The State of Account Identification: 2024 and Beyond

2023 was a year of significant change and growth for Demandbase. We’ve released multi-language Intent, rolled out buying groups to our first set of customers, and improved our prescriptive sales dashboards. account identifi

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.