At KickFire, we preach the power of IP address intelligence™ in identifying the companies behind anonymous website traffic and providing B2B marketers and salespeople with a much better understanding of exactly which accounts are visiting and engaging with their digital content.
Our proprietary TWIN Caching® (Translating the WAN IP Network) technology has the unique ability to uncover the company behind an IP address and, when combined with our firmographic data, provides business intelligence for buyer intent data, account-based marketing, content personalization, and more.
However, since KickFire does not look at, gather, store, or use personal data in any way, and we are strictly focused on the company data behind an IP address, this begs the question:
HOW? – How does IP address intelligence work when people are working remotely?
Well, much like Kentucky Fried Chicken’s secret 11 herbs and spices, we can’t say exactly how TWIN Caching works. But what we can tell you is that our technology relies on a variety of proprietary methodologies and self-curated data sources. These include our machine learning algorithms as well as a team of real human data experts that ensure our data is accurate, current, and clean.
TWIN Satellites™ (TWIN Caching for Satellite Offices and Remote Workers)
As business connectivity has expanded outside of traditional headquarter office locations, our TWIN Caching algorithms have also expanded the identification of last-mile connectivity to these new branches and satellite offices. Meaning, whether an employee is working from HQ or another office location, we are able to associate account-level identification with their activity as a TWIN Satellite. When employees are in their offices and using various devices connected to the company network to browse the internet, these activities additionally feed our algorithms and contribute to our IP match confidence score, which we will address later in this post.
However, with more employees and teams working from home (especially in recent months), it’s important to know that the same principles that make our TWIN Caching technology so powerful can still be applied to “satellite offices” and work from home employees as well. The machine learning used to identify TWIN Satellites is agile and easily transferable – meaning it can be applied to the process of translating remote working and activity to the high-quality account-level data our customers expect.
Foundations for Data Accuracy
Here are some of the foundations for TWIN Caching’s data accuracy that speak to the power of our IP address intelligence:
- Confidence Scoring: Our technology relies on millions of indicators that we refer to as “event signals” to determine an IP address’ true owner. Think of these signals like tiny little votes that tell us who each IP address belongs to. Over time, once we have enough votes, we can say with a certain level of confidence that a particular IP address belongs to a certain company. We look at these event signals both historically and in real-time, meaning these event signals are dynamic and constantly changing, and thus the confidence score of each IP address we match can ebb and flow. Our motto when it comes to IP matching is always “quality over quantity,” meaning we would rather report nothing than report the wrong company, so if we read conflicting signals that cause a company’s IP address confidence score to ever drop below our confidence threshold we will not report it.
Think about it like this: would you rather have a giant chest full of fools gold or a smaller box of real gold nuggets? Personally, I’ll take the smaller box. We look at match rates the same way – we would much rather provide our customers with meaningful IP translations they can turn into marketing audiences, sales leads, add to ABM programs, etc. than flood them with inaccurate, unverified matches. - Ground Truth: For our purposes, ground truth is the result of a combination of event signals that all indicate the real owner of an IP address. Once we detect enough signals to impact scoring algorithms, and a confidence threshold is reached, a new ground truth will be established.
For example, let’s say our algorithms have received 35 signals over a time period that a particular IP address, 209.128.110.10 is being used by Acme Enterprises. Once our confidence threshold is reached, that is set as the ground truth for that particular IP address.
- IP Address Intelligence vs. Public Data Sources: When looking to leverage IP data in your sales and marketing strategy, it's critical to have the highest quality IP network data source available. Unfortunately, the trend in work from home employment has wreaked havoc on public data registries such as ARIN, and public data aggregators. As we cover in our article Not All Data is Created Equal, these databases only contain the IP address information that is self-reported by the companies themselves. Long story short, taking every reverse IP lookup at face value can cause big problems.
For example, if you’re personalizing content on your website based on industry and your IP data vendor matches the wrong company, you might be customizing for a software company but your visitor is actually from a construction company. This will make it more difficult for the visitor to find information that is relevant to them, and it will likely also take away the visitor’s overall experience with your brand.
Fortunately, our customers do not have to worry about this. We do not simply take the public data sources at their word, instead, we only report IP matches of companies that have passed our rigorous evaluation process. Our robust intelligence and team of Data Integrity Specialists are constantly looking at the thousands of signals that produce the highest quality IP intelligence on the market.
We all might be social distancing right now, but at KickFire we don’t plan on separating our data from accuracy during this time. B2B marketers and product teams can continue to rely on KickFire data to provide meaningful account-level insights, beyond the ISP level to power their account-based sales and marketing strategies. For more information about KickFire’s TWIN Caching technology, check out our video!