Account-based retargeting adsRetarget entire companies, not individual people, with dynamic ad audiences.

Account-based retargeting ads: An overview

This account-based retargeting ads playbook involves using combinations of APIs from Clearbit. These involve “looping” data to identify companies from website visitors, prospect for target stakeholders, enrich prospects, then engage. This is called the “Reveal Loop”

We’ve observed teams on Hull move lead-to-customer conversions from 1% to 6% with this strategy alone, including a 7.5X ROI (which afforded them to triple their ad spend).

Read our overview of the account-based retargeting ads strategy:

  • Why retargeting works for B2B startups
  • The six tactics we’ve seen that power this playbook
  • The five criteria for seeing success with this strategy
  • The best-fit bonus criteria for maximizing value from this strategy.
Learn more about account-based retargeting ads

First, setup tracking to give a source of IP address

You will need to enable "anonymous users" in Hull. This creates Profiles without names, emails, and other personally identifiable identifiers. For instance, it will create a complete Profile for every visitor to your website (this can create a lot of volume).

The Reveal Loop is powered by reverse IP lookup. Clearbit Reveal returns the matching company to an IP address (company offices typically share an IP making it confidently identifiable).

You want the IP address of visitors from companies engaging with your brand. You can source from tracking:

  • Website traffic with Hull.js, Segment, Intercom, and more.
  • Any link click across sales emails, social, ads, and more with the URL Shortener
  • Any partner site or API that provides an IP address (but not an email address) that you can capture with webhooks or the Processor.

Once you've setup tracking sources into Hull, you'll find Profiles populating with IP address data. These will all create or update a trait Last Known IP.

Next, sync anonymous users to Clearbit Reveal

Once you've got IP address data flowing into Hull, you need to sync the "anonymous users" to Clearbit Reveal.

For maximum value, Reveal all your web traffic. However, you may also want to limit Revealed traffic to certain actions and engagement (like visiting your Pricing page). Create and save a segment in Hull based on page views where URL contains (or any other event property). For the example, let's call this Anonymous Visitors

Go to the Clearbit integration settings in Hull and configure Reveal. Whitelist segments to sync to Clearbit Reveal and return a company name.

Where Clearbit Reveal has data for that IP, your anonymous visitor profiles will now be enriched with:

  • Company Name + Domain name
  • 30+ data points on the company
  • Revealed at timestamp in their event timeline

Check if revealed accounts are eligible for prospecting

You want to avoid prospecting and engaging existing customers, opportunities, partners & competitors. To check this, we need to match against existing records for these accounts - typically in your CRM or backend database.

Connect your backend SQL database and CRM such as Salesforce or HubSpot CRM to Hull, and fetch all your accounts together with their status (e.g. "Customer"). For instance, you may have Lifecycle stage Is Partner Is Competitor in your CRM to match your domains against.

Create and save a segment Eligible for prospecting

  • Revealed at: Has any value
  • Domain name: Has any value
  • Lifecycle stage: Is not equal to "Customer" "Opportunity"
  • Is Partner: No
  • Is Competitor: No

Qualify and score accounts automatically

Segments like Eligible for prospecting Newsletter subscribers Demo requests may include many companies that are a bad fit for you. Instead of wasting prospecting credits, ad budget & sales time later, first filter out the ideal target accounts.

Use segmentation only

You can also specify your exact lead qualification criteria with limitless combinations of filters in Hull's segmentation tool.

Playbook Combo: Automated Lead Qualification


Use Lead Scoring

Lead scoring typically simplifies many complex lead qualification criteria into one simple number. You can compute a lead score using all your account data (including more data enrichment sources) in Hull:

  • Sync all your scoring data to a marketing automation tool for lead scoring
  • Compute scores from all your data with plain JavaScript in Processor
  • Sync all your scoring data to a predictive lead scoring tool such as Madkudu

Playbook Combo: Universal Lead Scoring


Using lead scores and segmentation filters, create and save a segment Qualified for prospecting:

  • Is in segment: "Elgible for prospecting"
  • Customer fit segment: High
  • Fetched at: Less than 30 days ago

Create automated prospecting rules for qualified accounts

With your target list of accounts pruned and qualified, you're ready to prospect for your target roles within them.

Clearbit Prospector returns contacts that match defined roles, seniority & exact titles up to a certain number of contacts. You can trigger Prospector in Hull with a one-off manual query or by prospecting any account in a segment.

Configure Prospector in the Clearbit integration settings on Hull. Use the segment Eligible for prospecting to trigger prospection, select the number of contacts, and define the roles you wish to target.

For example Sales Marketing Operations Engineering will return prospects up from any of those departments up to the limit of leads you set.

Hull will create a unique Profile for each prospect that Clearbit returns, including name, email, phone, job role & title, seniority, and a Prospected at timestamp in their timeline.

Enrich your leads & prospects to personalize engagement

The data you have on each lead and prospect may be sparse. Instead of "making do" and sending generic, send-to-all spam to everyone, use data enrichment to fill-in-the-blanks and complete their profile so you can personalize your messaging and communication.

With enrichment providers like Clearbit, you can add 85+ data points about the person and the company from just an email address.

Create and save a segment of all your sources of leads and prospects to sync to Clearbit Enrichment Leads to Enrich:

  • Enriched at: Is unknown
  • Prospected at: Has any value
  • Email: has any value
  • Lifecycle stage: equals "Lead" "Prospect"

Hull will capture the response from Clearbit Enrichment and write it to their Profile under the "Clearbit" heading on the left hand side.

Qualify and score leads for engagement

Your leads and prospects may not line up perfectly with your true target buyers and users, or even your most effective go-to-market strategy.

With many enriched leads and prospects across a target account, you need to be able to segment them by role and seniority to engage them effectively.

At Hull, we use "buyers" and "champions". The sale comes from a more senior buyer, but there may be many supporting users and roles involved in the purchasing decision. Sales wants to talk to buyers, but values the support from champions which marketing can nurture.

For instance, use Clearbit Role Clearbit Seniority to create a segment of more senior prospects (who likely hold the buying power in your target departments) and separate from more junior "user" roles.

Create & update custom ad audiences

Use all your enriched data around your leads, prospects, and customers to create Segments in Hull to sync to Facebook Custom Audiences.

Filter users in hull with Lifecycle stage Job role Traits to target according to your campaign and creative.

Select the Hull Segments to sync through to Facebook in the Facebook Integration settings. Click save for the initial sync.

Facebook takes a few minutes to ingest and match the initial audience, then it will continuously update whenever new Users are added or removed from the Hull Segment.

Your Hull Segments will then appear in Facebook audiences with the [Hull] XXX prefix.

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