The B2B Data Cooperative (Data Co-op) and data collection methodology FAQs

Bombora's B2B Data Co-op
Bombora's Intent Data Collection Methodology
Bombora's Demographic and Firmographic Data Collection

B2B Data Co-op

An exclusive collective of over 4,000 premium vendors, analyst firms, and content syndication businesses, forward-thinking publishers, marketers, agencies, technology providers, research and event firms all benefit as members of Bombora’s B2B Data Co-op.

From the largest business media companies on the planet to the most niche special interest destinations, cooperative members receive direct access to a massive pooled data set that details business firmographics and buyer intent across the B2B web at massive scale. In return, they contribute privacy compliant, brand anonymous, visitor consumption data.

Kickstart your account-based activities with these three quick applications of Intent data.

The scale of the B2B web

Bombora’s B2B Data Co-op is the largest of its kind, ensuring a valid historical baseline delivering scale exponentially greater than any one site:

  • 7.1+ million companies content consumption monitored
  • Across over 4,000+ websites
  • 18.5 billion average monthly content consumption events

Figures for Q2 2021 (average of monthly figures from April to June)


Bombora's B2B Intent Data Collection Methodology

Bombora is the largest aggregator of B2B Intent data, an indicator of changes in business purchase intent.

Unlike B2C which tends to be an individual buying experience, the B2B buying process often comprises of buying groups across different departments of an organization. Individuals within the buying group have different priorities and may be researching across a range of topics on the Internet.

Those research activities typically occur across third-party content and can include downloading white papers, attending webinars, sharing articles, reading case studies, and registering for specialized information.

Through our Data Co-op of over 4,000+ B2B publishers, Bombora monitors the website behavior and content consumption activities of over 7.1 million companies. These activities are aggregated into intent, demographic, and firmographic data segments that represent a strong indicator of business purchase intent. This data is made available for marketing and sales initiatives.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. How is Intent data collected, and how is the content assessed to derive Intent data?
  2. What information does Bombora have access to from the Data Co-op?
  3. How does Bombora ensure the quality of content in the Data Co-op?
  4. What are the differences between Bombora's intent topics and other intent providers' keywords? 
  5. How do you assign a business domain to a device?
  6. What is the verification process that you use to identify fraudulent cookies, such as bots?
  7. Is your data deterministic or probabilistic?
  8. How is Bombora's Intent data GDPR-compliant?
  9. How is Bombora ethically responsible to its Data Co-op members? 

1.    How is Intent data collected, and how is the content assessed to derive Intent data?

Bombora's Data Co-op includes a collection of the world’s most notable B2B publishers, marketers, agencies, technology providers, research and events firms. Over 70% of the websites are exclusive to Bombora, meaning they do not contribute data to any other Intent data provider. 

The largest of its kind, Bombora’s Co-op approach to Intent data collection makes possible a consistent and stable historical baseline measuring business-level content consumption. This baseline effectively spans the B2B web, delivering at an exponential scale greater than any one site.

2. What information does Bombora have access to from the Data Co-op? 

Direct relationships with each Data Co-op member allows Bombora to place tags directly on their sites. This tag collects anonymized information about a visitor’s IP address, an anonymized cookie ID, a timestamp of when they visited and geo-location information. Bombora does not use device fingerprinting to track users.

Bombora also has access to all of the content across each of these websites. What is unique to Bombora is the ability to access, analyze and classify all of the information about a site visitor’s onsite content consumption and their engagement metrics, including: topic consumption, scroll velocity and dwell time.

From this data, Bombora has created its taxonomy of 9,000+ Intent topics, which grows monthly.

3. How does Bombora ensure the quality of the content in the Data Co-op?

Since the inception of its Data Co-op, Bombora has focused, and continues to focus, exclusively on B2B content. Sites in the Data Co-op are constantly vetted for content, brand and traffic levels to ensure that the Intent dataset is representative of the B2B ecosystem at large. This focus ensures that Company Surge® data is truly representative of B2B content consumption interest.

4. What are the differences between Bombora's Intent topics and other Intent providers' keywords?  

There are some key differences between Bombora's Intent topics and other providers' keywords. The derivation method is different, as our Intent topics are based on data science, and keywords are scraped terms from a given content source. Check out the resource below to learn more about the differences and why they matter.

Intent Topics vs Keywords

5. How do you assign a business domain to a device? 

Bombora uses a three-pronged methodology (see below) to resolve devices to domains. Additionally, a persistent unique identifier maintains that match for an extended period of time. Typically, we can associate a domain to a device 20-30% of the time.

6. What is the verification process that you use to identify fraudulent cookies, such as bots? 

We use proprietary methodologies that include user agent detection, IP blacklist and behavioral models for non-human traffic detection.

7. Is your data deterministic or probabilistic?  

It varies by the segment type, but our data is comprised of both deterministic and probabilistic data.

8. How is Bombora's Intent data GDPR-compliant? 

There are two main paths to GDPR compliance – legitimate interest and consent. Bombora is taking a consent-based approach to comply with the requirements of GDPR.

Where other forms of Intent data are based on legitimate interest, Bombora has a direct relationship with owners of the sites in its Data Co-op. Bombora is explicitly listed as a vendor and our data usage (its purpose) is detailed, providing visitors the opportunity to provide knowing consent.

To give users control over their privacy and tracking preferences, Bombora also uses standardized opt out processes as well as making a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) portal available - another requirement of GDPR.

9. How is Bombora ethically responsible to its Data Co-op members?

Fundamental to the Data Co-op model is confidentiality around the originating source of content consumption behavior. To ensure this, Bombora anonymizes the content consumption activity that it collects and translates this into raw topics, which it uses in aggregate to form its Intent dataset. The identity of the Co-op member is never exposed.


Bombora's Demographic and Firmographic Data Collection

Bombora aggregates B2B demographic and firmographic data to provide targetable segments such as revenue, company size, professional group, functional area, industry, and seniority. The data is collected from a combination of anonymized publisher registration data, proprietary IP-to-Company mapping technology, and offline data sources. 

The offline data sources that we work with specialize in offline data acquisition. While their data collection methods are proprietary, they do share that some of their sources include, but are not limited to, registration or whitepaper form fills, resumes, and business cards.

For a full list of audience segments available for targeting, please reach out to the Audience Solutions Desk at AudienceDesk@bombora.com.

 

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