The complete guide to Bombora’s topics and taxonomy
The Bombora taxonomy is foundational to the way that we structure massive amounts of media consumption data collected across our proprietary Data Cooperative. By accurately classifying information consumed by businesses, our topic taxonomy enables the derivation of our industry-leading Intent data, Company Surge®.
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The Bombora taxonomy is foundational to the way that we structure massive amounts of media consumption data collected across our proprietary Data Cooperative. By accurately classifying information consumed by businesses, our topic taxonomy enables the derivation of our industry-leading Intent data, Company Surge®.
The Bombora taxonomy
The Bombora taxonomy is our proprietary content classification system that contains tens of thousands of business topics as well as company and product names. This extensive collection of business-relevant topics includes subjects that companies are actively researching across the web and across devices, giving businesses insights into the B2B research patterns of millions of companies. Leading industry platforms like Simpli.fi have integrated the Bombora taxonomy into their offerings.
Bombora topics
Within the taxonomy are tens of thousands of business-related topics. A Bombora topic is a contextual classification that identifies when content is about a subject, even if specific words aren’t used. In contrast, a keyword is just a literal word or phrase match on a page, without understanding context or meaning.
Continuous topic updates ensure ongoing relevance
Bombora continuously updates its Intent topics to reflect market trends, changes in the business world, new business sectors, and more. We do this by evaluating requests from our customers and analyzing traffic patterns from our Data Cooperative to identify emerging topics.
All new submissions are subject to our thorough vetting process. We then employ cutting edge technologies like LLMs to obtain or verify topic descriptions.
AI models classify content within the taxonomy
When a topic is added to the taxonomy, we use machine learning to train our natural language processing (NLP) models using hundreds of relevant content pieces that focus on the subject to identify the context and patterns associated with that topic. When content is consumed across our Data Co-op, our technology scans the content and scores the relevance and density (i.e. is the topic the focus of the content piece or mentioned briefly) and assigns it to the topic.
Our natural language processing (NLP) models understand the context around the topic rather than just identifying the word itself. They ensure that the identified topics are genuinely related to real B2B interests and contextualize homonyms, understanding the difference between “apple” (the fruit) and “Apple” (the company).
Topics versus keywords
To understand when businesses are in market for a product or service, Bombora monitors billions of business user content consumption events. The tens of thousands of topics in our taxonomy represent business concepts that are captured from the content that is consumed in our Data Co-op. Deep learning and natural language processing models predict topic assignment. Our models understand when online content truly relates to a topic rather than just mentioning a word.
Keywords, on the other hand, are collected by scraping content for terms and phrases that are explicitly stated on web content, with no regard for context and with no ability to figure out the meaning of a word with multiple definitions. Keywords do not represent concepts, and they are only scraped from web pages that serve ads, missing out on vital consumption of research and analyst sites, vendor site activity, and additional content such as whitepapers.
The advantage for businesses is that Bombora topics capture intent and relevance, while keywords capture only surface-level mentions.
Using Bombora’s topics
Bombora topics enable businesses to get a granular understanding of what content their target audiences are interested in. After customers select the topics that they want Bombora to monitor, they can identify accounts with high levels of interest in the topics, which could include the products they sell. In addition, by understanding what topics target accounts are researching, sales and marketing teams can customize outreach. Knowing when target accounts have spiking interest in topics can also help businesses time activities and identify opportunities for cross sell, upsell, or reduce risk of churn. These are just some of the use cases for topics within our Company Surge® solution.
Bombora’s topic grouping
The topics within the Bombora taxonomy are organized into groups that make it easy to map them to business strategies. This is how we recommend that customers consider topics to select:
- Brand / Products: Topics that are core to your business, including your brand, products, services and any key functions your business performs.
- Competitors / Partners: Names of your main partners and competitors. This could also include names of their specific products or services.
- Industry / Vertical: Your primary category/ categories of business, including strongly associated tandem categories and any capabilities or use cases relevant to your products or services.
- Pain points / Challenges: Topics that are important to each of your key customer personas. This can include pain points, business issues, or expected outcomes / results. This selection should be a broad representation against a collective persona.
Tracking research of topics in our proprietary Data Co-op
Bombora tracks how businesses are engaging with B2B topics by monitoring research and content engagement events within our proprietary Data Cooperative, comprising thousands of influential B2B publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers. Each month, Bombora analyzes billions of content consumption events in real time across the B2B web.
Topics can provide insights into the buyers’ journey
Companies select topics that they want to track based on a number of factors including products that they sell, competitors, subjects that relate to their offerings, and more. Some topics may indicate early stage research versus late stage research. Because 86% of the data in our Data Co-op is shared exclusively with Bombora, no other Intent data solution has access to these high-volume, high-quality signals.
Bombora topics are integral to determining B2B intent
Bombora’s topics are integral to our Company Surge® solution, which allows businesses to identify and act upon B2B intent by measuring spiking interest across the B2B web. Use cases include:
- Targeting & Segmentation: Using specific topics in Company Surge® to build hyper-targeted audiences of accounts that are actively in-market.
- Content Strategy: Identifying which topics target accounts are surging on (subjects and brands that are being researched and content being consumed, suggesting heightened interest) and creating content that directly addresses their research needs.
- Sales Enablement: Alerting sales teams when a key account is showing intent on a specific topic. This allows them to lead conversations with a deeper understanding of the account’s current priorities.
- Competitive Intelligence: Tracking intent on competitors’ products and services to understand which accounts are considering alternative solutions.
Bombora’s topic taxonomy – an unbeatable advantage for B2B
With tens of thousands of topics, continuous updating, and proprietary NLP models that understand context, the Bombora topic taxonomy is a one of a kind resource. By tracking these topics over billions of research consumption events across the B2B web, businesses gain an unbeatable advantage when measuring Intent.
FAQs about Bombora topics and taxonomy
What is the Bombora Data Cooperative?
Bombora has built a one-of-a-kind Data Cooperative, which gathers billions of events from influential B2B publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers. The insights derived from this rich data set cover the full spectrum of B2B research and consumption.
What is the Bombora taxonomy?
Bombora’s taxonomy is a classification system for topics that are researched by businesses. These B2B topics are categorized and organized to generate Intent data. The taxonomy powers Bombora’s Company Surge solution.
What is the difference between Bombora topics and keywords?
A Bombora Intent topic describes the nature of the online content. It is derived from deep learning and natural language processing models that understand the content and assign the topic that’s most relevant to what the content piece is about. Bombora’s NLP models can understand context as well as the difference between words with more than one meaning. A keyword is a literal word or phrase, and Intent signals derived from keywords only refer to the presence of that word/phrase on a web page.
What is Company Surge?
Company Surge® is Bombora’s Intent data solution that aggregates content consumption activity of millions of B2B organizations and informs customers when target organizations are actively researching topics related to their products or services.
How do businesses use Bombora topics?
Businesses use Bombora topics to accomplish a variety of strategic business objectives, including prioritizing accounts that are surging on topics related to their business, personalizing messaging and advertising to reflect areas of interest to target audiences, integrating Company Surge data into CRM and ABM platforms, and more.
How does Bombora use AI and NLP?
Bombora uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze content (web pages, articles, whitepapers, videos, blogs, etc.) and classify that content into intent topics from its taxonomy based on context, semantics, and relationships between ideas.
In addition, Bombora uses AI for IP-to-company domain resolution, combining deterministic signals, probabilistic models, and composition-based models. Bombora also applies AI to resolve website visitor domains even when employees work from home. AI functionality is deeply ingrained throughout the Bombora solution set.