In my last post, I wrote about the risks of optimizing too hard for bottom-funnel activity and how it can quietly hollow out your future pipeline. The natural follow-up question is: if building awareness matters, how do you actually measure whether it’s working?
It’s the right question. And the honest answer is that you’ll never get perfect attribution on awareness and brand-building. But that doesn’t mean you’re flying blind.
With a handful of tools that most B2B companies already have access to, you can build a surprisingly clear picture of which companies are warming up, long before they fill in a form or reply to an email.
The problem with waiting for leads
Traditional lead-based measurement only tells you about the 5% of the market that’s ready to buy right now. Everyone else is invisible.
But invisible doesn’t mean inactive. Companies in your target market are visiting your website, reading your content, engaging with your ads and downloading your material weeks or months before they’re ready to have a conversation. If you know where to look, those signals are there, not just at the top of the funnel, but at every stage where interest starts to show.
Three tools, one picture
1. Website visitor identification: who is actually visiting your website?
Most website analytics tools tell you how many people visited a page. Tools like Leadinfo, Albacross, and Leadfeeder tell you which companies did.
In practice, this means you can see that a specific company visited your offering page three times this week, downloaded a whitepaper, and spent time on your case studies. That’s a very different signal from an anonymous traffic spike.
What to look for: companies that visit repeatedly, go deep into your content or download material. A single visit means little. A pattern of visits over two or three weeks is a strong buying signal.
2. LinkedIn Company Engagement Report: Which named accounts are paying attention?
If you’re running LinkedIn ads towards a defined list of target accounts, the Company Engagement Report shows you exactly which companies are seeing your ads and how they’re responding, down to individual company level.
What makes this particularly useful is the ability to track changes in engagement over time. A company moving from low to medium engagement, with LinkedIn flagging the trend as “Increased,” is a more actionable signal than a company that has been highly engaged for months without movement. It’s the direction of travel that matters.
LinkedIn also pre-categorizes companies into engagement lists based on a combination of paid and organic activity: highly engaged, brand-aware, engaged prospects, recently engaged, and so on. In practice, this means LinkedIn is already doing a layer of prioritization for you. A company appearing in your “highly engaged” list that wasn’t there last month is worth paying close attention to.
In a recent ABM campaign targeting named accounts across several European markets, we could see weeks before any outreach began which companies had increasing engagement levels and which individuals within those companies were responding to the content. That data went directly to sales to inform who to prioritize and why, not based on gut feel, but on observable signals.
The Demographic Report adds another layer: are you actually reaching the right job titles? Seeing that your ads are landing with CEOs, Production Managers, and Board Members is a meaningful quality signal, even if click volumes are low.
3. Content downloads as intent signals
Downloads are one of the clearest intent signals available, because they require a deliberate action. When a named account downloads a guide or a checklist, they’re telling you something.
Combined with website visitor data, you can often connect a download to a specific company even without a form submission. A company that visits your site, reads a case study, and downloads a whitepaper is a very different prospect from one that bounced after ten seconds.
Putting it together: A simple prioritisation model
The real value comes from combining these signals rather than looking at them in isolation. In practice, it looks something like this:
A company appears in your website visitor tool with three visits in two weeks, including your pricing page. The same company shows up in your LinkedIn Company Engagement Report with an increasing engagement trend. One of their employees downloaded your latest guide.
That company goes to the top of your sales outreach list, with a clear reason why: they’ve been circling you for weeks. You’re not cold calling. You’re following up on signals they’ve already sent.
What this isn’t
This approach won’t give you a clean ROI number to put in a board presentation. It won’t tell you exactly which touchpoint “caused” the eventual sale.
But it solves a more practical problem: it tells your sales team where to focus their time, and it gives you early evidence that your marketing is reaching the right people before leads start appearing in your CRM.
In B2B, where sales cycles are long and relationships matter, that early visibility is often worth more than a perfectly attributed conversion.
The takeaway
You don’t need a six-figure martech stack to measure this. You need to look in the right places and combine what you see.
Website visitor tools show you which companies are on your site and what they’re reading. LinkedIn tells you which named accounts are engaging, whether that engagement is growing, and who within those companies is paying attention. Downloads reveal active interest. Together, they give you a signal layer that tells you where demand is building before it’s ready to convert.
That’s not a perfect measurement system. But it’s a far better one than waiting for the lead form to tell you what’s already happened.
If you want to discuss effective marketing, just reach out to me.
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
