In This New Era, Demandbase Unlocks Improved Target Account Identification with More IP and Cookie Data

2020 was a year of significant change and growth for Demandbase. Not only did we accelerate revenue growth and achieve profitability, but we also have a new product that hundreds of customers are now enjoying. The successful and completed product merger of Engagio and Demandbase has allowed our win rates to skyrocket against our competitors. What’s more, all previous analyst reviews are now outdated.

One big factor in our success: The continued improvement of our target account identification

Demandbase has always taken a different approach to target account identification. At any given time, Demandbase has around 3.7 billion IP addresses that are mapped to a company or otherwise classified (i.e., consumers). We source our IP data from proprietary methods and use numerous first- and third-party sources to validate and enhance our matching capabilities. Additionally, Demandbase has hundreds of millions of active cookies that supplement the identification (and our IP data set). All of this has allowed and continues to allow Demandbase to flourish with high identification rates going into the next decade.

Match rate and match accuracy improvements

In the second half of 2020, Demandbase added more IPs, cookies, and first-party data signals that allowed for a +15% increased match rate. We also significantly improved the accuracy of the matching by adding 28.3 million new and confirmed IP-to-company matches and increasing our available proprietary signals of IP and cookies by 127%. This means we have data that continuously increase our match rates and allow for more accuracy controls.

One of the many additional benefits that the Engagio acquisition provided Demandbase was data — and lots of it. We added 50 million more first-party data signals, which collectively increased our match accuracy rate by 20%.

Accuracy is critical.

We feel this is game-changing. Any vendor that doesn’t spend most of their time making sure their account identification is accurate will hurt your business. Misallocating your attention to incorrect accounts is a costly mistake—causing you to waste your most precious resources: time, money, and attention from both Marketing and Sales.

“We’ve never lost an account identification match test to another vendor.”

Some of you might recognize the above statement often made by one of our competitors.

I can assure you that you will never see it on a piece of content from Demandbase (well, except in this context). We already know we have the best identification and have consistently won head-to-head tests over the last few months.

Don’t be fooled by the exaggerated claims other vendors might make regarding target account match tests.

First, any vendor can artificially inflate the match rates if they put accuracy aside.

A vendor could report that 100% of the traffic comes from IBM.com and they have a 100% match rate — it just wouldn’t be very accurate. Vendors can manually increase the probability of IP address and cookie assignations to companies solely for the sake of winning these data bake-offs. Loosening up quality control measures is something Demandbase will never do.

Second, there needs to be an accuracy measurement with match tests.

Tip: If you go forward with a match test, have a couple of colleagues from other companies visit your website and verify their traffic with the vendor. Additionally, you may run a test advertising campaign and measure the increase in engagement (and conversions) from the advertised accounts.

Third, you may be tempted (or coached by some competitors) to send each vendor a list of IPs for a match test.

For the reasons stated above, this test is not complete and will not produce an accurate assessment. A vendor should include the processing of cookies to have a more complete match comparison. To accomplish this, place a JavaScript tag on your webpages. Using the JavaScript tag also affords a more realistic test, preventing manual data mining by vendors looking to win data bake-offs.

Ultimately, what matters the most is the identification of your specific total addressable market.

Identifying large enterprise companies is a lot different than identifying companies with less than 100 employees. For smaller and more niche markets, accuracy is paramount.

To all of our customers, prospects, and competitors (Hello! We’re hiring!), our match rates are currently at 77% after filtering out some of our largest customers with a high percentage of consumer-based traffic.

What does this mean? 77 out of 100 visitors are confirmed company visitors or bots, and 23 out of 100 are consumers or very small businesses. Match rates for our site, Demandbase.com, have been consistently hovering around 78%.

Key takeaway: The actual match rate of B2B traffic will vary depending on the type of traffic your website attracts, so absolute comparisons don’t make sense. If you’re a prospective client, we’re happy to provision a tag and place it on your website to determine what you could expect with Demandbase.

In Closing

All the features our customers have grown to love and find value in have improved in 2020 and will only continue to improve. We will continue to monitor our data closely and regularly communicate best practices and recommendations to our customers. For now, we recommend focusing on all account-based digital efforts — especially since marketing and sales KPIs are harder to achieve with the more traditional inbound marketing initiatives.