Influencing more than a third of all new pipeline contacts
Summary
I run always-on, full funnel advertising for Vattenfall across several markets and campaigns. Beyond the leads and conversions our ads generate directly, I wanted to know the real business value: how many of all new contacts we had actually reached, warmed up and engaged before they converted, wherever that happened.
1 in 3
New contacts influenced by ads
~50%
Of influenced contacts are opportunities
3
Markets: SE, FI, DK
The challenge
Buying journeys are no longer linear. Someone sees an ad on LinkedIn, then searches on Google or goes straight to the website. The ads may well be the reason, but last-touch attribution gives them no credit. Counting only the leads that came directly from ads would hide a large part of their impact.
The approach
I built a new type of influence report. I took every contact that reached Opportunity or Sales Qualified Lead in the CRM over the last 180 days, regardless of source, across Sweden, Finland and Denmark. I then matched those companies against LinkedIn's data to see which of them we had reached with paid ads in the period leading up to each conversion, looking back at least 6 months before the contact was created, and how engaged they were, based on clicks, reactions, comments, shares, video views and site visits.
The outcome
More than a third of all new contacts had been reached by our advertising before converting, with different levels of engagement along the way. About half of those influenced contacts are now opportunities, and around one in ten has already become a customer. The rest sit at lead, marketing qualified and sales qualified stages. We can't claim these leads as ours, but we can now show that the ads were part of the journey for a large share of the pipeline.
Attribution to a single channel is getting harder every year, so I always want to add more metrics, such as influenced leads, alongside the classic ones. Matching CRM data with what we see in LinkedIn gives a fairer picture of what advertising really does, and the next step is to track each market separately and introduce a new metric: cost per influenced contact.