What you need to know! 10 questions to ask when evaluating B2B Intent data providers`

B2B Intent data is an important component for marketing and sales teams to identify accounts interested in their products or services. However, there are many different types of Intent data, and they are not equal in terms of data quality, ease of implementation, or privacy compliance.

As a fairly new and niche tool, it’s often challenging to understand the nuances around Intent data and know what questions to ask when evaluating vendors. To help with this, we’ve pulled together a resource ‘10 Questions to ask Intent data providers‘ to use when evaluating different intent offerings.

Below we list these questions and to help you with your evaluation, we’ve also included Bombora’s answers! Read on to learn more about what Outsell calls “the brand to beat in the B2B intent data space“.

Question 1. How is your Intent data collected?

Bombora has a proprietary Data Co-operative of 4,000+ B2B websites of publishers, marketers, agencies, technology providers, research and event firms that contribute content consumption data to a massive pooled data set that details buyer intent.

Data Co-op members provide consent-based brand-anonymous data including unique cookie IDs, IP address, page URL and referrer URL, browser type, operating system, browser language, and engagement data such as dwell time, scroll velocity, scroll depth and time between scrolls.

Engagement data validates that the reader is actually consuming the content and not quickly bouncing from the website.

Question 2. Can you share some websites that you collect data from?

Bombora’s Data Co-op members include SourceMedia, Bloomberg, Quinstreet, 1105 Media, Business Insider, Forbes, CNN, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Haymarket, and more. Approximately 70% of Data Co-op members are exclusive to Bombora.

Question 3. How do you identify which businesses or contacts are consuming content?

Bombora derives business domains in three ways:

1. Co-op publishers provide the business domain of the user from their own registration data
2. IP-to-business domain match using proprietary technology
3. Offline databases and registration data sources provide information that can be matched to online devices

Thanks to the combination of these methods, Bombora is able to track and match signals even when the majority of the workforce is working from home. View our 2020 COVID-19 analysis to learn more.

Question 4. How do you measure the intensity of intent signals?

Bombora uses a deep learning, natural language processing model to identify topics within content. Topic clusters are used to group similar topics and more accurately measure Intent than relying on independent topics.

The model then analyzes four data features to produce Intent data:

1. # of topic events – The number of interactions between a business and a topic
2. # of unique users – The number of people researching a topic from a business
3. Topic relevancy weight – the relevancy of the content to the topic (i.e. is the topic the focus or simply mentioned)
4. Content engagement – The depth of engagement of the interaction including scroll velocity, scroll depth, dwell time, and time between scrolls

For every topic across every business domain monitored, a rolling 12-week baseline is established in order to understand the normal behavior of a business’ interest with a topic. Recent behavior across the four features is compared to the baseline to measure changes in intent between a business and a topic.
More methodology information is available here:

1. Analyzing an event
2. Business profiling 
3. Quantifying intent 

Question 5. Is your data GDPR and CCPA compliant?

Direct relationships with Data Co-op contributors ensure that Bombora’s Intent data is collected in a privacy-compliant consent-based manner. All personal data, including IP address is collected only at the business level and not at the individual level. Visit our privacy policy for more information. 

Question 6. Is Intent data the primary focus of your business? What else am I paying for?

Intent data is all Bombora sells.

Question 7. How can I integrate your data into my existing tech stack?

Bombora integrates directly with a variety of sales and marketing technologies including Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua*, HubSpot*, Engagio, Terminus, Triblio, Integrate, Everstring, LiveRamp, LinkedIn, Google Analytics and more. Additionally, the data is compatible across a variety of sales and marketing platforms through our extensive channel partnerships.

New integrations are continually being added to meet customer needs.

Question 8. How quickly can we get started? How long does on-boarding take?

Bombora can be integrated into the systems and processes you already have in place. You can use Company Surge® Intent data right away on most platforms. For more complicated integrations, your customer success team will develop a timeline that works for you.

Question 9. Who else uses your Intent data?

Marketo, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, Juniper Networks, IBM, SAP, Extreme Networks, CleverTap, Hushly, Cloudera, 8×8 and Fortinet, to name a few. Hear from other customers sharing their learnings and success with using Intent data at the Intent Event and through our case studies and testimonials.

Question 10. Is there a way to test the Intent data before I buy it?

Bombora strongly encourages testing Intent data before you buy, and offers a number of ways for you to do this. The most popular is to request a Company Surge® report from a solution expert. Alternatively, users can sign up for Company Surge® Alerts, a free weekly report of 10 businesses researching what you sell. Additional testing options and Historical Buyer Journey Analysis is available for qualified customers.

For further assistance with your Intent data research, please request a demo.

The post What you need to know! 10 questions to ask when evaluating B2B Intent data providers` appeared first on Bombora.