Metadata Activates G2 Buyer Intent and Lowers CPL by 42%

Sometimes new marketing platforms pose frustrating constraints. But if you’re anything like Metadata, you’ll resourcefully work around these challenges to accomplish your goals.

Metadata is a demand generation platform that launches paid campaign experiments and self-optimizes them to revenue. The platform uses AI and machine learning to automate the time-consuming parts of campaigns so marketers can forego mundane tasks and focus on targeting and strategy. 

Like other innovative brands, Metadata is not afraid to try their hand at new marketing and advertising strategies. In fact, the company was an early adopter of LinkedIn Conversation Ads, effectively leveraging the platform to connect with prospective customers. 

But despite early success, Metadata’s campaigns soon hit a wall due to the new ad platform’s limitations. 

Metadata quickly pivoted to focus on building better audiences and enhancing paid campaigns. Rather than place high bets on stale audiences, the company set out to find reliable ways to identify in-market buyers, lower campaign costs, and improve overall ad performance.

The secret to optimizing ad performance

Last year, the Metadata marketing team began using LinkedIn Conversation Ads to generate qualified demo requests for its sales team. The new strategy was an instant hit, generating over 2,000 demo requests and driving five times the ROI over the course of a year. 

Unfortunately, Metadata was unable to further improve and optimize these campaigns without innovating. 

Jason Widup, Vice President of Marketing at Metadata, reflects on these challenges: “When you enter a new market, you have to experiment, optimize, and constantly be looking at data feedback.” 

Widup continues, “But because it’s a new ad format, LinkedIn Conversation Ads don’t have many benchmarks or historical data to optimize against.” 

Metadata used cold audiences in LinkedIn based on demographic and firmographic data. The challenge was, that data lacked more granular information outside of high-level job title, industry, and market segments. 

Without deeper insights from technographic data, Metadata had no indication that their target audience was actually in-market to buy.

When Metadata started running LinkedIn Conversation Ads, they spent between $80 and $90 per lead. After a year of running campaigns and exhausting audience segments, the company’s CPL grew as high as $200.  

To decrease out-of-range CPLs and increase conversions, Metadata decided to move on from cold audiences and incorporate intent data to target in-market buyers.

Integrating G2 Buyer Intent with Metadata’s demand gen platform

Metadata knew they wanted a vendor that didn’t solely rely on IP lookup, a common way intent providers track companies’ research activity online. Instead, Metadata needed deeper insights into their target audience’s behavior and buying intent.

That’s where G2 comes in. Metadata already knew G2 as a trusted source for B2B software research and reviews that could also deliver specific intent data on potential in-market buyers. 

G2’s first-party intent data gives Metadata access to companies that looked at Metadata’s G2 profile page, a competitor’s page, or the various software category pages Metadata is listed on.

However, simply having account-level intent signals doesn’t always translate to getting in front of the right people. 

Metadata uses its own platform to build audiences surfaced by G2 Buyer Intent, and then layers on other attributes like job title, industry, and company size. This allows them to activate G2 intent data in real-time by automatically serving LinkedIn Conversation Ads the next day to in-market buyers.

“Intent is always changing. We need to know our intent data is fresh and automatically updated in our platform. And we can do that with G2.”

Jason Widup
VP of Marketing at Metadata

As the intent data changes, Metadata’s demand generation platform automatically pauses campaigns, updates audiences with the latest intent data, then relaunches the campaigns.

More conversions. Higher deal sizes. Lower CPL.

Metadata knew that incorporating intent data into their strategy would improve their ad campaign performance. To measure their outcomes, Widup looks at how LinkedIn Conversation Ads informed by G2 Buyer Intent compare to a control group that only uses demographic data like industry, company size, and job title. 

And let’s just say the numbers speak for themselves. 

Ads with G2 Buyer Intent had an average CPL of $108.80, compared to the control group’s $186.94 CPL. This means Metadata was able to successfully lower their CPL by 42%.

Furthermore, ads using G2 Buyer Intent saw a 12% increase in conversion rates and had an 18% higher average deal size than the control group.  

While the control group maintained a solid 60% open rate and 6.4% click-to-open rate, the G2 intent data ads surpassed these numbers with a 69% open rate and 13.7% click-to-open rate. 

This translates to a 15% higher open rate and 114% higher click-to-open rate for G2 Buyer Intent ads.

G2 Buyer Intent significantly impacted Metadata’s LinkedIn Conversation Ads performance. Metadata can now confidently invest in campaigns that target the right audience, promote pipeline, and drive more revenue – and the fact that they’re now more cost-effective is just the cherry on top. 

Sell more, more often. Get started with the most powerful intent data on the market: G2 Buyer Intent.