Bombora vs. Google Ads

Bombora is the perfect tool for anyone looking to understand their B2B customer and their buyer's journey better. Companies produce tons of content - and pay lots of money creating and then amplifying it too. But is it really what the customer is interested in? Now you don't have to guess, you can know thanks to company surge data.

Incentivized

Clients who are selling products such as dresses, clothes, jewelry, beauty products, etc., generally work well. Also, in some cases, it doesn't fetch a good ROAS for very small business owners. If a client is already doing well in SEO, the probability for it to perform well over Google Ads is always enhanced, and if it doesn't have a good organic reach, Google Ads also suffers.

Incentivized

• Intent topics, as well as the clusters tied to them, have enabled our PMMs to be more granular with specific workloads that are based on industry.
• The "Account Intent" option within the "Insights" tab allowed us to look specifically into historical data tied to current activities that we were experiencing with that account.

Incentivized

• Keyword Research - Google Ads has a handy built in tool that helps determine important keywords to target both for Ads & SEO
• Intuitive Analytics Dashboad - Google Ads makes it fairly simple to see and analyze important metrics on how your ads are running week after week
• Intuitive Setup - Google Ads makes it easy to figure out how to run ads with little to no training (although training is highly recommended to run effective ads), as their interface is clean and easy to figure out (unlike competing products).

Incentivized

• Downloading intent data and trying to use it outside of their environment is tricky because the data is essentially one large worksheet. We want to overlay the data with our own data but joining it all together is tricky. Our data comes from D&B so the names provided by D&B don't always match what we get from Bombora so account matching is not very clean.
• Customer service is a bit hit or miss. I worked with an account rep to try and resolve it but she couldn't. However, she did open a ticket with the Bombora help desk to try and get me answers. I waited more than a week and got no answer. I followed up and the reply was the original owner of the ticket is out and the new ticket owner was wondering if I had rerun the report to see if the problem went away.
• Despite having a self-service type set up for the dashboards and reports, trying to understand what exactly needs to be filled in isn't always easy. The data doesn't match up with what we download so trying to compare the dashboards/reports to the extract is next to impossible?! It shouldn't be this way.

Incentivized

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.

Incentivized

I give Bombora an 8 as they do intent well for now. Not a 10 because again its a one trick pony where there are other platforms like ZoomInfo that offer intent as well plus so much more. From an end user perspective, I'd like Bombora to build out first party intent data capabilities to combine into the scoring.

Incentivized

I suspect that Google Ads is not for the novice user. I told my 'Ad Specialist' that I was not the best on computers and apprehensive about my ability to maneuver the website. He told me on more than one occasion that "I work for you...I'm your sherpa...call me any time or send me an email"!
The sales and service representatives for Google Ads are very well trained, though not much integrity. Despite that I told my Google Ad Specialist that my website was incomplete the ad was published live anyway! Beware that the 'talk' is good, but it ain't cheap!

Our CSM team is always available for us to meet with via an outreach click to book an invite and we have standing meetings. They met with us on day 1 of implementation and had us up and running that evening. They even go to the lengths of matching industry tenured folks with us to help us move faster.

We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with

Incentivized

There is a room for improvement in a layman's perspective as it was difficult for our to understand things during training and had to rearrange sessions.

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

Liked the implementation, however there is a still room for improvement for the support needed in overall implementation

Incentivized

Bombora doesn't give you a token for the number of accounts that are populated. You can search and request as many as you'd like. With other platforms, they provide you a token, and if you use all your tokens for the month, then you have to wait til next month.

Incentivized

Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.

Incentivized

Need improvement in places such as visualisation & UX

Incentivized

• Bombora played a big role in us proving the effectiveness of ABM for our organization and had a huge impact on us gaining approval for a full ABM platform.
• Bombora helped us identify key target accounts that brought great net new business to our company.

Incentivized

• Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
• Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
• If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.

Incentivized