When tracking the results of a marketing investment can seem like a black box, impossible at times to know what truly drives results. This was the reality for a leading B2B SaaS company specializing in people analytics and workforce intelligence that struggled to connect its programmatic spend to qualified pipeline.
To strengthen its account-based marketing (ABM) strategy and drive more qualified engagement from senior enterprise decision-makers, the company and its agency of record, Swell Media, needed clearer proof that their investment was translating into meaningful engagement and pipeline impact.
Swell is a performance-driven media agency that helps brands grow through data-informed strategy, planning, and execution across digital channels. The company crafts media solutions rooted in research and audience insight, offering services including media strategy, paid search and social, programmatic, SEO, performance TV, and marketplace sales.
Swell’s Objectives
Swell’s approach is outcome-focused and channel-agnostic, combining industry tools, artificial intelligence (AI) innovations, and human expertise to forecast, activate, and measure campaigns aligned with core business KPIs.
Besides meeting the needs of their clients, Swell officials wanted to validate whether its incumbent programmatic partner was truly delivering the best performance for enterprise ABM. To answer that question, Swell designed a strict head-to-head test under fully controlled conditions, with identical budgets, timelines, target account lists, seniority levels, and verticals. The goal was to identify which approach could deliver stronger qualified engagement and measurable actions across the funnel.
How AI Digital Approached ABM Differently
To achieve this, enter AI Digital which offers a competitive test with a precision-focused ABM strategy built around contextual relevance, audience accuracy, and continuous optimization. AI Digital operates as an AI-native media consultancy. Built on its Open Garden framework, the company combines AI-informed optimization with hands-on strategic oversight to ensure media decisions are aligned to business outcomes rather than platform incentives.
This approach is particularly effective in enterprise ABM, where clean data, audience control, and explainable measurement are critical. In this engagement, AI Digital’s bias-free execution, continuous optimization, and disciplined testing methodology enabled a fair head-to-head comparison and delivered measurable gains in qualified engagement and conversion efficiency.
AI Digital’s campaign solution combined upper-funnel prospecting with structured retargeting to engage decision-makers throughout the buying journey— the company deploys a mix of native and video formats in contextually aligned environments to improve message resonance, while targeting focused on highly specific account segments and senior-level decision-makers across relevant industries.
The Results
Performance was tracked using multi-touch attribution, ensuring that impressions, clicks, and conversions could be directly tied to on-site actions. Additionally, ongoing optimization was supported by monthly reporting and feedback loops that refined creative, bidding, and audience strategies. AI Digital worked closely with Swell to maintain clean data, ensure audience deduplication, and preserve fair testing conditions throughout the evaluation.
The campaign outperformed the incumbent media partner across every key performance benchmark as AI Digital delivered a three times higher click-through rate, two times greater conversion efficiency, and a 25% increase in video completion rate versus benchmark.
Importantly, AI Digital’s ABM prospecting matched or exceeded retargeting performance, demonstrating stronger qualified interest earlier in the funnel and reinforcing the effectiveness of its audience modeling and contextual strategy. Based on these results, Swell awarded AI Digital the ongoing media business for the client and expanded the partnership.
“The head-to-head performance results were highly encouraging,” said Natasha Tibbetts, SVP of Media at Swell Media. “It reinforced that transparency, trust, and disciplined best practices drive data integrity.”
