Understanding Intensity

Companies will often have multiple technology signals for the same product, or exhibit signals for competing solutions, which can inflate the perception of how a company's tech stack. A calculation known as intensity helps us understand a company's usage for a technology by taking into account the number of unique dates where a signal has been observed. 

Intensity on its own can be inflated, so HG also offers a score called weighted intensity to help you understand the depth and relevancy of a company's usage for a specific product.

It's worth noting that intensity is different from signal strength, which is the frequency of which we can determine the usage of a product at a company.

What is Intensity? 

Intensity is the total number of unique dates verifying the installation of the product. On its own, intensity is a binary, daily computation, meaning a company has a product signal, giving it a score of —or it doesn't, which is a score of 0. 

Intensity is a way for us to normalize install signals across companies because, typically, we see more signals for large customers than for smaller customers. If Birkenstock produces 2,000 signals on Monday and 400 signals on Tuesday for a specific product, their intensity would be 2 to represent the two days of signals.

These scores are then calculated over a calendar year, making the maximum score 365. Intensity on its own can skew the true usage of a product when the product signal comes from a job posting mentioning multiple competitive technologies, which may indicate a desired skill (e.g. knowledge of CRMs in general), versus a true product installation.

As an example, let's say we have two documents from Birkenstock detected on April 2:

• Document 1: “managing CRM software such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, HubSpot... also Microsoft Office”
• Document 2: “...used Salesforce ...”

Intensity would attribute a score of 1 to all three CRM products mentioned above on the date the signal was detected, even though its unlikely the company actually has all three of those CRMs installed.

What is weighted intensity?

Using NLP, HG Insights applies a scoring modification to any document whenever we detect multiple competitive technologies mentioned together in this manner. We may see multiple documents for a given product on a single day, so we also account for solo mentions of a product to outweigh others like in the example below.

• Document 1: For mentions of 3 CRMs and 1 non-CRM technology, each CRM product would get a weighted intensity of ⅓. Because Microsoft Office is part of a non-competitive group, this product receives a score of 1.
• Document 2: The standalone occurrence of Salesforce indicates a higher likelihood of this being the CRM that Birkenstock is using, so Salesforce gets the max weighted score of 1.

Weighted intensity gives more context to potentially inflated signals with competitive products; we don't remove the products entirely, but this approach makes it easier to determine which products are relevant and the primary tools in use.