INSIGHTS FROM EXPERTS ON LINKEDIN
Valentin Dimitrov points out that one small HubSpot CAPI setting can quietly strip out LinkedIn view-through data before LinkedIn even gets a chance to attribute it. His recommendation is simple: send everyone to LinkedIn and let LinkedIn decide who actually interacted with the ad, rather than letting HubSpot make that call based on UTMs and click IDs. It takes two minutes to fix, and he says almost every account he checks has the wrong option selected.
Veronika Vēbere 🐝 explains why the usual “get as many leads as possible” demand gen model doesn’t make much sense when you’re selling six-figure contracts to enterprise accounts. If only 1–5% of your target accounts are actively in market at any given time, the goal is to make the right accounts familiar with your brand and point of view so sales has a warmer door to open later. For her, marketing’s job isn’t to generate leads in isolation – it’s to create the conditions that make selling easier.
Jay Baron says his team realised there simply wasn’t enough existing demand to hit their pipeline targets, so tweaking ads, bidding and account structures wasn’t going to solve the problem. Instead, they’re rebuilding the entire marketing motion around a buyer narrative designed to create belief in a new way to win, with the same story carried across the website, sales, content, community and events. The goal is to stop pushing the product and start pulling the market toward a new way of thinking.
Adam Robinson argues that raising venture capital can put founders on a treadmill where they have to keep growing just to justify the money they’ve taken. Drawing from his own experience, he believes most founders are better off building a profitable, bootstrapped company rather than chasing huge ARR targets and giving up equity for growth that may not actually exist. Build a disruptive product, market it well, and keep as much of the business as you can.
Jamison Furr discovered that LinkedIn Message Ad open rates had been overstated from January 2025 through July 2026 because some messages were marked as opened when users simply visited LinkedIn on desktop. LinkedIn says the issue was fixed in mid-July, only affected desktop Message Ads, and historical data won’t be corrected. Jamison estimates the error may have inflated open rates by around 7 percentage points, so those impressive Message Ad open rates deserve a second look.
WHAT'S NEW IN THE INDUSTRY
Anthropic is adding invisible watermarks to Claude-generated text and C2PA metadata to files, mainly to meet EU AI Act transparency requirements. The watermark indicates that Claude processed the content, even if a person originally wrote it and only used AI for editing, translation or summarization. For brands, the bigger issue is making sure their public AI policies, contracts and claims about human-made content match how AI is actually being used.
Clay has introduced an internal AI writing policy focused less on compliance and more on making sure employees take responsibility for what they write. AI can still be used for brainstorming, drafting and proofreading, but employees are expected to understand and stand behind every sentence, while keeping documents concise and worth the reader’s time. The policy has now spread beyond engineering to the whole company, offering a more practical approach to AI use than simply banning tools or telling employees to use them more.
Google is expanding Ask Advisor across Google Ads and Analytics with AI-generated performance summaries, conversational insights and automated dashboards. Marketers can ask questions in natural language, investigate trends and generate visual reports without manually digging through multiple reports. The goal is to make campaign analysis faster while leaving the actual decisions and actions in advertisers’ hands.
Google has introduced a Campaign Data Import Validation Report to help advertisers spot missing or incomplete metrics in data imported from other ad platforms. It flags gaps in key fields such as cost, clicks and impressions, making it easier to catch reporting issues before they affect cross-channel analysis.
Google will automatically migrate existing Travel campaigns to Search campaigns for Travel starting in Q3 2026, while advertisers can also make the switch manually. The new setup brings travel formats, feeds, AI-powered bidding and reporting into a single Search-based campaign type, so advertisers should review their settings and performance before the transition.
Google is removing campaign-level language targeting from Search and AI Max campaigns in late September, leaving its systems to decide which language ads to show based on the ad language and user signals. This means advertisers will have less manual control, making clear multilingual ad copy and landing pages more important. Existing campaigns won’t require immediate changes, but advertisers should review their setups and monitor performance as the update rolls out.
That’s the scoop for this week! If you found this valuable and any useful insights caught your eye, feel free to share them with your network.
Until next week!
