The Most Powerful Account Identification in ABM? Demandbase Just Built It

The recent shift that B2B has seen in reaching buying teams operating in a remote work environment is no longer a trend, but the new reality. So when we acquired Engagio, we knew that the first features we’d integrate would be those that would give our customers a better account identification experience. And we did just that. In fact, our enhanced AccountID product arguably provides the most complete and accurate account identification available.

While improvements to match rates are good, enhancing our match rate and accuracy at the same time is even better.

Numbers don’t lie. Our customers experience the most accurate account identification in the industry.

The first thing we did in bringing Engagio into the fold is to integrate their first-party data into our AccountID product. Not only that, but we have also been hard at work adjusting to the new remote work environment.

Our proprietary data sources now generate 80 percent more signal, all of which tracks remote-working employees wherever they are. In doing so, over 98 percent of our clients have experienced an improved match rate (a way to measure coverage). Additionally, the accuracy of their matching results has improved by 50 percent. At the end of the day, Demandbase yields best-in-industry identification in both coverage and accuracy.

These impressive results are due to the four core proprietary solutions we bring to the account identification challenge. Our AccountID product now boasts a best-in-industry combination of:

1. First-party data from Engagio’s expansive list of integrations
2. Traditional third-party data
3. Proprietary Demandbase signaling
4. AI models with years of history and hundreds of billions of data points

Why we focused on building a more powerful AccountID.

We doubled-down on enhancing AccountID because accurate identification of anonymous web visitors has always been critical to ABM. When first introduced, the ability to focus advertising on one’s target accounts across the web was a game-changer in B2B Marketing. At the same time, account identification has always been an inexact science and subject to inaccuracies. With so many of us expecting to spend most of 2021 working from home, account identification efficacy is top of mind as never before.

And the acquisition of Engagio couldn’t be better synchronized. Engagio introduced tens of millions of new data points to our coverage capability and boosted our accuracy in identifying anonymous web visitors. The first-party data of Engagio provides a sustained source of high-value signals with a broad footprint, helping us achieve 80 percent more proprietary work-from-home signal identification since COVID began in February 2020. By combining all of this data with our existing methods, our artificial intelligence models are able to generate far superior results than they could previously, now identifying 12 percent more traffic overall.

It’s not about coverage or accuracy of account identification. It’s about both.

While improvements to match rates are good, enhancing our match rate and accuracy at the same time is even better. As noted at the top, the increased signal ability has yielded over a 50 percent improvement in accuracy, and, even more promising, the broad reach of the new signal extends these accuracy gains across the mid-market and small business segments.

Match rate can be an effective way to measure overall coverage of an anonymous account identification product, but trade-offs can easily be made to improve match rate by sacrificing accuracy. To drive the best possible ABM results, our approach has always been to maintain a high bar for accuracy.

For example, in our Targeting product, every dollar spent on an inaccurate identification result is money wasted on advertising to accounts that may not be remotely interested in your product. And this is something on which we’ve always kept a critical eye.

With our recent achievement, our Advertising product—where we have the highest bar for accuracy—has already grown by 7.8 percent in identified advertising opportunities. And we expect it to grow even more as the model evolves. By improving both coverage and accuracy, we have introduced even more opportunities for our clients to target their key accounts across the web while still being sure no dollar is wasted.

Improvements in account matching are just the beginning.

Expanding both coverage and accuracy in one update is often an elusive achievement in machine learning. It’s through the unique synergies of existing Demandbase and Engagio data that we have achieved this feat.

Our data is at the core of our ABM platform, even as the Engagio integration continues. This update lays the groundwork for many future improvements to power the next-generation platform we are building. Stay tuned.