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.

It can be 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!

Question 1. How is your Intent data collected?

Bombora has a proprietary Data Co-operative of 5,000+ 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.

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, 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?

Make sure the Intent data provider you’re intending to partner with has experience working with similar businesses like yours. You’ll want to see if they can showcase real results, case studies, use cases, and reviews from customers (like our shoutouts below) sharing their learnings and success with using Intent data. Do they have technical webinars they can share with you to see how businesses put Intent data into action within an integrated partner platform?

“There are these big enterprise businesses we had no idea were shopping. When you use in Company Surge^® Intent data the lights come on and you find all these opportunities you didn’t know to go after,” Rob Thomason, former director of sales operations at Exterro.

“Companies produce tons of content – and pay lots of money creating and then amplifying it too. But is it really what the customer is interested in? Now you don’t have to guess, you can know thanks to Company Surge^® data,” said Aly Ryan, global advanced lead generation at Siemens.

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

Bombora strongly encourages testing Intent data before you buy — sign up for Company Surge^® Alerts, a free weekly report of 10 businesses researching what you sell. Or request a demo to learn about Intent data more in-depth and why Forrester* calls Bombora “the de facto standard in B2B marketing for third-party behavioral data to indicate Intent.”

*Hint: They conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by integrating Bombora into their marketing and sales processes. The study focused on a global B2B financial services organization — that saw a 15% growth in revenue ($3.3m!). Check out the highlights of the study here.