Bombora Intent FAQs

What is a 'Surge'?

A Surge is when a company exhibits an increased level of research activity or content consumption compared to its historical baseline. Companies 'surging' on certain topics are strong indicators of purchase intent or interest in certain products or services.

What is a Bombora Company Surge^® Score and what factors are used to calculate it?
A Surge Score (aka Topic Surge score, Topic interest score, Composite score) indicates the extent to which a company is surging on a specific topic compared to its historical baseline. Scores range from 0 to 100. A score of 50 equals average consumption. Surging companies are those that have scores above 60.

There are many factors that contribute to the way Bombora models calculate the Surge score including:

Topic consumption by interactions - the number of interactions from a business in the last 3 weeks compared to the previous 12 weeks of historical data.
Topic consumption by unique users - the number of unique individuals from a business researching relevant topics in the last 3 weeks compared to the previous 12 weeks of historical data.
Topic relevancy weight - a measure of the content piece's 'denseness' in the topic of interest, i.e. is the topic the focus of the content piece or mentioned briefly?
Engagement - the depth of an organization's engagement with the content, i.e. dwell time, scroll velocity, scroll depth, etc.

What is the difference between the Summary tab and the Comprehensive tab in my Bombora surge report?

The Summary tab shows a high-level overview of which companies are surging and gives you an average score, topic count, and topic count delta for that company as a whole. The Comprehensive tab takes a deeper dive into each company showing you which topics each company is surging in.

What is the Average Score in the summary tab of my Bombora surge report?

This is the average surge score for a company as a whole. It takes each topic surge, each location surge, and averages it to give you a company’s Average Score.

What is the Topic Count in the summary tab of my Bombora surge report?

This is the number of your chosen topics that a company was surging on in the past week. The summary tab is sorted by this column. Generally speaking, a company with a higher Topic Count should be higher priority (if the company fits your other criteria).

What is the Topic Count Delta in the summary tab of my Bombora surge report?

This is the difference in topics that are surging when comparing to the week before. A Topic Count Delta of “+1” means that a company is surging in 1 more topic than they were last week. A Topic Count Delta of “-1” means that a company is surging in 1 less topic than they were last week. A Topic Count Delta of “0” means a company is surging in the same amount of topics as last week. A Topic Count Delta of “New” means a company was not surging last week, and is surging this week.

What is the Composite Score in the comprehensive tab of my Bombora surge report?

This is the surge score that a company has for a specific topic (see Topic Name column).

What is the Composite Score Delta in the comprehensive tab of my Bombora surge report?

This is the difference of the Composite Score from the week prior. It works the same way as the Topic Count Delta (see that question/answer above).

This report has a lot of data; can it be filtered?

Yes! We can either set up parameters to pre-filter the report or you can filter it yourself in Excel. Some filtering parameters might be company size and/or industry.

Are topics different than keywords?

Yes! Topics are predicted from deep-learning and natural language processing models that understand human concepts presented in text. Keywords, on the contrary, are collected by scraping content for terms and phrases that are explicitly stated throughout web content.

Imagine you read an article that contains content about Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat but never mentions the phrase “social media”. Bombora’s topic learning engine will recognize that this content is relevant to social media, even without containing that phrase. Keywords that will come up for that article would contain simply scraped terms that appear in that article.

What is an intent topic cluster?

An Intent topic cluster is a group of like-minded granular topics representative of all facets of a product or service. While it’s interesting to monitor content consumption activity for one topic. Building an Intent topic cluster identifies broader interest on related topics, which is more indicative of a trend.

Why are Intent topic clusters important?

Bombora’s taxonomy contains over 5,300 Intent topics! Finding inter-related topics relevant to specific products and services is the first step to activating Company Surge® data.

How do we build Intent topic clusters?

A Historical Buyer Journey Analysis on a set of closed-won (and lost) deals can help to identify which topics customers were consuming more prior to purchase. It helps build a very specific set of Intent topic clusters for different parts of the buying journey. Once intent topic clusters are built, customers can target accounts in these clusters with high Company Surge® scores.

I don’t see a specific topic listed in Bombora’s topic taxonomy, can I request a new topic?

Yes, new topics can be requested. If you are interested in requesting a new topic, please send over the topic name along with a description of the topic. It will then be sent to Bombora for approval. If the topic is approved, Bombora will start creating it which will take 6-9 months.