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Enhanced matching does the work, but it can only work with the quality of the data you give it. This lesson has two parts: how to fill the gaps in your data before you sync, because that's what actually moves the number, and how to read the match rate correctly once it comes back.

💰 Get the LinkedIn URL

Remember the economics from the last lesson. The personal email is the expensive thing to enrich, and the hashed email is the cheap substitute.

To produce one, the providers work from what you give them: a work email or a LinkedIn URL. And the optimal input is the LinkedIn URL. It pins down exactly which person we're talking about, and filling it in is relatively cheap.

So the single highest-leverage thing you can do before you run a sync is fill your LinkedIn URL gaps. Coverage there moves the match rate more than anything else you control.

📏 Find Your Gap

Before you fix anything, find out where you stand.

1. Pull up the audience you're looking to sync.
2. Filter on LinkedIn URL is empty.
3. Read the count at the top. That number is your gap.

These are people who are already in your target audience but have no LinkedIn URL attached. In the demo we start from a segment where nobody has one, so the enrichment has something to do on every row. Your own segment will look different, and that's fine.

🔨 Fill the Gaps with Bulk Enrich

From the audience, we run a bulk enrich. Clay creates a new table scoped to that audience and pulls in 10 rows as a preview. The preview keeps setup cheap; the run itself processes everyone.

Then you walk the wizard:

1. Select the audience fields you want as columns: Name, First name, Last name, Email, and LinkedIn URL. Keep it minimal.
2. Add the enrichment. Search for LinkedIn and pick the LinkedIn URL waterfall built for Ads. The inputs map themselves, and you're ready to run.
3. Set the run condition: only run if the LinkedIn URL is empty. This is the click that makes the whole thing cheap. Everyone who already has a URL gets skipped, and you only pay to fill actual gaps.
4. Save and run on the 10 rows in the preview view.
5. Map the field back. The LinkedIn URL column in this table maps back onto the LinkedIn URL field in the audience. Because of the run condition, nothing that already had a URL was touched, so there's no overwriting to worry about.
6. Review and run. The review step shows what you're about to spend: 444 rows remaining, an estimated 2.9 credits per row, and the one enrichment you added.

From here the pipeline maintains itself. A new record joins the audience, the gap gets filled, and the next sync carries it out.

⚙️ Three Additional Settings

The review step carries three settings that are easy to skip past and worth understanding.

Auto-enrich new records: leave this on. New people joining the audience get filled in automatically, within about 15 minutes. If they don't have a LinkedIn URL, Clay fills it in for them.

Recurring enrichments: this lets you re-run on a schedule.

Credit spend limit: set one. The table pauses itself if it ever crosses the line.

🧱 Two Habits That Keep Paying

Work email is the multiplier. Some providers accept both a LinkedIn URL and a work email, and more inputs per person means more chances that one of them lands. Once you've seen how well the gaps filled on LinkedIn URL alone, you can run a second bulk enrich on work emails if you're not happy with the result.

Keep the Ads table narrow. Its one job is to pull in a list, lift the match rate, and sync out. Every other enrichment you want belongs in a separate table. A bloated ads table gets slow and confusing, and it doesn't match any better.

📖 How to Read the Number

The number comes back about two days later, and this is where most of the confusion in ads reporting lives.

Start with People sent: the number of contacts Clay attempted to send to each platform. On this example sync, that's 8,286 for LinkedIn Ads and 15,820 for Meta.

Now remember that enhanced match sends up to three hashed emails per contact. Each platform counts those differently, and that difference is where the confusion comes from:

• Meta confirms matches at the contact level. If any of the three emails hits, that's one matched contact.
• LinkedIn processes each email as its own input during ingestion, so its reporting reflects matches across those emails. The panel says so on screen: Clay sends multiple identifiers per contact, so matched count can exceed the number of contacts sent.

The key point is that every platform's number has a different denominator.

Before you compare anything, check your hashed-email coverage: how many of your contacts actually got hashed emails. Not everyone does, and that number caps everything downstream.

So when LinkedIn shows a higher number and Meta shows a lower one on the same audience, both can be right. They're answering slightly different questions.

One more nuance to Google: the identity-graph match is larger than the audience you can actually target. Only the subset currently eligible counts, meaning signed in, meeting minimum campaign requirements, and opted into personalized ads. It splits again by campaign type, so the Search audience and the Display audience are each their own subset of the matched users.

Never read a single number as the match rate. Ask what it's measured against, and check your hashed-email coverage before you blame the platform.

🔍 When the Number Comes Back Low

No ads product can tell you which specific contacts matched. Not Clay, not anyone. The platforms don't return contact-level match results at all.

So don't debug person by person, because you can't. Debug the list. Raise coverage across the whole thing, then watch how the match rate varies by segment: company size, seniority, region, to find where it's weak.

Region is a real one. The matching providers are strongest in North America, so expect lower rates outside it and send more inputs per contact to compensate.

When the number comes back low, check in this order:

1. LinkedIn URL coverage - the lever from Part 1, and the one most likely to be the problem.
2. Your region mix - a list weighted outside North America will read lower.
3. Work emails - the second enrichment to run after LinkedIn URL

🚀 What's Next

You can now build an audience, lift its match rate before it ships, and read the result that comes back without being misled by it.

Next, we'll build the audience that pays for itself fastest: an exclusion list that maintains itself.

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