WILMINGTON, DE — LinkedIn generated higher advertising returns and larger deals than Google in a Factors.ai analysis of B2B marketing activity, with the study also finding that buyer engagement often begins months before an opportunity reaches a company’s sales pipeline.
Factors.ai said LinkedIn produced a 1.6-times return on ad spend, compared with 1.18 times for Google, while deals sourced through LinkedIn were 34% larger on average.
The findings come from proprietary, anonymized data collected through the company’s platform. One dataset covered more than 850 B2B companies representing over $150 million in LinkedIn advertising spending.
A second dataset examined more than 50,000 closed deals valued at more than $5 billion from over 100 B2B companies that integrated their customer relationship management systems with Factors.ai.
The analysis found sustained LinkedIn engagement began an average of 124 days before a deal was created in a company’s CRM, suggesting that measurements beginning with formal opportunity creation capture only part of the buyer’s activity preceding a sale.
Accounts combining paid and organic LinkedIn activity recorded win rates 10.8 percentage points above the study’s baseline.
Broader engagement within prospective customers was also associated with higher win rates. Accounts where six or more contacts engaged before deal creation recorded a 17.1-percentage-point increase in pipeline win rate compared with accounts where only one contact engaged.
The strongest role-based result involved deals where an end user, influencer and technical evaluator all participated. Those opportunities recorded a 22-percentage-point lift in win rate, according to Factors.ai.
The analysis also examined why opportunities were lost. Accounts that stopped engaging, buying groups that failed to reach a decision and sales teams that lost access to the appropriate decision-maker collectively represented 27.1% of documented lost deal value.
Competition accounted for 19.3% of lost deal value, while product gaps represented 13.5%.
Praveen Das, Factors.ai co-founder and chief marketing officer, said the company expanded its previous LinkedIn benchmarking research to examine engagement across the buyer journey.
“We wanted to take that analysis a step further and look at what happens across the buyer journey itself: when engagement begins, how it expands across the buying group, and which patterns are associated with stronger pipeline outcomes,” Das said.
The findings identify associations between engagement patterns and sales outcomes within Factors.ai’s customer data rather than establishing that LinkedIn activity itself caused the higher win rates or deal values.
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