Challenge

BusinessOnline is a B2B digital marketing agency that uses a data-driven approach to both optimize performance and improve campaign ROI for B2B advertisers.

BusinessOnline uses a proprietary analytics platform, Dataweld, to connect data from different sources and create dashboards that indicate which channels offer the best cost per lead for their customers. Knowing that LinkedIn presented a massive growth opportunity for clients, the agency needed a way to validate LinkedIn’s performance both internally and with customers, at scale.

Solution

To take full advantage of the opportunities LinkedIn presented, BusinessOnline integrated LinkedIn’s Marketing APIs into their Dataweld platform. BusinessOnline was able to get the APIs up and running in a matter of weeks. These API integrations enabled the agency to create a channel performance dashboard and measure campaign performance across all marketing channels – most importantly, the impact of LinkedIn campaigns on customer lead quality and sales. Notably, BusinessOnline discovered that LinkedIn generates more qualified traffic that results in 5x higher conversion rates compared to Google AdWords, putting LinkedIn’s overall ROI at 5,290%.

BusinessOnline also leveraged LinkedIn’s APIs to create a benchmarking dashboard to measure the performance of their customers against industry averages. By doing so, they were able to more effectively prove the value of their agency services and, as a result, increase customer investment. “The most powerful tool we have to persuade customers is industry benchmarking data, and the LinkedIn APIs really allow us to tap into that,” said Ramos. “For instance, this year alone we had a 53% higher average click-through rate when compared to other advertisers on LinkedIn. This information makes a big difference to clients.”

“We’re seeing these successes with LinkedIn in B2B in large part because they allow us to precisely target individuals – by job function, by industry, by company size, by geolocation,” said Eric Ramos, director of analytics at BusinessOnline. “LinkedIn’s Marketing APIs enabled us, for the first time ever, to see which audiences have the greatest ROI potential, allowing us to achieve conversion rates that far outpace other platforms.”

Results

By integrating LinkedIn’s Marketing Analytics APIs, BusinessOnline was also able to streamline their internal reporting processes. Prior to integration, the agency manually ran daily reports through LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager as well as their own internal reporting tools. “Merging data from these two systems to create cross-channel performance reports was incredibly time consuming,” said Ramos.

The LinkedIn APIs helped BusinessOnline dramatically cut their time spent reporting by enabling them to fully automate performance reports. All told, BusinessOnline’s integration with LinkedIn’s Marketing Analytics APIs saved the agency an estimated 4-8 hours per report, adding up to over $75,000 in savings per year. It also freed up more time and resources for the agency: “The reporting dashboards that the LinkedIn APIs allowed us to create really opened up our days,” said Ramos. “Now, instead of culling reports, we can focus on developing more strategic solutions and delivering greater insights to our customers.”

The road ahead

Thanks to the successful integration with LinkedIn’s Marketing Analytics APIs, BusinessOnline is better equipped than ever to guide their customers toward smart, data-driven decisions with solid returns. And that means good returns for their business as well.  According to Ramos, “using LinkedIn’s Marketing APIs, we’ve been able to increase our clients’ LinkedIn advertising spend by at least 300% year over year, and that’s the type of performance data we like to see.”