Last week, Adobe announced the launch of its Audience Marketplace, where marketers can buy and sell user data for utilization in its Marketing Cloud or in other tools.
Today, New York City-based data provider Bombora — a spinoff of data and lead provider Madison Logic — announced that its B2B intent data will be available to users of Adobe’s data management provider (DMP) Audience Manager, through the Audience Marketplace.
Senior vice president and co-founder Mike Burton told me this is the first time user data about B2B buyer’s interests has been available at scale in Audience Manager. He noted that such data, which can be used for targeting ads and personalizing web sites, has been housed “in siloes” in individual publishers’ data, although it has been available at scale for B2C.
Intent data is a kind of behavioral information that indicates what a user is interested in buying. Bombora collects anonymous intent data from its cooperative of client companies — including CBS Interactive, UBM and Forbes — to create its massive databank, which it says now totals about 400 million global B2B users. About 180 million of them are in the US.
As an example, suppose a user went to a Bombora-enhanced technology site like EMC.com.
First, the Bombora platform would attempt to find out the visitor’s company. This is a critical piece of information, since it tells a lot about what the user might be interested in.
But it’s not so easy to find out. Burton noted that the visitor’s IP address can be looked up in a registry. However, that’s only occasionally reliable, especially since the IP address could belong to the visitor’s Internet Service Provider, like Comcast.
This is why Demandbase, which also targets B2B users for ads, prides itself on having built its own IP-to-company database.
If, however, Bombora has previously tracked this visitor anonymously across its network of clients through her cookie, there’s an accumulation of interests indicated by the pages visited. Each page is classified by topics so that, even if the visitor’s company is not evident, the accumulated cookie info can tell she is interested in, say, servers, cloud software and healthcare solutions.
A Bombora-enhanced site can then personalize the content for someone with those interests.
For a marketer on the Adobe Marketing Cloud, that anonymous user can also be matched with the marketer’s information on its own customers, or with information on other companies’ customers that has been shared with the marketer:
Burton told me that making the connection between Bombora’s interests-based profile on anonymous user #123 and a marketer’s identified user Jane Doe is made by Adobe. Given the wide usage of its web management and marketing platform by so many sites, said user may already have been cookied by Adobe.
There are also probabilistic ways to make the match, with inferences that match one user profile with another based on the same physical location or other factors.
Bombora notes that it is the first company to provide such a large source of B2B intent data. A number of predictive marketing firms – like Mintigo, 6sense and Leadspace — also tout their use of intent data, but Burton said they license from his company. Bombora also provides its intent data to Adobe competitor Oracle.
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