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Improving Contact Match Rates in Clay: Tips and Troubleshooting

·Jul 31, 2025 06:36 PM·

Hey Community! I’ve been using Clay for a couple of months and really like it overall. However, I’ve noticed that when I import a list to find people, around 60–80% of the contacts are missing. Is there something I might be doing wrong or a way to improve the match rate?

5 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Improving Contact Match Rates in Clay: Tips and Troubleshooting | Clay

Asher
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Abdul W. Sadly, there’s no way around it in Clay’s ‘Find People’ functionality :( There are two limitations (Based on my previous experience)
1.
Clay can’t extract private LinkedIn Profiles
2.
Clay uses a data provider (Not sure how many), but the data is not always the freshest which explains the mismatch.
The best way might still be to use something like Apollo (Which might have a bigger database), or Sales Navigator directly. And push the contacts into Clay and mainly use Clay for enrichment.
3
Abdul S.
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Hey Abdul W. totally get what you’re saying match rate can vary depending on how clean and specific your input data is. A few quick tips that usually help:
Make sure company names and domains are accurate and standardized.
Try including job titles or LinkedIn URLs if you have them that boosts matching a lot.
Clay works best when paired with good data sources like Apollo, People Data Labs, or Clearbit
1
Andrew H.
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If you're using a LinkedIn scrape, you only get the first 2500 people.
Talha O.
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Andrew H. hi, Just to confirm: is that limit applied per individual LinkedIn search (so I could run several filtered searches and get 2,500 from each), or is there a cumulative cap across all scrapes within a time window? Curious so I can plan my segmentation strategy. Thanks!
Andrew H.
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Correct: you can run several filtered searches. Keep them to <2500 and you should be able to scrape, realizing of course that the further down each of these lists you go, the more noise you’re likely to find. (Lead 1956 is not going to be as aligned as lead 1)
1