Bombora alternatives for B2B intent data

This guide helps a revenue operations or marketing lead who uses Bombora, or is evaluating it, decide whether another source of intent data should replace it or sit beside it. The choice turns on method. Bombora measures research: what people at a company read across a co-operative of publishers, brands and business-to-business media sites. Other sources measure activity on a review site, reading on one publisher's own network, or what the company itself does in public.

Fokals is in the last group. It scores intent from company actions, and every score carries the dated evidence behind it. Bombora's Company Surge page puts its taxonomy at more than 25,300 topics, and its home page also lists digital audiences for advertising, the identification and enrichment of anonymous website traffic, and campaign measurement. The two methods observe different things, which is why many teams run a behavioural source and an action-based source together.

What Bombora measures

Bombora describes itself on its home page as a data company and not a platform. Its intent product is Company Surge, and the material behind it comes from what Bombora calls its Data Co-op: publishers, brands and business-to-business media sites with which it has direct relationships. The Co-op page says Bombora has a tag on members' websites and captures engagement with gated, paywalled and open content, including text, form fills, downloads and registrations. It describes the data set as consent-driven and says 86% of the Co-op's data is shared with Bombora alone for the purpose of deriving intent.

The Company Surge page explains the scoring. Bombora monitors research against its topics and, for every pair of account and topic, compares the most recent three weeks of activity with a 12-week baseline for that account. Its guidance to customers on thresholds treats a score of 60 or more as spiking. The topic taxonomy is revised quarterly, and the page on Bombora's Apollo integration says the signals are refreshed weekly.

Delivery is through the tools a team already runs. The home page says the data goes into a customer's CRM, marketing automation and advertising technology, and the partners page counts more than one hundred integrations and partnerships. The same page says Company Surge can be delivered to a data lake or a customer data platform as a flat file or through an API.

Why teams look for an alternative

The reasons are about fit.

• A different question. Research interest says a topic is being read about. Some teams need to know what a company has done: the tool it adopted, the role it opened, the filing it made.
• Evidence a person can open. A rep, a model reviewer or an auditor may want the dated public source behind each signal.
• A sourcing rule. Some organisations take only public records and what a company publishes about itself. That is the buyer's rule, and it says nothing against a source that works by consent, as Bombora states its Co-op does.
• Licence fit. A team building a product needs terms for embedding or redistribution, and those are settled vendor by vendor.
• Research use. An investment team needs point-in-time rows that are written once, carry observation times and map to security identifiers.

Two methods side by side

The table sets Company Surge beside the Fokals intent dataset, using what each vendor states in public. The longer treatment of the two methods is in company signals vs third-party intent data. The methodology documents the Fokals score, and the delivery page describes the API and the exports.

What each is built for

• Research interest ahead of a public act. A buying group can read for weeks before the company posts a role or changes its site. Company Surge is built to observe that stage.
• A product described by a narrow term. Bombora's site states more than 25,300 topics, revised quarterly, which suits a category that only a very specific topic names.
• Audiences and identification of website traffic. These are Bombora products, delivered into advertising and marketing tools through the integrations its site lists.
• A dated reason to call. When a rep must say why now, a signal with its date, kind and source supplies the reason. Each Fokals score carries its five strongest signals, so the evidence travels with the number.
• Features for a model or a product. Fokals scores are produced under a named, frozen version. Weekly rows are written once after the week closes and are never revised, and a breaking change ships as a new version with at least 90 days' notice.
• One company index across datasets. Intent Scores join to Technology Stack, Job Postings and Company News on the same company ID, and listed companies carry ticker, ISIN, LEI and FIGI. A score can be read beside the stack and the hiring that explain it.

Using both: research interest and public action

The two sources answer different questions, so a team that already licenses Bombora can run them together and learn which combination precedes its own opportunities. Three steps set it up.

1. Map the topics. List the Fokals topics from the Intent Scores dataset, which carries each topic with its label and its group, and write a small table that ties each behavioural topic you track to the nearest Fokals topic.
2. Map the companies. Load your behavioural feed with the company's website domain as its key, build a domain-to-company map by domain matching, and join on the Fokals company ID.
3. Join by week. Fokals weeks run Monday to Sunday UTC, and each is written once after it closes.

-- behavioural_intent and topic_map are your own tables:
--   behavioural_intent(domain, topic, score, week_start), as you loaded it
--   topic_map(behavioural_topic, fokals_topic)
select
  m.company_id,
  f.topic,
  b.score as research_score,
  f.score as action_score,
  f.surge,
  f.evidence
from behavioural_intent b
join topic_map t
  on t.behavioural_topic = b.topic
join (select distinct domain, company_id from company_technologies) m
  on m.domain = b.domain
left join company_intent_weekly f
  on f.company_id = m.company_id
 and f.topic = t.fokals_topic
 and f.week_start = b.week_start
where b.week_start = date '2026-09-21';

Count the domains that drop out of the join separately, because an unmatched domain is not the same as a quiet company. A matched company with no row for a topic was quiet on that topic in that week. Read what remains as four groups.

An illustrative case: Acme Robotics, an invented company, has a research score of 68 on a CRM topic for the week of 21 September 2026. Its Fokals row for the CRM topic in the same week holds a score of 57 and is flagged as an intent surge. The evidence lists a posting whose title names a CRM tool and a new domain verification with a software vendor. Research and action agree, and the rep has two dated facts to open with.

Then measure. For each group, count the accounts that opened an opportunity within 60 days, and keep the thresholds fixed for a quarter so the groups stay comparable. The guide to prioritising accounts with intent scores covers the ranking itself.

Other alternatives to Bombora

Bombora is one of several sources of behavioural intent, and each observes a different place.

• G2 Buyer Intent records buyers researching a vendor's product on G2: visits to its profile, comparisons with a competitor and views of alternatives in its category.
• Informa TechTarget Buyer Intelligence reports which buyer is researching as well as which account, and the company says its signals come exclusively from its own audience. A team that needs the buyer as well as the account needs a source of this kind.
• Demandbase says its intent draws on its direct access to the advertising bid stream, and that it can import Bombora, G2 and TrustRadius intent beside its own.
• 6sense describes native intent data inside its platform, complemented by partnerships with other intent providers, Bombora among them.

The last two can take in Bombora data, so choosing either need not mean leaving it. Fokals is an alternative of a different kind: an evidence-backed feed of company actions for a team that runs its own stack.

Frequently asked questions

The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.

What this page says about the products it names was checked against their public documentation on 4 October 2026. Product and company names are trademarks of their owners. Fokals is not affiliated with them or endorsed by them.