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Key Questions to Ask When Evaluating B2B Intent Data Providers

When Bombora invented B2B Intent Data a decade ago, our solution gave businesses a much-needed way to identify, understand, and apply B2B research and media consumption behaviors across the ever-expanding media landscape. Today, Bombora offers an industry-leading approach that provides you with the most comprehensive insights available to strengthen your GTM strategy.  

With the resounding success of Intent, new providers have entered the space to offer their own “Intent” solutions. Yet businesses should be cautioned that these solutions vary widely in terms of the detail, accuracy, and data privacy safeguards.  

Why evaluating your Intent data provider is critical  

When considering Intent data solution providers, your team should assess data quality (sources, collection strategies, and derivation methodologies), scale of the data set (verticals, geographies, interoperability), relevance to your commercial priorities, ease of implementation, and privacy and compliance considerations.  

  1. What type of third-party Intent data will best drive growth?  

To drive growth, you need to understand your business and data strategy and then bring in the Intent providers that can empower you to achieve strategic goals. Some providers focus on narrow Intent data sources such as bidstream data, review sites, or publisher-specific consumption. These can offer value, but their scope will be limited. In contrast, because of its comprehensive source data, Bombora provides visibility across the full range of the buyer journey. Depending on your goals, the best approach may be layering different sources to build a robust and highly predictive model. 

The quality of Intent data depends significantly on its source, which directly impacts its reliability and applicability. Sourced from our exclusive Data Coop, Bombora’s Intent data provides you with unmatched insights across every stage of the buyer’s journey – from early awareness to decision-making.  

Our solutions capture research from a wide range of sources and thousands of topic areas. Our methodologies compare information consumption events to historical activity baselines to ensure an account is showing a genuine uptick in interest. Bombora tracks engagement signals like scroll velocity and dwell time to validate that website visitors are truly consuming content, versus bouncing off.  We provide a high quality and diverse data set that reveals deeper buying behaviors, including content engagement and research intensity. 

  1. How can Intent data serve my various marketing needs? 

Intent data can fuel use cases across marketing and sales workflows. For demand generation, you’ll want to go broad and cast a wide net of topics to monitor. This will enable you to observe research behaviors that signal interest in the kinds of products and services you sell. You can use Intent levels to build high impact ABM strategies. First you can identify which of your key accounts are in market, and then you can customize messaging and engagement strategies to each account based on their research behaviors. Intent can also be used to spot possible churn by identifying customers who are starting to research competitors. Sales teams can also use Intent data to prioritize outreach based on high-intent signals, improving pipeline velocity and win rates. 

Our enterprise customers leverage multiple Intent data sources—combining Bombora’s robust data with more niche intent signals—to create multi-layered models that fuel lead scoring, predictive analytics, and engagement strategies. The more diverse the data, the more accurate and actionable these models become. 

  1. What is the source of your Intent data? 

Our models source data from our Data Co-op, which includes influential B2B publishers, B2B brand sites, and ad-tech partners including Fortune, Bloomberg, Business Reporter, INC, Fast Company, as well as vertical-specific publishers like CyberEd, Fierce Telecom, LinuxInsider, and E-Commerce Times. Bombora’s Company Surge® Intent data is created by a proprietary suite of machine learning (ML), large language models (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP) models that sit on top of our data. Bombora’s models have been trained for more than 10 years.   

Importantly, 86% of the data in our Co-op is shared exclusively with Bombora for the purposes of deriving Intent – no other Intent data provider has access to these signals. This gives us the unique ability to capture intent signals across industries, verticals, and stages of the buyer journey. 

The breadth of our data means we can measure research activity from initial awareness all the way through to solution-specific engagement, which is critical for identifying intent that maps closely to your priorities. 

  1. How easy is it to use Intent data in my existing systems and workflows? 

Bombora’s Intent data is platform agnostic, offering compatibility with most martech, ad-tech, sales, and CRM platforms. Bombora data seamlessly integrates with your existing tools, systems, and workflows. Our portable, flexible data solutions allow you to activate Intent data quickly across your organization. Sophisticated organizations with multi-source data lakes can ingest Bombora data and use with existing models. 

  1. How sustainable is the data source in light of evolving privacy regulations? 

Bombora data solutions are grounded in our B2B premium Data Co-op, which is governed by persistent privacy first, consent-based data collection protocols. Our data is designed to meet the quality and privacy standards (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) of industry-leading companies. Our commitment to quality sources and privacy-aligned collection practices gives you the confidence to bring our data into your data models, tech stack, and commercial motions. Bombora is committed to maintaining compliance in the evolving privacy landscape, so you can rest assured that the models you build with our data will be usable throughout future changes. This is a commitment that not every solution provider can make. 

  1. How do you create your Intent data? 

Bombora was the first Intent data solution to use AI methodologies and large language models (LLMs) inclusive of natural language processing (NLP) and named entity recognition (NER). Our solution goes beyond individual words, revealing the likely objectives of a business’s research. These technologies have been trained for over 10 years, ensuring accuracy and relevance. 

Unlike other providers that rely on simple keyword scraping, Bombora’s AI models capture the full context of the content being consumed, filtering out noise and irrelevant signals. Our models also understand topic relationships, creating a more accurate picture of buyer behavior by identifying how different topics interact to indicate purchasing intent. 

  1. How do you derive the level of intent? 

To make an informed choice in B2B Intent data solution providers, you need an understanding of how solutions derive intent. At Bombora, we have a robust, multi-layered approach:  

  • We identify topics within the large dataset: Bombora’s natural language processing models work across millions of pieces of content to identify relevant topics. Unlike simple keyword-based approaches, Bombora’s AI-powered models discern the contextual meaning of the content, ensuring that the identified topics are genuinely related to business interests. In addition, Bombora’s topic taxonomy constantly evolves, allowing us to capture relevant research activity across various verticals, industries, and geographies. Our models also go beyond singular topic identification to identify relationships between topics and curate sets of topics that represent holistic buying behavior. 
  • We determine an account’s level of interest in those topics: Once topics are identified, Bombora measures intent by evaluating multiple factors that indicate a business’s level of interest: 
    • Content relevancy: How relevant the content or visit is to a specific topic. 
    • Consumption density: The number of interactions a business has with content related to a given topic. 
    • Employee breadth: How many individuals within the organization are researching the topic. 
    • Engagement depth: Deeper engagement signals such as scroll velocity, scroll depth, dwell time, and time between scrolls indicate the intensity of the research. 
    • Filtering out noise: Bombora’s AI models go beyond identifying topics—they also exclude irrelevant data, such as accidental keyword matches. Our models examine the meaning of the words within text, preventing homonyms (cloud storage versus weather clouds) from being mis-attributed. By interpreting the full context and depth of engagement with content, Bombora’s models filter out noise, providing clean and actionable intent signals that accurately reflect true buyer interest.  

Make the best choice on B2B Intent data 

Getting answers to these key questions goes far beyond fulfilling due diligence. The answers about data sources, use cases, relevancy, and more will empower you to select the Intent data solution provider that can help you drive significant, sustained growth with the prospects and customers that matter most. Contact Bombora to learn more about how B2B Intent data can significantly improve your go to market and sales targeting and results.