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When Federico Mobilia joined Depthfirst as Marketing Lead to run paid media, he ran into three problems:
1. List building took too long: He managed 30+ Salesforce reports, exported CSVs, and manually uploaded lists into LinkedIn's campaign manager.
2. Lists weren’t getting updated which wasted spend: They kept paying to reach current customers and open opportunities, because his exclusion and suppression lists were too time-consuming to keep updated.
3. Match rates were poor so he was stuck on one channel: LinkedIn matched at 65%, so about 3,500 of every 10,000 leads were unusable. They couldn't expand to platforms like Google, where his emails wouldn't match.
Performance marketers, growth marketers, and demand gen specialists hit these three problems every day. Clay Ads fixes all three. It gives marketers one place to build dynamic audiences from first- and third-party data, keep those audiences updated automatically, and improve the odds the right people see the ad.
Paid Ads budgets are growing faster than efficiency
These problems compound as paid budgets grow. Marketing dollars are pouring into paid ads as other channels get noisier, and performance marketers are under pressure to scale spend and spend it well at the same time. Adding money to existing campaigns hits diminishing returns, because you're spending against a fixed pool of people.
Spending efficiently means growing the pool of fresh, qualified people faster than you grow the budget. Clay Ads makes that the default.
How Clay Ads Works
Clay Ads includes several new capabilities:
- Ad Audiences built from Clay Audiences: Build ad audiences from the unified data layer connected to your CRM, data warehouse, signals, and 200+ data providers
- Enhanced Matching: Enrich each contact with up to 3 hashed emails across multiple providers so platforms have more to match against
- New ad destinations: Sync to Vibe.co, Bing, and Reddit alongside LinkedIn, Meta, and Google.
- Built in compliance logic across platforms and geos: Build EU audiences from first-party data, with opt-outs that auto-update across ad platforms
- A cleaner interface for building and syncing audiences.
The Advantages of Clay Ads
Build audiences from all your data in one place
Clay Ads builds audiences from your CRM, data warehouse, CSVs, and Clay's data marketplace of 200+ providers, all inside Clay Audiences. Filter each list across first- and third-party fields to define exactly who belongs, then sync across LinkedIn, Meta, Google, Bing, Vibe, and Reddit automatically.
Because every audience lives on the same data layer, one place runs all your plays — nurture campaigns, new TAM sourcing, ABM, and suppression — instead of a separate export for each. Your audiences stay aligned with what sales and marketing already know about every account.
Audiences that stay current as your pipeline moves
Your audiences update on their own as your data changes. When a contact meets your filters, they join the audience. When they no longer fit, they drop out.
Suppression lists works the same way: customers, open opportunities, competitors, and employees fall out of your prospecting audiences without a manual reconciliation, down to the individual contact. Clay runs full replacement syncs as often as every two days, so a closed-won account leaves your prospecting audience within about two days of closing.
Reach more of your list with Enhanced Matching
Ad platforms match best on personal emails. A list of work emails gives them little to match on, which is why B2B audiences often land at 30–40% out of the box.
Hashed emails give you a less expensive way to match. They let you match contacts to platforms like Meta and Google without exposing anyone's personal contact information.
Enhanced Matching takes a LinkedIn URL or work email, queries several Clay-managed providers at once, and returns up to three hashed personal emails per contact. More identifiers give the platforms more surface area to find a match. With Enhanced Matching, match rates reach up to 95% on LinkedIn, 85% on Google, and 70% on Meta.
Use Cases of Clay Ads
Targeted plays
Put ad spend behind the accounts your sales team is working. Build audiences directly from your CRM, data warehouse, or a CSV and keep them in sync, so your ads follow the same accounts your reps are prioritizing.
ABM
Build dynamic Tier 1,2, and 3 audiences from account data and run different creative per tier on Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, with employees, competitors, and customers suppressed automatically.
Lookalike audience building
Find and enrich lookalikes of your best-fit customers using 200+ data providers and then run enhanced matching to find hashed emails. The result is a high-quality, cleanly matched seed audience to train lookalike algorithms across platforms like Meta and LinkedIn.
Always-on suppression
Stop paying to show ads to people who shouldn't see them. Build always-on exclusion lists from your CRM or data warehouse. When you get new customers, opportunities, or employees your suppression audiences adjust and re-sync across ad platforms.
TAM expansion
Build audiences of in-market accounts that aren’t in your CRM yet from 200+ data providers and find contacts across the entire buying committee. Enrich and verify the contacts, and continuously sync them to platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, and Google with global compliance (like GDPR) built in.
Signal-based retargeting
Add leads from first and third party signals, like attending a webinar, speaking with a sales rep, or social listening signals, into an always-current warm audience that syncs across your ad platforms and sequencer.
Examples of Customer Successes
Depthfirst
After moving to Clay, Federico builds audiences from live rep activity and ties a 4,000–5,000-contact top-of-funnel warming audience to the accounts your sales team is working, with hundreds of accounts excluded through dynamic lists. Google customer-list uploads brought 30–50% lower CPL, and his targeting is precise enough that he'll pay 5x the CPM ($600 versus $120) on his best prospecting audiences.
Northbeam
Northbeam builds all the ad audiences in Clay running Lookalikes on Meta, Tiered ABM, and TAM sourcing. Match rates moved to 50%+ across Meta, LinkedIn, and Google, up from as low as 20%. On the same budget, qualified leads went from 2–3 a week to about 15 with CPLs flat, and a Meta lookalike built on a Clay seed audience drove 5x the SQLs. Pipeline from paid doubled year over year.
Get Started
Clay Ads is available on Clay’s Growth and Enterprise plans. Build your first audience and run Enhanced Matching — match rates improve on the first sync.
Start using it here.
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