How customers are decreasing lead CPA by 87% with Dreamdata and LinkedIn Conversions API

Editor's note: Dreamdata is a member of the LinkedIn Marketing Partner program and a certified LinkedIn Conversions API Partner. Learn more here.

“The Dreamdata to LinkedIn Conversions API connection has enabled marketing to be in the driver’s seat for budget conversations. We can now confidently track campaign impact through the entire funnel and say, ‘We can spend up to this amount and almost guarantee the results – how much budget are you willing to give us?” – Luke Fielding, Head of Demand Generation, Eftsure.

Last fall, LinkedIn released its Conversions API (CAPI) which will eventually replace their Offline Conversions API. Keen to build on the success our customers had experienced with Offline Conversions, Dreamdata participated in the CAPI beta to bring the new functionality to our joint customers as it first became available.

As a B2B Customer Data Platform powering go-to-market analytics, attribution and activation, Dreamdata is well-equipped to help B2B marketers automate, track, and leverage their conversion data. 

Our customers’ adoption of the LinkedIn CAPI has been nothing short of incredible; by the end of November 2023, we had already seen 70 customers activate. Five months later, we now have over 85% of our paid-plan customers connected and streaming offline and online conversions to LinkedIn.

But it doesn’t stop there. Despite B2B buying journeys often being very long, some of our CAPI adopters are already experiencing jaw-dropping results. (keep reading for details).

And it’s still early days.

In this post, I’m going to cover how and why Dreamdata can deliver this success through the Conversions API.

A short intro to LinkedIn Conversions API

Before we dig into how Dreamdata has been able to deliver success with LinkedIn’s CAPI, it’s worth recapping the awesomeness that is API.

If you already know about CAPI and what it does, jump over to the next section.

In a nutshell, CAPI is a method of conversion tracking that allows you to attribute your conversion data - pipeline and revenue data to you and me - back to your LinkedIn Ads.

It’s a mechanism for B2B marketers, whose down-funnel conversions happen months down the line and offline (outside LinkedIn’s Insight tag tracking), to optimize ad campaigns towards these conversions. And crucially, it’s a mechanism that allows you to do this by bypassing the less reliable (and rapidly disappearing) third-party cookie tracking.

Let’s get concrete for a sec. 

Say you’ve bought 10,000 clicks from LinkedIn. By using LinkedIn’s CAPI, you can feed LinkedIn with data on which of those clicks ended up being part of accounts that went far down your sales funnel or even became won deals months down the line.

The result of feeding this data back to the LinkedIn Ads platform is, according to LinkedIn, “stronger optimization [and] more efficient Cost Per Action”. And our early data is suggesting it’s more than just efficiency . . . more on that below.

The three ways to share conversions

LinkedIn offers three options for sending your conversion data to LinkedIn:

1. Manually through CSV files, 
2. Building a direct LinkedIn CAPI connection, or 
3. Leveraging a certified partner’s LinkedIn Conversions API connection.
   

Dreamdata is one of these certified partners, alongside Google Tag Manager, Zapier, Supermetrics, and Tealium. 

But not all options guarantee the same success. A lot depends on the go-to-market tech stack and data infrastructure you have in place.

Let’s take a look at how and why.

LinkedIn Conversions API success: a question of data quality 

CAPI’s ability to improve the quality of ad campaigns based on down-funnel conversions requires fresh and accurate conversion data to be available in the first place. No easy feat if you’re in B2B.

Accurate pipeline and revenue data

In B2B, tying marketing action to pipeline and revenue is challenging.

Whether it’s the number of touchpoints, the number of buyers (from the same accounts) or the sheer length of the journey, B2B marketers need to contend with more customer journey data points than their B2C counterparts. Data points which, to complicate matters further, live in siloed tools on the tech stack.

Let’s go over a standard B2B customer journey to illustrate the point: 

A journey might start with a key persona reading an organic post on LinkedIn.This individual might then click through a LinkedIn ad before discussing with colleagues about the solution, who in turn might then click through organic search, browse the site and blog page, and go on to book a demo or start with a free plan. They might then involve other key decision-makers and stakeholders who could then compare solutions on a review site, sign up for the newsletter, form part of demo calls, etc. before eventually buying the solution.

The data from this journey lives in the ad platforms, the analytics platform, the automation platform, the review platforms, and of course, the CRM. That’s at least six different tools.

And so we get to the ‘clean’ part of the equation.

Bringing all this data together involves more than just breaking the silos and pooling it. The data needs to be free from any duplication or errors, standardized, mapped, enriched, and modeled.

Only then can you accurately track and measure the impact your marketing activities are having.

And crucially, only then can the data be reliable enough to send over to your LinkedIn Ads campaigns for optimization.

Without clean, fresh data available, or worse, inaccurate or incomplete data on those down-funnel conversions, marketers won’t see the full benefits of CAPI for their LinkedIn campaigns.

Enter Dreamdata.

Dreamdata’s end-to-end automation

Dreamdata automates all of this out of the box. Dreamdata collects data on all the tools in your go-to-market tech stack with propriety integrations, from first-party site tracking to your ad platforms to your marketing automation tools to your CRM.

We then completely transform and model the data, to ensure that it gives us an accurate picture of what your B2B buyers are doing on their path to purchase, tracking every conversion along the pipeline. 

This is the data we then automatically feed through our LinkedIn CAPI integration.This enables us to constantly power your LinkedIn campaigns with your latest pipeline and revenue data - which LinkedIn recommends in its best-practice

“Sending events in real-time ensures that the data can be attributed and used by the campaign while it is fresh and relevant.” LinkedIn.

Finally, Dreamdata keeps this whole B2B revenue feedback loop maintained and up to date, meaning that there’s no need for developer resources on your end.

Not convinced? Of course not, so far I’ve only made a theoretical case. A powerful one, but a theoretical case nonetheless. The proof is, as always, in the pudding. And boy have we got some lovely pudding!

Success stories with Dreamdata’s LinkedIn Conversion API

The rapid adoption we’ve seen from our customers - 85% of our paid-plans customers are now on LinkedIn’s CAPI - has helped us gather before-and-after data on the impact of CAPI for some LinkedIn Ads power users. 

As I mentioned earlier, even though our customers have been using CAPI for only a few months or less and B2B customer journeys are often long, we have already seen some very impressive results.

Since activating CAPI, one of our enterprise customers has seen an increase in acquired leads of 815% with a decrease in their Cost Per Acquisition of Leads of 87%. But what’s more impressive is that this trend is also starting to be felt further down funnel, with an 80% increase in Opportunities created and a 34% decrease in the Cost Per Acquisition. “Huge” would be an understatement.

“The Dreamdata LinkedIn Conversions API connection has enabled Marketing to be in the driver’s seat for budget conversations. We can now confidently track campaign impact through the entire funnel and say, ‘We can spend up to this amount and almost guarantee the results – how much budget are you willing to give us?’” – Luke Fielding, Head of Demand Generation, Eftsure

Another customer, Screencloud, has seen a 2.6x improvement in their ROAS. 

Eftsure has seen a 40% reduction in cost per lead and an increase in their ROAS of 10%. 

“The integration between Linkedin Ads and the LinkedIn Conversions API connection via Dreamdata have surfaced valuable insights to validate our strategy of storytelling. The attribution reporting in Dreamdata has helped us to have better discussions around ROI and has made it easier to get budget approved from management.” - Niek Dekker, Head of Marketing, Eftsure

A final word

As a launch partner of LinkedIn’s CAPI, we at Dreamdata have been quick off the mark in enabling B2Bs to tap into the benefits of CAPI.

Dreamdata automatically connects conversion data directly back to LinkedIn Ads. The rapid adoption by over 85% of our paid-plan customers within five months highlights the effectiveness of this approach in enhancing the B2B marketing funnel, known for its complexity and lengthy cycles.

The tangible benefits of leveraging Dreamdata’s automation for LinkedIn's CAPI are clear, with significant improvements reported in lead generation and ad spend efficiency. For instance, Dreamdata customers have experienced up to an 87% decrease in Lead Cost Per Acquisition and an 80% increase in opportunities created. 

These outcomes are only early indicators and demonstrate the potential of Dreamdata’s LinkedIn CAPI integration. Why not see for yourself?

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