, you expect all the accounts in your audience list to view your ad, right? However, our research reveals a shocking truth: 80% of your ads are shown to only the top 10% of the accounts 🤯

The best way to avoid losing pipeline due to such uneven ad distribution is to use a tool that allows you to control how your ads are shown to your prospects and evenly distribute impressions across your target account list.  

In this article, we’ll explain how our newest feature, “Smart Reach,” can put an end to your impression distribution worries ⬇️

The Challenge

“Control is an illusion”  – a quote that most B2B marketers relate to when they launch their ad campaigns and leave it all to the algorithms to show their ads to the right people and accounts. A couple of accounts may have viewed your ad too many times, whereas many may not have seen the ad enough. 

Here’s an example to help you understand how impression frequency works on LinkedIn:

Suppose you have a target account list of 500 accounts, including SMBs and large companies, with the top 10 accounts being enterprises with 1000+ employees. Since enterprise companies have more employees that match your ICP, LinkedIn will more likely show your ads to larger companies, neglecting the rest of your account list. 

This causes a handful of issues like:

• Ad fatigue and underexposure to your ads: Since your ads aren’t evenly distributed across your account list, some prospects would face ad fatigue, whereas others may not have seen them enough.

• Losing out on potential deals: If a sufficient number of ads are not shown to the majority of your accounts, you risk missing out on high-value deals and costing your company significant opportunities.

• Wasted ad spend: If 10% of your accounts consume 80% of the impressions, there is much room for improvement in marketing efficiency.

A lack of frequency capping becomes a major problem, especially when launching brand awareness campaigns, where your main objective is to maximize reach. 

You could maneuver this issue by creating smaller audiences across different campaigns. However, the smaller the audience size for a campaign, the higher the CPMs - which again results in wasted ad spend. Not to mention, it would get increasingly tedious to manage multiple smaller campaigns. 

💡Check out our research in detail here: LinkedIn Frequency Capping: Impact Measurement

So how do you possibly win in this lose-lose situation? 2 words: Smart Reach.

“LinkedIn budgets can scale very quickly — and if you’re unsure you’re reaching the right people, you’re essentially setting your money on fire. With Smart Reach, we’ve been able to reach the largest spread of accounts visiting our website without putting too much undue weightage on larger accounts.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Introducing: Smart Reach 

Our newest feature allows you to manage the frequency with which your ads are displayed to each account, ensuring maximum reach, lower CPMs, and impact. Plus, with intent-based impression control, you can ensure that your ads are only shown to relevant and high-intent accounts. 

Here’s an example of how Descope uses Smart Reach  to improve its ad distribution:

We analyzed Descope’s LinkedIn ad metrics to examine how Smart Reach affects campaign reach and ad spend. Our research revealed that without setting a frequency cap, the ads reached 8214 accounts, and the top 25 target accounts consumed 35% of ad impressions. This led to an ad spend of approximately $4700. 

We set up a cap of 2000 impressions at an account level across all campaign groups to analyze whether there would be an impact on reach. After a month, we noticed the following improvements:

• Impressions consumed by the top 25 companies have decreased by 17% within a month.
• Descope was able to redistribute around 158,841 impressions that were earlier consumed by the top 25 companies.
• Ad spend was reduced by 22% ($1,000 less!), with CPM going down from $7 to $4
• The reach was reduced by only 6% 

This proves that Smart Reach not only saves your ad spend but also ensures that your reach remains intact. 

3 key benefits of Smart Reach 

Better reach per dollar spent 

Imagine investing a good chunk of your budget on LinkedIn ads, only to realize your ads don’t reach all the accounts in your audience list. Well, with Factors, you don’t have to imagine. Smart Reach allows you to redistribute impressions to reach more accounts per dollar spent, helping you make the most of your ad spend.

Intent-based ad distribution 

Saying that all prospects are equal sounds good in theory, but in reality, that’s not the case. Ideally, sales-ready accounts should receive more ads than others. However, after analyzing 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts, we’ve found that most ads are distributed to large companies. With Factors, you can configure Smart Reach rules so that the high-intent accounts who visit the pricing page, engage with G2 pages, open emails, etc., receive ads more frequently than others. 

Conversely, accounts that have already booked a demo or expressed negative interest in a sales email should be shown fewer ads. Factors empowers intent-based ad distribution to ensure an appropriate ad frequency for each account based on intent levels.

Avoid over and underexposure

Just like Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, there should never be too much or too little of anything, whether porridge or LinkedIn ads. Your high-intent prospects shouldn’t have to deal with seeing the same ad over and over again, but they should also see your ads enough times to consider your product for their needs. Smart Reach ensures that your impression distribution is just right – automatically showing the right frequency of ads to the right accounts. 

“Within a month of setting up our frequency capping rules with Factors, we’ve saved 216,448 ad impressions and reached the largest spread of accounts per dollar spent. We’re excited to scale this up in the future.”—Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Join the waitlist today

Every marketer launches their campaigns, hoping their ads reach all the relevant accounts at the right time. With Smart Reach, you can make it happen. Factors AdPilot offers a comprehensive range of features that ensures you make the most of your ad spend while increasing revenue via LinkedIn ads. Contact our sales team to learn how you can use AdPilot to take your LinkedIn game to the next level.