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Data Services Best Practices

  • Updated

Use the following notes to achieve the best results when purchasing enrichment data for your person and company records. 

  • When sending matching criteria to the data vendors, there is a trade-off between match quality and match rate. Using several match criteria results in high match quality, but often at the sacrifice of match rate. Reducing the match criteria improves match rate, but often results in reduced match quality.
  • Most 3rd party data providers require a company email address for matching person data. Use of free email providers (ie. gmail, yahoo, hotmail, aol, etc.) results in very low match rates.
  • If you do not have a company email address, you may be able to use a data provider like GetEmail.io to obtain a company email, and then use a different provider with the company email address to get additional data for the person record.
  • Match rates tend to be higher for contacts and companies located in the United States versus those located in other countries. This is especially true since GDPR took effect. 
  • Match rates are highest for publicly held companies versus privately held in any locale.

In order to maximize your match rate, we recommend a waterfall method using multiple data vendors. For example, construct your enrichment job in Openprise using the following approach:

  1. Clean and normalize any data used for matching. For example, normalizing Country, State, and Zip codes will help increase your match rate and match quality by correcting typos and inconsistencies.
  2. Enrichment task 1: First vendor: supply several match data points to produce good match accuracy.
  3. Enrichment task 2: Filter out any matches from the preceding task. Using the first vendor, supply fewer match data points to attempt to increase the match rate.
  4. Enrichment task 3: Filter out any matches from the preceding tasks. Using the second vendor, supply several match data points to produce good match accuracy.
  5. Enrichment task 4: Filter out any matches from the preceding task. Using the second vendor, supply fewer match data points to increase the match rate.
  6. Repeat these steps for all the data vendors you wish to use.

 

Vendor Specific Notes

These vendor notes are subject to change as vendors are continually improving their services.

BrightVerify (Validity)

Provides: Email validation and verification.

BriteVerify will verify if an email is valid or not. However, it does not ensure that the email address belongs to the person.

BriteVerify returns several values 

  • Valid: the address is definitely valid. 
  • Invalid: the email address (as processed) is definitely invalid. 
  • Accept_all: the server accepts all addresses, so the domain is good, but the specific address may or may not be. 
  • Unknown: BriteVerify cannot make a determination about the validity of the provided email address.

If Bright Verify indicates an email address is Invalid, it provides 3 different error codes:

  • email_address_invalid: the email is not formatted correctly
  • email_domain_invalid: the domain does not exist or is not capable of receiving email
  • email_account_invalid: the email account does not exist on the domain

More information is available at: https://help.returnpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047111771-Understanding-Statuses-in-BriteVerify

Cognism

Provides: Contact and related Account data.

Cognism provides information on whether a contact has had a title change and remains as the same organization and if the contact has changed organizations. If the contact has changed organizations, it provides the match details for the new organization.

The Cognism City and Cognism Country fields provide the location that social networks such as LinkedIn state the individuals are in. As a result, Cognism City may provide data such as “Greater Denver Area” rather than a city name. Other address fields returned provide the office address for those companies.

The Cognism API connector is newly released as part of the Openprise platform. 

 

Dun and Bradstreet

Provides: Account and/or Contact data.

Account Data:

  • Using the waterfall method described above is suggested when trying to match Account data.
  • High match rates can be achieved if you use DUNS number and/or company website domain as part of your match criteria.
  • The Advanced Search option requires that you provide a contact’s full name. Providing anything less than a full name will give you incorrect results. You may need to create a task in your job that combines first name and last name together to meet this requirement. (Hint: use the Combine Attributes task.)
  • IMPORTANT: When matching Account data and supplying Territory match criteria (in the US, Territory = “state”), you must supply any North American (US and Canadian) states in their 2-character abbreviation. For any state outside of North America, supply the state name in its fully spelled out form.

Contact Data:

  • The Advanced Search returns nothing if you put in email address only.
  • If you only have email, you need to use the email search option, not the basic or advanced options.
  • Best practices are to start with several match criteria (ie. Full name, email address, country, state, city, zip). Then follow with a second and/or third match using fewer match criteria (ie. the final match could include only contact email address). 
  • The Advanced Search option in Openprise requires that you provide a contact’s full name. Using anything less than a full name will give you incorrect results. You may need to create a task in your job that puts first name and last name together to meet this requirement.

DiscoverOrg 

[ZoomInfo was acquired by DiscoverOrg on 2/3/2019 and operates under the name ZoomInfo.]

Provides: Contact data. Good for Fortune 200 companies, and deep coverage in the IT space.

  • The DiscoverOrg user’s account must have API access which is an additional charge, and obtainable directly from DiscoverOrg.
  • DiscoverOrg’s API does NOT allow you to include the Company name in the search parameters, although this is changing with a new API version. [As of 1/1/2019]

GetEmail.io

Provides: Email verification and email retrieval when provided a name (first and last) and company.

  • GetEmail.io has a 10-minute wait implementation. For example, Openprise will call the API & get results, wait 10 minutes, then call the API again to get better results. The 10-minute delay is likely required for GetEmail.io to get real-time results.

Oceanos

Provides: US contact data.

Orb Intelligence

Provides: Account data on 42.5 Million Global Companies, along with parent and subsidiary family tree data. http://orb-intelligence.com/

  • Collects Data from 2,000 International Government sources
  • Data is updated every 30 days
  • Coverage claim:
    • 99 % coverage for companies over 100 employees
    • 90% coverage for companies between 10 and 100 employees
    • Good coverage for companies under 10 employees
  • They have SMB and International coverage
  • They include website and email domains
  • They’re working on rolling out reverse IP lookup. Contact help@openprisetech.com for availability. 

Notes on Industry Data

In a company profile, there are four attributes describing a company's industry:

  1. Industry - general simple industry category. Flat dictionary of 200 classes, such as Manufacturing, Software, Media, Retail, etc
  2. SIC code - government standard. Hierarchical taxonomy. Companies report it themselves in gov filings, or sometimes we infer it from other classification known about the company.
  3. NAICS code - government standard. Hierarchical taxonomy. Companies report it themselves in gov filings, or sometimes we infer it from other classification known about the company.
  4. Categories Name and Categories Weight: A set of business categories with weights. We have built our own proprietary dictionary of 40K business terms. A set of categories can be used to classify a company more specifically rather than SIC or NAICS code. They can also be used to build a list of look-alike companies. We extract these terms with weights from the company's description on the website and in social network sites. 

Updates 

The database is updated every 45 days. Changes are not tracked for industries.

People Data Labs

Provides: people and some company data

  • They claim they can handle personal emails and return work data, including email.
  • They have a combination of people-personal+professional data. 
  • Pricing includes up to 100 attributes of info, including historical data (email, job title, etc.)

Synthio

  • Better match rates are achieved with fewer match parameters.

ZoomInfo

Provides: Contact information, with robust direct dial information.

When using the Openprise ZoomInfo connector, please refer to this link for information on match criteria and returned data details.

If you have any questions please email help@openprisetech.com  

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