Bombora is an industry-leading B2B data company specializing in Intent, identity, digital audiences, and campaign measurement. Bombora’s data solutions are built from its one-of-a-kind Data Cooperative, consisting of thousands of B2B brand and publisher websites. Bombora delivers durable, privacy-centric data that powers sales, marketing, and advertising teams to identify and engage buyers at scale. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Bombora CEO Mark Connon to learn more.
Mark Connon’s Background
Could you tell me about your background? Connon said:
“My entire career, spanning leadership positions at Experian, Tapad, Verizon, AOL and some ‘dot com era’ companies, has been dedicated to harnessing data to drive superior customer outcomes. Bombora is actually my first B2B (business to business) focused leadership role. I am hooked! As Bombora’s customers navigate increasingly complex, high-stakes, multi-month buying journeys, we stand uniquely positioned to help marketing and sales teams unlock data-driven insights from across a diverse B2B ecosystem and apply them to accelerate pipeline and win more effectively. We are in a very special position, cultivated over the last 10 years, at the center of the B2B ecosystem.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Connon explained:
“Bombora is a B2B data company, meaning we deliver unique, consent-driven, privacy-centric, durable data solutions and enable them to be applied seamlessly wherever a customer wants to use them.”
“The essential core of our offering is our one-of-a-kind Data Cooperative made up of thousands of leading B2B publishers, brand websites and premium data providers that all consent to contribute B2B research and consumption data. Our Data Co-op allows Bombora to deliver durable, verifiable data that industry leaders can rely on to fuel their businesses. The Co-op is a constantly evolving asset – we add hundreds of publishers and sites every year. I believe it would be impossible to replicate.”
“Our core product offering includes:
- Company Surge Intent data: We invented the B2B Intent data category more than 10 years ago and remain the industry leader. Our Intent data is unique because it relies on AI-driven machine learning and natural language processing models that understand meaning beyond keywords, it derives intent from a diverse set of reliable sources across the B2B internet, and it measures elevated activity relative to company-specific, longitudinal baselines.
- B2B digital audiences: We are the industry’s largest provider of B2B digital audiences, including hundreds of off-the-shelf audiences and thousands of business attributes that can be combined to create infinite custom audiences that align with an advertiser’s strategy
- Identity and enrichment solutions: Bombora’s identity solution allows companies to turn anonymous website traffic into valuable first-party data. Our patented methodology fuses deterministic, behavioral, and IP to company (IP2C) data to intelligently resolve business identity and enrich it with valuable firmographic, demographic, and geographic attributes.
- B2beacon, proprietary B2B campaign measurement: B2beacon, Bombora’s proprietary digital campaign measurement solution, is intentionally designed to give B2B advertisers the visibility they need to evaluate impact and optimize campaigns. B2beacon provides granular, descriptive reach and engagement metrics at the account, buying group, and persona level, powered by unparalleled match rates.
Bombora also brings unique capabilities that enable data activation across the ecosystem:
- A unique ability to translate high-value B2B data, from first and third-party data sources, into actionable digital audience segments for programmatic advertising. In October, we applied this capability to deliver Curated Ecosystem Audiences, a first-to-market offering that unlocks data from sources like Definitive Healthcare and Crunchbase for programmatic advertising.
- Extensive integrations with partners across Adtech (e.g., The Trade Desk, StackAdapt, LinkedIn, LiveRamp), Martech, and SalesTech (e.g., 6Sense, Apollo.io, Salesforce, Hubspot) that allow Bombora data to be deployed wherever, whenever a customer wants to use it.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Connon affirmed:
“Bombora is a B2B data company. We deliver unique, privacy-first, consent-driven, durable data solutions and enable them to be activated seamlessly wherever a customer wants to use them. This is an important distinction relative to many other players in our space who operate SaaS-based platforms (like Account Based Marketing platforms). Platforms are strategically designed to lock data in the tool to drive usage. In contrast, Bombora, a data company, drives usage through ubiquity. To this end, we continually invest against our strategic imperative that our data can be used anywhere, anytime, any way a customer wants it. In the past year, we have focused more on unlocking and enabling B2B data beyond that directly derived from Bombora’s proprietary sources. For example, earlier this year, we launched a direct integration with Adobe B2B CDP, which allows Adobe users to transform any data segment housed in the CDP (first-party data, third-party data) into addressable audiences that can be deployed across Bombora’s network of digital advertising platforms.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Connon noted:
“More than 10 years ago, we created the B2B Intent data category with our Company Surge’ Intent data solution. We have been pioneering B2B data solutions ever since. Today, despite many players entering the category with claims of comparability, our Intent data is widely considered “the gold standard” against which others measure performance. Our Intent data is powered by our Data Cooperative, made up of thousands of media destinations that truly represent and influence B2B decision makers.”
“We have expanded our suite of solutions well beyond Intent. Today, we offer identity and enrichment solutions, the industry’s largest suite of B2B digital audiences, and proprietary digital campaign measurement solutions. This suite allows us to serve the end-to-end needs of our customers – from building a high-potential key account list based on first and third-party data, to identifying the relevant buying group members shaping purchase decisions at these accounts, to building and activating addressable audiences to power advertising, to measuring the impact of these advertising investments.”
Significant Milestones
What are some of the company’s most significant milestones? Connon cited:
“In 2024, we celebrated the ten year anniversary of Bombora – a major milestone for the company. It was an opportunity to celebrate what we have accomplished, including creating an entirely new category (Intent data) and helping customers adopt and ultimately depend on it to drive their businesses. More importantly, it allowed us a moment to pause and reflect on where we want to go as a company.”
“As a rapidly growing company in a dynamic space, we get to celebrate other milestones frequently. This year, we have announced major partnerships and integrations with industry leaders, including Reddit, Adobe, and StackAdapt while continuing to expand our relationships with The TradeDesk, LiveRamp and others. As these are Adtech and Martech heavy hitters, their partnership demonstrates the persistent essentiality of our data to the B2B ecosystem.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Connon highlighted:
“We have many success stories across B2B publishers, B2B brands, and the agencies that serve them.”
“As we all know, publishers’ business models are being disrupted by AI-driven search. They are fighting to retain first-party traffic and justify third-party advertising investment. We applied our Company Surge Intent models to better understand the media consumption patterns of one major publisher’s target audience, uncovering topics that were under-represented in their owned editorial content. The publisher optimized its content strategy and, in one year, increased its page views on owned sites by 213% and its newsletter engagement by 7x. We are also helping publishers profile and validate their first-party audiences to attract advertising investment in a competitive market”
“We are also helping B2B brands do more with less. For example, the programmatic media company, MiQ is using Bombora’s proprietary B2B digital audiences and digital campaign measurement solution, B2beacon, to radically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the campaigns they build for their clients. After deploying our Intent-driven account based marketing audience segments, the click-through rate on client campaigns increased +28% (on average) and campaign-driven site traffic increased by 40% (on average).”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Connon acknowledged:
“Bombora, like all companies, is navigating the disruptive application of generative AI across workflows and use cases. The possibilities of AI seem almost limitless. The potential catalyzes urgent adoption but we also know it must be done in a framework that allows for scalability and optimization over time.”
“Among our customers, we are finding that companies are now holding data providers to a higher bar. Quality, durability and verifiability, attributes that may in some cases have only gotten lip service prior to this AI revolution, are now critical requirements. AI-driven productivity models, powering things like lead prioritization or marketing next best action models, must be trained on high-quality, verifiable data. Out-of-context data or privacy-murky data can distort insights, contribute to model degradation, and misdirect investments. Bombora is uniquely positioned to supply the high-quality, trusted data that B2B companies know they must have feeding their tools and AI agents. For ten years, we have worked directly with publishers and brands to build our Data Co-Operative. These thousands of publishers and brands trust how we collect and treat their data. They use it to power their own sales and marketing motion. Our annual retention rate is nearly 100%.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Connon concluded:
“Bombora’s future goal remains: make verifiable, durable B2B data available for our customers to use whenever, wherever they want. That said, the environment we are in is changing. So, where we might have been focused on ensuring our data is usable across the mar tech and ad tech landscape, now we are also focused on ensuring that our data can be used by the agents that our customers are building and implementing to unlock productivity (third-party and homegrown). We believe that we are uniquely positioned to fuel this moment.”
