Company Surge® tells you which businesses are researching the products or services that you and your competitors sell. And it's integrated directly into your processes to align sales and marketing around prospects that are in market. This is B2B purchase intent data. Visit the Company Surge® one pager for more information.
Frequently Asked Questions:
- What is Company Surge®?
- How is Company Surge® different from Intent data?
- How is Company Surge® data different from other Intent data providers?
- How can I access Company Surge®?
- What can I do with my Company Surge® report?
- What's the pricing for Company Surge®?
- How do I create a Company Surge® report?
- What is the maximum number of domains I can upload for a Company Surge® report?
- What is a Company Surge® Score and what factors are used to calculate it?
- What is the Metro/State/Country Company Surge® Score?
- How do you derive the domain and location of the research activity?
- How do you associate content with the topics in your taxonomy?
- How do you suggest topics with the topic recommendation tool in Company Surge®?
- How often do you refresh the data for Company Surge® reports?
- How often do you update your topic taxonomy?
- How do I activate my Company Surge® data through digital or programmatic channels?
- What is an 'Always-On Company Surge®' segment and how do I activate it through digital or programmatic channels?
- What if there is a topic that I want to monitor that is not on the list?
- What is the process for adding topics to the taxonomy?
- How do I upload my topic clusters to the Bombora user interface?
- What is Bidstream data and how is it different than the Intent data that Bombora captures?
- Does Bombora use Bidstream data?
Company Surge® identifies when a business is increasing research activity or content consumption on a product or service compared to its historical baseline, which is a strong indicator of B2B purchase intent.
2. How is Company Surge® different from Intent data?
Intent data is a broad term for data collected about a business web user’s observed content consumption behavior. There are many sources of Intent data. For more information on the source of Bombora’s data, visit the B2B data cooperative FAQ.
Company Surge® data is Bombora’s patented solution for identifying businesses interested in specific B2B products or services. Bombora monitors content consumption behavior from a proprietary data co-op and applies data science to identify changes in activity compared to historical baselines. A natural language processing engine reads, deciphers and understands content across a taxonomy of 8,000+ intent topics that grows monthly.
3. How is Company Surge® data different from other Intent data providers?
Bombora has four key values that differentiates Company Surge® from other solutions.
Data cooperative - the data comes from 4,000+ B2B publishers, where a majority of B2B buying research actually happens. 70% of these publishers agreements are exclusive, which means that buying research that takes place on their sites is not available from any other Intent data provider. By working with Bombora, you benefit from more complete coverage of buying signals and research.
Quality - patented data science methodology identifies changes in intent compared to historical baselines. Research frequency, depth of engagement and content relevancy all contribute to measuring an organization's interest in topic(s). A natural language processing (NLP) engine reads, deciphers and understands content across a taxonomy of 6,900+ topics.
Compatibility - easy to implement no matter what your tech stack looks like or what use cases you want to deploy. Activate Company Surge® data across multiple use cases through direct integrations and partners. Use in existing workflows for faster time-to-value and fewer process changes.
Privacy and compliance - the industry's de facto standard for Intent data according to Forrester. End user opt-in and consent is directly acquired through relationships with each member in the co-op. No personally identifiable information is collected, the data follows the guidelines of GDPR and CCPA, brand anonymous and the data is on visitor's content consumption only.
Download the Intent data core values infographic.
4. How can I access Company Surge®?
Company Surge® can be accessed from the Bombora user interface, as a data feed, an API, platform integrations and channel partners. For information, please reach out to your Bombora account contact.
For user interface instructions, please reference the Company Surge® User Guide.
The data feed is a flat file available through an SFTP. To understand the data output, reference the Master Company Surge® Data Dictionary.
For information on the API, please review our API documentation.
Company Surge® data can also be accessed directly through Salesforce, Marketo, LinkedIn, a variety of channel platforms and HubSpot.
5. What can I do with my Company Surge® report?
There are many ways to get value out of Company Surge® across your marketing and sales initiatives.
- Sales enablement - identify organizations in active buying cycles to prioritize prospecting efforts and MQLs
- Digital advertising - focus digital advertising on businesses that are most interested to drive efficient demand
- Marketing automation - better segment contacts and route to the most appropriate nurture paths based on intent
- Content marketing - uncover topics of interest that your target accounts are interested in
- Channel enablement - identify mutually interested leads using intent and route to the right channels.
For more use cases, download the Intent data guide to learn more about use cases by persona.
Learn more about how other brands use Intent data.
6. What's the pricing for Company Surge®?
Visit our pricing page for the latest information.
7. How do I create a Company Surge® report?
To learn how to create a Company Surge® report, download the user guide or watch the demo video.
8. What is the maximum number of domains I can upload for a Company Surge® Report
The maximum number of domains that can be uploaded in the API or the UI is 1,000,000.
9. What is a Company Surge® Score and what factors are used to calculate it?
A Company Surge® Score (also known as composite score) represents the intensity of research between a business and a topic compared to its historical baseline. Scores range from 1 to 100.
- Scores below 40 are decreasing in research activity.
- Scores between 40-60 are showing the same or average research activity.
- Scores above 60 are increasing in research activity.
There are four factors that contribute to the way our models calculate Company Surge® Score including:
a. Topic consumption by interactions - the number of interactions from a business in the last 3 weeks compared to the previous 12 weeks of historical data.
b. Topic consumption by unique users - the number of unique individuals from a business researching relevant topics in the last 3 weeks compared to the previous 12 weeks of historical data.
c. Topic relevancy weight - a measure of the content piece's 'denseness' in the topic of interest, i.e. is the topic the focus of the content piece or mentioned briefly?
d. Engagement - the depth of an organization's engagement with the content, i.e. dwell time, scroll velocity, scroll depth, etc.
10. What is the Metro/State/Country Company Surge® Score?
Bombora tracks research intensity for office locations, specific to metro area, state, or country. For example, you may see Company X with a Company Surge® Score of 65, but their office location in the NYC metro area may have a score of 80, if there is a significant increase in research activity for a topic in that geography compared to its baseline. Please note that each geography has its own unique historical baseline that's used to compare research activity.
11. How do you derive the domain and location of the research activity?
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. Location can be derived from the IP address.
12. How do you associate content with the topics in your taxonomy?
We actively monitor 8,000+ B2B topics in our taxonomy. When a topic is added to the taxonomy, i.e. cloud security, we use machine learning to train our natural language processing (NLP) models using hundreds of relevant content pieces that focus on 'cloud security' to identify the context and patterns associated with that topic. When content is consumed across our Data Co-op, our technology scans the page and scores the relevance and density (i.e. is the topic the focus of the content piece or mentioned briefly) of the content against our topics. Beyond simply scanning for keywords, it also considers the greater context of the page (i.e content about Facebook is also associated with social media). It then associates the content piece to all of the appropriate topic(s).
Learn more about why our topics are different from other Intent data vendors' 'keywords'.
13. How do you suggest topics with the topic recommendation tool in Company Surge®?
Bombora has a similarity score for each topic compared to other topics, and the order of topic suggestions are sorted by that score in the resulting list. Please click here for a list of the topics in the Bombora taxonomy.
The topic suggestion model compares each topic against every other topic to create the similarity score using three categories:
1. Topic Description – How similar are the topic descriptions
2. Topic Training Data – Score similarity between the different training data sets per topic
3. Co-occurrence – Frequency where the two topics are returned for each content URL
14. How often do you refresh the data for Company Surge® reports?
Data is captured in real-time. However, the data for Company Surge® is refreshed on a weekly basis and new data becomes available every Saturday.
15. How often do you update your topic taxonomy?
We're continuously evaluating updates and improvements to our taxonomy based on customer and partner requests, and industry trends. We update our topic taxonomy every 1-2 months. Download our latest taxonomy.
16. How do I activate my Company Surge® data through digital or programmatic channels?
Once you've created a Company Surge® report and have a targeted list of companies actively researching topics relevant to you, you can easily create a digital audience segment to activate across digital or programmatic channels directly from Bombora's interface. This can be done with Digital Audience Builder. If you do not have access to Digital Audience Builder, please reach out to your Bombora account contact.
Refer to the Digital Audience Builder User Guide for instructions.
17. What is an 'Always-On Company Surge®' segment and how do I activate it through digital and programmatic channels?
An 'Always-On Company Surge®' segment is one that automatically updates a segment with businesses actively researching specific topics and removes those no longer interested on an ongoing basis. Currently, we offer always-on segments exclusively through MediaMath, Eyeota, Oracle BlueKai, Adobe, LinkedIn, The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, and Lotame.
For more information on how to activate an 'Always-On Company Surge®' segment, refer to the Digital Audience Builder User Guide.
18. What if there is a topic that I want to monitor that is not on the list?
We're consistently evaluating updates to our topic taxonomy to reflect customer and partner suggestions, and industry trends. If there are topics that you're interested in that are not included, please send an email to topics@bombora.com with your topic suggestion, a short description and any related content links.
19. What is the process for adding topics to the taxonomy?
We consistently review topic suggestions from our customers and from market trends to add to our taxonomy. When a new topic is suggested, it typically takes 6 to 9 months before Company Surge® data can be associated with it. While we strive to add as many topics suggested by our customers as possible, we cannot guarantee the feasibility of any topic suggestion.
Our process involves several steps:
- Reviewing all topic suggestions and determining its viability based on its similarity to existing topics, granularity, definability, and clarity.
- Approved topics are sent to a content team which finds a minimum of 80 pieces of content per topic in order to train the topic classification engine.
- Our Data Science team must train our topic classification engine on the new topic.
- It takes an additional 13 weeks to build a baseline on a given topic for Company Surge®.
- From there, Company Surge® customers will be able to use the new topic.
20. How do I upload my topic clusters to the Bombora user interface?
Topic clusters are a group of like-minded granular topics representative of a product or service. Topic clusters help identify broader interest on related topics, which is more indicative of a trend. Bombora has just released a new feature in the user interface for uploading topic clusters for your Company Surge® reports. For more information, check out the video.
21. What is bidstream data and how is it different from the Intent data that Bombora captures?
Bidstream data is passed from ad exchanges to ad targeting platforms and collected exclusively from ad impressions that are available for auction.
Check out the a comparison infographic of Company Surge® vs. bidstream data.
22. Does Bombora use Bidstream data?
No. Bidstream data, the information passed during the process of real-time ad auctions (or Real Time Bidding/RTB), once presented an alternative way to gather data quickly. Bombora assessed Bidstream data, and decided against adding it to its dataset because:
- Bombora’s direct measurement method, and relationships with business sites, is more comprehensive than relying, as Bidstream does, on data derived from only pages that have RTB inventory.
- By having direct relationships with publishers and B2B sites, Bombora is able to deliver value back to these owners in exchange for their data contribution.
- Use of Bidstream data beyond RTB is forbidden by Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) (such as Google, AppNexus, Amazon, Rubicon and OpenX), according to Ari Paparo, Founder and CEO of DSP Beeswax, in the AdExchanger article, 'Everything You Need To Know About the Bidstream', published on March 7, 2019.
