Ad tech firm Dstillery enters B2B arena with intent data from Bombora

Bombora makes its living by tracking what products B2B users research on the web, and it then provides data so others can market to those visitors’ companies.

Dstillery offers a targeted B2C ad platform that employs machine learning to optimize its targeting, combining a data management platform (DMP) and a demand-side platform (DSP).

This week, the two New York City-based companies announced a partnership where Dstillery uses Bombora’s intent data to target B2B companies whose employees have shown interest in specific products. This is Dstillery’s first move into the B2B market, while Bombora has worked with other DMPs and ad providers.

Bombora VP of Programmatic Data Solutions Greg Herbst told me that his company sets up a segment of web users at a targeted company who have shown they are interested in, say, servers because of the web pages they’ve visited or the white papers they’ve downloaded.

His company tracks the activity of personnel from 1.3 million businesses, supplying the targeting data for others to use, such as in ad campaigns. The user data comes from a cooperative of B2B media companies that pool their anonymized visitor info from its websites.

“We collect the info [on a B2B customer’s journey], but we don’t act on it,” he said.

Evan Hills, head of business development at Dstillery, said his company’s primary business “is taking a seed [that is, initial] set of users and then finding lookalikes” for B2C ad targeting, based on similar attributes and behavior.

If a client company, for instance, wanted to find B2B buyers of servers, Bombora might provide to Dstillery a segment of employees at 500 companies who have been visiting pages and downloading white papers about servers.

Dstillery then uses this seed data to find lookalike users with similar attributes. It delivers ads only to those users among the seed set and the expanded set that its machine learning indicates are most likely to buy because of web pages those users have visited, forms they have filled out, or other behavior that Dstillery has tracked. It tracks and targets users by cookies on laptops, desktops and Android devices, but not on iOS.

A Dstillery campaign dashboard, using Bombora’s data

“Bombora sends us audiences,” Hills told me. “We mount [ad] campaigns, optimizing the campaigns using similar intent data.” Dstillery’s additional intent data, Hills said, differs from Bombora’s because it is less granular and less frequently obtained.

Ads are delivered based on where in the buying journey Dstillery determines the user is.  The optimization includes redirecting the campaign’s budget to various targeting segments if they seem more responsive.

Neither company has any data yet on whether this partnership to boil down intent-driven B2B ad campaigns has a greater effectiveness than other kinds of targeted ad campaigns.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.