Bombora gives marketers self-service access to its B2B surge intent data

B2B intent data provider Bombora is today making its account-based surge data available directly through a self-service dashboard.

Bombora collects data showing when employees of Company X have viewed web pages about, say, routers, or downloaded white papers on the topic. A firm that makes routers, for example, might want to get a list of companies that are interested in routers.

When there’s a lot of such activity from that company within a three-week period, compared with other three-week periods in a given quarter, Bombora considers it a surge of interest.

Bombora provides intent data about visits to 3,000 specialized business sites participating in its data co-op, whose members share their visitor data in order to learn more about who comes to their sites.

While a firm like Demandbase is also known for providing B2B intent data, it’s focused on visitors to a company’s own website.

“We’re the primary source of B2B intent data,” CEO Erik Matlick told me, adding that his company is the “only one with B2B surge data.” His company’s other product focuses on providing cookie-based data on behaviors of individuals, as opposed to accounts.

Before today, if one of Bombora’s client companies wanted to get surge data about other companies interested in routers, they had to make the request via phone or email and wait 24 hours for a spreadsheet of results to be generated manually.

Otherwise, the data was available through Bombora’s many partners, such as data management providers Exelate, Adobe or BlueKai, or through point solutions like MeritDirect, which provides contacts at corporate accounts and executes email campaigns.

Now, the surge data can be obtained directly by the client company through a self-service dashboard, reducing the turnaround time to a few minutes. Additionally, Bombora is making the surge data available via an unlimited, monthly subscription instead of a per-report basis.

Co-founder and SVP of Data Sales Mike Burton said that the surge data can now become immediately available throughout a client company, for research as well as for direct utilization. A client can provide its own list of companies that it wants to check for surges, or it can utilize Bombora’s database of 1.2 million firms. In any case, it chooses from about 2,800 intent topics.

Bombora doesn’t actually say that surges indicate the account will buy a product, only that this kind of activity leads to increased engagement, such as a 25-percent lift in email opens.

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.