Understanding Account Matching and Domain-Based Targeting

Demandbase targets accounts by identifying the online users associated with each account:

1. Domain Matching: Demandbase matches each target account’s website to its primary online presence, or domain.
2. User Affiliation: Demandbase uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine which users are associated with each domain.

Important: In this article, “users” refers to individuals at current and potential customer accounts who engage with online content where your ads can appear.

Understand Domains in Demandbase Advertising

A B2B company's domain is typically the root of its website URL. For example, the company.com in https://www.company.com/division.

In Demandbase Advertising, a domain is the unique, non-redirecting portion of a website URL that represents a distinct online presence. An account’s website cannot simply act as a proxy for another URL.

Understand Account Matching

When you upload an account list, such as a CSV file, Demandbase matches each account to a company in the Demandbase company database.

Your account data remains unchanged. The match connects the account to Demandbase company intelligence, including associated domains, and provides the foundation for domain-based targeting.

Understand Why Account Matches Change

Companies, domains, and corporate relationships change over time. Acquisitions, domain redirects, parent-child relationship changes, and updates to your CRM data can affect account-to-domain mappings.

To keep your data accurate, Demandbase periodically re-matches accounts to the most accurate company record available. Across a database of more than 30 million domains, annual match drift of approximately 5–10% is normal.

Re-match updates are applied monthly and occur gradually, so month-over-month changes are typically small.

Understand How Domain Mapping Affects Targeting

Accurate website URLs help Demandbase identify each account’s distinct online presence.

If an account has its own unique domain, Demandbase can identify and target people associated with that account. Accounts without a distinct domain cannot be targeted independently.

For example, a division that exists only as a path on a parent website, such as company.com/division, cannot be targeted separately. A division with its own subdomain, such as division.company.com, can be targeted.

Example: Subdomain Mapping

Website URLs can change over time and affect domain mappings. For example, because sprint.com redirects to t-mobile.com, Demandbase maps accounts using sprint.com to t-mobile.com. The mapped domain then appears in campaign reporting.

Important: When multiple accounts share a domain, Demandbase cannot provide separate domain-level metrics for each account. Reporting is aggregated at the domain level.

Example: Multiple Accounts Mapped to One Domain

After mapping each account to a domain, Demandbase uses proprietary machine learning to identify associated users. Demandbase processes approximately 20 billion domain signals each day to target those users with your ads.

How Domain Mapping Works for Your Ad Campaigns

Here's a simplified overview of how Advertising Cloud uses domain mapping to reach your target accounts:

1. An account is associated with a website URL.
2. Demandbase maps the website to a domain.
3. Demandbase associates users with that domain.
4. When a user requests an ad, Demandbase determines whether the user is associated with one of the targeted domains.
5. If the user is associated with a targeted domain, Demandbase serves the relevant ad.

When multiple accounts share a domain, targeting occurs against the shared domain audience.

Understand Campaign Reporting

Your account list reflects the latest match for each account. Therefore, the number of accounts in the list remains the same as the number of accounts in your original input. For example, an 800-account list continues to contain 800 accounts.

Campaign reporting works differently. A campaign shows the lifetime count of accounts targeted during the campaign.

If an account initially matches to Company A, and is later rematched to Company B because Company B is the more accurate match, both company records can appear in the campaign’s lifetime account count. As a result, a campaign that started with an 800-account list might eventually show 830 targeted accounts, even though the account list still contains 800 accounts.

These differences are expected. They reflect ongoing account rematching and do not mean that accounts were added to your original list or that your targeting intent changed.

Review Campaign Reporting

Campaign reports include domain and subdomain reporting in addition to account-level reporting. This helps explain differences between account and domain performance while providing account engagement and advertising metrics.

See Understanding the Campaigns and Domains Tabs on the Campaigns Dashboard.