Match rates measure an account-identification vendor’s ability to connect anonymous buyer activities to pipeline accounts. When your account match rate is high, you can uncover more target accounts, optimize spend, and improve personalization.
How Matching Works
Account matching takes data from your own website and customer database, as well as third-party sites, and matches them to contacts or accounts. Historically, this was done using corporate IP addresses — but the rise in remote work forced vendors to rely on other methods.
In addition to IP addresses, accounts can be matched using device IDs and cookies. And incorporating other data signals such as channels, product categories, and location can further uncover account data and intent.
Matching accounts to activity indicates who to pursue more assertively. That’s why it’s probably no surprise that a low match rate can be detrimental to your revenue strategy. If an account is misidentified, you’re personalizing messages based on false information, which creates a poor experience for the buyer. It wastes resources, too
Failing to match an account altogether means you’re missing out on hundreds of potential customers and thousands — or much more — in revenue.
How to Evaluate Vendor Match Rates
Before selecting a vendor to help you identify accounts, put their match rates to the test. There are a couple of ways to do so.
The first is to provide vendors a list of known IP addresses and ask them to come back with corresponding accounts. The caveat with this method is that in order to get an accurate indication of match rates, you’ll need a list of at least several thousand addresses — not the most feasible approach.
An easier test is to put JavaScript tags on your website for a week and ask vendors to report back on match rates and accounts that visited the site. This also shows you whether vendors use other data points to match accounts beyond IPs.
It’s important to note: Whatever method you choose, use the same dataset for every vendor to get the most definitive comparison.
(6sense is proven to have the highest match rate in the industry, collecting millions of interactions and connecting intent across devices, channels, people, and more. Our method has helped us to achieve up to an 85% match accuracy.)
