Data discrepancy between ContactOut chrome extension and API

Introduction

• There are certain scenarios where the ContactOut Chrome Extension will return data where the API does not.

How the chrome extension works

• The ContactOut chrome extension looks at multiple pieces of data including:
  • Linkedin public URL
  • Linkedin Member ID
  • Profile details (such as current role)
• These inputs are used collectively to match ContactOut's internal data to provide contact information

Limitations of the API

• The API typically only accepts a single input, whether that is the linkedin_public_url or member_id
• Because there is only a single input, the API match rate will sometimes return no result whilstthe ContactOut chrome extension has a result.
• The API does not support URLs from salesNav or Recruiter
• For work-emails, there are 3 categories:
  1. Email addresses we have open signals for
  2. Email addresses that are engineered and verified with an SMTP check
  3. Email addresses that are engineered but have an unknown result from the SMTP check
• In category 2 and 3, it can take a number of seconds to do the verification so on the standard endpoints, please check the documentation for details on which endpoints will return the SMTP verified emails.

How to find the memberID to increase match rate on the API

1. On a linkedin profile page (can be regular, salesNav, recruiter) bring up the page source
2. Find "urn:li:member" and extract the value

Using the SearchAPI to increase match rate

1. If you have additional data points such as name + current company, you can also use the searchAPI to see if there is a match beyond the linkedin_url or member_id.