A continued factor in our success: The stable 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. Of note, Demandbase has over a billion active cookies that supplement the identification (and our IP data set). As the deprecation of 3rd-party cookies is upon the broader ecosystem, we’ve been stepping up our game in regard to new alternative signals, leveraging both partnerships as well as in-house solutions to ensure our leading account identification rates flourish.

Match rate and match accuracy improvements

In 2023, Demandbase improved both identification match rate and match accuracy through a variety of enhancements.

In early 2023, we released an updated version of our IP-based identification that improves our bot detection, identification of shared networks that aren’t tied to businesses, and introduced two new models to improve identification – one leveraging similar characteristics in IPs and the other observing cookies. This has increased the number of IPs we have identified by 40%. This new dataset is refreshed with the most up-to-date data from 1st- and 3rd-party sources.

Mid-year, we improved the detection of a specific subset of shared networks, proxies, and business VPNs/ZTNAs (zero-trust network access solutions).

To round out the year, we released our updated cookie-based identification model, which, by itself, increased our match accuracy across all customers by close to 10% (along with improved match rates!).

Account identification accuracy is critical.

We feel this is intrinsic to the core value we offer to all customers. 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 incorrectly-matched accounts is a costly mistake—causing you to waste your most precious resources: time, money, and attention from both Marketing and Sales.

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 accurate. Claims like these leave out the real-world traffic scenarios that are a fact of life – bots, shared networks, and individual non-business traffic. 

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, which will be a better measure of ROI in real-world scenarios.

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.

Accuracy is only great if it is actionable – when it is accompanied with the right contact, company, or technographic information to support your team’s next best action.

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 2023 and will only continue to improve, even with changes in digital advertising, marketing, and online privacy. We will continue to monitor our data closely and regularly communicate best practices and recommendations to our customers. 

The post The State of Account Identification: 2024 and Beyond appeared first on Demandbase.

B2B, B2C, or Retrofitted B2C: What’s the difference and why does that matter? 

(In a hurry? Check out this 1-minute video clip.)

I’ll warn you, I’m going to get in the weeds, but I think you’ll appreciate the details.

Let’s start by examining the differences between B2B and B2C buying journeys. In B2C, you usually have a large market, mostly made up of individual buyers making simple buying decisions that are low cost and don’t involve multiple decision-makers. B2B is the opposite. Most purchases are complex. They take time and involve a whole committee of people, each with a different role in the buying process. 

In the B2C scenario, you do one of two things, either mass branding to a large population of people who fit a certain profile or retargeting to people who’ve shown interest in your product. Think boots. If you recently checked out boots at an online retail site, the B2C advertiser will serve you an ad for those very same boots, hoping to entice you to buy now for the low price of $59.99. Done. Easy decision.

In B2B, most of the time there’s no budget for mass branding. After all chances are pretty good there are a lot more individuals interested in boots than in your B2B solution. And retargeting does not result in conversions. Why? Because B2B buying decisions take longer. Relying solely on either of these strategies will result in a massive waste of budget. B2B digital marketers only want to target people at accounts that are a good fit for their company and likely to make a purchase. 

The problem is that B2C ad tech has no concept of an account or buying group. They choose their targets based on demographic data such as age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, income, and so forth. Not only is this irrelevant in B2B, but the “facts” they gather are often wrong. 

This also means that B2C platforms can’t measure results that matter in B2B. You can track individual impressions and clicks, but there’s no way of knowing if your ads are generating engagement, pipeline, bookings, or revenue from your targeted accounts.

Enter Retrofitted B2C

To address these problems (and to compete with Demandbase), other B2B advertising solutions adapt B2C ad platforms to provide some account characteristics. What they do is upload IP addresses and cookie IDs to their partner platform to serve ads exclusively to a specific group of accounts. That might sound great, but the underlying technology can’t optimize bidding to accounts, so all sorts of problems arise, like individual accounts sucking up all the campaign budget and the inability to prioritize bidding at the account level. What’s more, some companies have an incredibly large pool of IPs and cookie IDs that represent mostly people outside of the buying groups, which leads to targeting people within the account who don’t care about the product being advertised. In other words, wasteful spending.

Perhaps the most significant flaw with retrofitted B2C ad tech is that it can’t tap into the holy grail of B2B targeting data that uses real-time B2B intent signals to prioritize the IPs and cookie IDs to use within each account. Without this, IP-based targeting is all you get. 

I’ll admit, the retrofit is better than nothing. But there’s still too much wasted spend, and there’s a better way.

Meet Demandbase Piper

Earlier this month, we rolled out the red carpet for the Demandbase Piper B2B DSP — the new name for our proprietary B2B ad tech. The technology has been around, honed, and perfected since 2012, but we decided it was time to give it a name as distinctive as its capabilities. 

Piper stands for Pipeline + Revenue and it was built from the ground up to tackle the unique challenges of B2B, with a native account object and the ability to use real-time B2B intent signals to optimize targeting and bidding.

It only serves ads to people associated with a target account, and prioritizes impressions to the buying group members in an active buying cycle. How does it do that?

Suppose you were able to narrow your targeting to an individual with the right title at an ICP account and they’re showing interest in your product (something other ad tech is not able to do, by the way), you might think you’d hit the jackpot. But not necessarily so. That still doesn’t mean the company as a whole is in a buying cycle. You need to be able to analyze behavior across the entire buying group to determine if the company is actively considering a purchase. Demandbase is able to do just that through our Demandbase One platform. It considers predictive models, engagement minutes, intent, anonymous web activity, and more to decide who to advertise to, and feeds those audiences directly into the Piper DSP. 

In short, Piper, combined with Demandbase One, is able to identify ICP accounts and their buying groups and track intent and other engagement behaviors across the groups. These are the two absolute essentials for B2B advertising. Anything less will result in wasting your ad dollars on the wrong targets.

In addition, with Piper and Demandbase One, you can:    

• Track each buying group member throughout their journey, so you can target them individually and customize your messages for their role and stage in the buying process.
• Measure business goals, not vanity metrics, so you can see how impressions and clicks contribute to pipeline, deals, and revenue — at the account and individual level.
• Pace your campaigns and balance impressions across your target accounts and buying group members, so you don’t accidentally spend your whole budget on a few large accounts.
• Advertise only on whitelisted, context-appropriate sites. You’ll never see a Demandbase ad on a celebrity rag or radical political site. That can’t be said of other “B2B” advertisers.
• Automatically optimize bidding to achieve results that drive revenue, such as account lift, engagement, and account reach.

That’s everything you’d want and expect from an advertising solution that’s fluent in B2B. Can that be said of your ad tech? If not, contact us and we’ll gladly introduce you to Demandbase Piper. 

In case you’re wondering, DSP stands for demand side platform. It’s the inside term for a software platform that facilitates ad bidding and targeting across multiple ad exchanges. In other words, “ad tech.”  

The post Is Your Ad Tech Fluent in B2B? appeared first on Demandbase.

As our eyeballs have moved from linear (i.e. traditional, live) TV to a more streaming-based consumption pattern, so have the advertiser budgets. Similar to what we saw with mobile in the 2010’s, there has been some lag between where the audiences are and speed of budget reallocation, but every indicator shows that viewers, time spent, and budgets are starting to rise in tandem –– which we can see in this recent eMarketer chart.

What does this mean for advertisers?

Some of the biggest hurdles preventing most brands from advertising on traditional TV were cost, targeting, and measurement. Spend minimums were out of reach for most businesses; in an increasingly digital world where audience targeting is the norm and ability to measure performance from those specific users is expected, the massive gaps in traditional TV just seemed less and less acceptable. 

Enter Connected TV and the CPM model familiar to digital media buyers where you pay a predictable and affordable cost per thousand impressions to reach a narrower and much more custom audience. Brands can now advertise just to the content categories they feel match their target buyers with other controls like geo and time-of-day and, of course, the ability to get more granular than that based on levels of sophistication around data and other inputs. In fact, a study by MNTN showed that two thirds of CTV advertisers had never run a campaign on traditional TV.

The benefits don’t stop there… multiple studies show increased recall on other paid channels like display, social and search post-launch of a CTV campaign, not surprisingly associated with the sight, sound, and motion impact of a video ad on a large screen that is highly relevant to the viewer.

What does this mean for B2B advertisers?

The CTV evolution to date has been dominated by the B2C segment, initially focused on brand/awareness with a lot of DTC (direct to consumer) companies leveraging the relative cost-effectiveness and targeting capabilities mentioned above. Some B2B advertisers have smartly repurposed existing video assets used on the web and/or traditional TV to dip their toes into CTV, but it has been limited and so far executed primarily on B2C ad tech.

As with other digital media –– display, native, web video, etc. –– the capabilities and customizations of B2C tech are not built with B2B in mind, so using a programmatic buying platform that understands business buying cycles, buying groups and the concept of account-based advertising is a critical differentiator (see more here on why having a B2B DSP matters).

What does this mean for Demandbase customers?

Connected TV is largely an IP-driven targeting environment… there are no cookies on a TV, unless you’re still into Sesame Street. This means having a partner with deep data resources and expertise in IP-based account associations is a key differentiator. Demandbase can confidently reach users from your target accounts and, as with our display, native and web video delivery, you can trust your message will only be delivered in appropriate environments next to brand-safe content.

Because Demandbase’s B2B DSP, Piper, is seamlessly integrated to our ABX platform, you can also be sure that intent-based account selection and prioritization and how those accounts move in and out of campaigns based on your customizable settings will inform your CTV campaigns in coordination with your other paid media.

Your buyers are watching. We can help you reach them. Time to switch the channel.

The post Demandbase DSP Turns Up the Volume for Connected TV appeared first on Demandbase.

It’s getting harder to sell because of uncertain economic times, so B2B buying cycles are longer and more complex. You’re also being asked to do more with less. 

Every dollar you spend is getting scrutinized under a microscope and needs to drive ROI. 

Jordan Rost, Head of Ad Marketing for streaming/connected TV provider Roku, understands your pain. He leads Roku’s advertising business, which helps B2B marketers like you better target and execute their ad spend to drive ROI. 

In a recent Sunny Side Up podcast episode, Rost explained how connected TV can help B2B marketers get the most bang (ROI) for their B2B advertising buck. 

Connected TV’s growth and the “best of both worlds”

People are increasingly cutting the cord and watching more content on multiple streaming services (Netflix, Apple TV, Roku, etc.) and devices. Last year, “more people spent time streaming TV than watching a traditional television set,” said Rost. 

 Rost views CTV as combining the best of traditional TV and digital advertising. “TV has always been about great storytelling on the biggest screen in the home,” he explains, “and digital advertising has always been about precision, accountability, and measurement. Streaming combines the best of both those worlds.” 

B2B advertisers have multiple ways to take advantage of the growth of streaming/CTV and to measure the impact of their ad spend on CTV.

Ad-supported streaming, for instance, where viewers “pay” for content by watching an advertisement, is growing as fast as streaming subscriptions. “This ad-supported model may overtake subscription viewership in the next two years or so,” says Rost. 

Measuring Connected TV ads

Targeting and measurement were huge problems with traditional TV advertising. 

You paid your money to buy an ad during some golf tournament because you were hoping to reach Fortune 500 business executives, but measuring your ad ROI was a messy game of pin the tail on the donkey. 

CTV takes the blindfold off and lets B2B marketers see their target audience and place the pin precisely on the donkey’s backside.

Streaming and connected TV have become “performance marketing” media, like other internet-based advertising channels. B2B advertisers can see if a CTV viewer visits their brand website as a result of watching a CTV ad. They can connect specific ad spend to specific customer engagement and revenues. 

The “measurability” of CTV is gold when it comes to proving and improving the ROI of your B2B ad spend. 

Rost also sees CTV becoming a place to make actual purchases. “We’ve been making connected TV advertising more shoppable. With a click of their TV remote control, ad viewers can get more information (or a product demo) about an offering and even put items into a shopping cart right from their screen.” That enhanced ad interactivity is the holy grail of B2B advertising.

How CTV killed the million-dollar sock puppet

Traditional TV ads were generally too expensive for most B2B marketers. Targeting audiences was speculative. Tracking impact was harder still. 

B2B marketers never want to put all their chips down on a single, make-or-break bet, as Pets.com did back in 2000 when it bought a massively expensive Super Bowl ad (with its famous sock puppet) only to go out of business a few years later. 

Blowing your B2B ad budget on huge bets that lose is a great way to blow up your career.

 “CTV changes the whole B2B advertising playbook,” says Rost, “because everything B2B marketers have learned through digital is applicable to TV streaming.” With CTV, B2B advertisers can leverage their first-party and third-party data to precisely target the right audience at the right time with the right message. 

“You can target audiences based on what people are streaming or other behavioral signals,” driving relevant messaging, says Rost. 

A Word on DSPs

Using a demand side platform, or DSP, B2B advertisers can use their data to target certain buyer personas and audience segments, then make ad purchases. At the end of the day, CTV is a great place to put your ad spend. It offers B2B advertisers more analytics, better targeting, measurability, segmented audiences, and more ROI. 

The days of million-dollar sock puppet ads that break your whole company are over. You actually can do more with less. The solution is targeted, measurable B2B advertising on CTV that can prove and improve your ROI.

Learn more about CTV and the Demandbase Advertising Platform built exclusively for B2B.

The post Why Should You Care About Connected TV? ROKU’s Jordan Rost Shares His Take appeared first on Demandbase.