Why Building a Contact List Using LinkedIn Search Off a Company List Performs Poorly

i know it’s been asked, but can someone help me understand why building a contact list using LinkedIn search off a company list performs so poorly? For example, I’ll search for a general title term like “marketing” and not get most or even any of the people in those companies with marketing titles? I’m finding that if I start with a company list, I have to then load that as a custom company list to LinkedIn Sales Nav and run the search there, extract, then move back into Clay. I must be doing something terribly wrong? https://app.clay.com/workspaces/183442/tables/t_4P8EI6DITF0d/views/gv_FvkxpPM7Dtbq

9 comments

Clay Team
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Hey Nick!! Thanks for the question!
Clay Team
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It could be due to several reasons but mainly it's likely this is it: -> LinkedIn integrations don't use your active session or cookies to find data on LinkedIn. The tradeoff is that it could miss some information here and there, especially if there are privacy restrictions in their profiles, meaning that you need to be logged into an account to see all the data, that could be a limitation set by LinkedIn or the person themselves.I did try running the search an it returned this though
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Clay Team
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Also, it's not like a "fuzzy match" as it works in LI, where if you type in VP for example, our tool will only return matches for VP and not Vice President (currently), so adding both variations or more could help increase coverage a bit for now, unless the profiles are private as mentioned before. However, if you do see an increase in the number of people you can collect with other methods, that's also an option to then get those back into Clay to further enrich them if needed.
Nick Z.
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Yeah. It’s more than that. Like, literally the vast majority of people with [marketing] in their title were not returned. Is it case sensitive? Is the titles field an OR operation or an AND?
Clay Team
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If there are more people with those titles then we're probably running into a lot of private ones. It's not case-sensitive so you should be fine there, and works like an OR statement within the same field. So a comma-separated list of titles would be "VP" OR "Vice President", but if you add other filters in other fields, those are considered AND operations, for example: Include titles: "VP" OR "Vice President" AND Exclude titles: "Assistant" OR "Sales"
Nick Z.
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Yeah. They’re not private profiles
Clay Team
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Thanks for the follow-up, Nick. Happy to check a few of them to confirm. The way this is tested has to be without being logged into LinkedIn at all (using incognito tabs are the easiest way to test this). If as soon as you open it it asks you to log in to see the full profile then that means it has been restricted or labeled private, especially if none of the fields like experience, education, and so on are visible either, unless you log in.
Nick Z.
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5% of Linkedin profiles are private. I checked. They’re not private. They’re just not coming up. Does this mean I need to take a different approach to building contact lists with Clay that ignores all the LI functionality?
Clay Team
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It may be that our data aggregators missed a few but will take a look and report. If you do find list building outside of Clay better for your use case and then just importing to further enrich them, that's also an option, some users also do this depending on the situation.The data providers that enrich LI profiles are different from the ones finding them, so if you import a LI URL, it should get enriched.