What are the two kinds of intent data?
Intent data tries to answer one question: which organisations are researching something you sell, right now? The two main sources answer it in very different ways.
First-party intent is behaviour observed where the observer has a direct relationship with the audience. That could be your website, your product, your webinars, or a publisher or community platform that shares signals under its own privacy terms. You know what was read, which question was asked and when.
Third-party intent is inferred from activity across a network of websites you have no relationship with. Providers collect content consumption through publisher co-operatives or advertising bidstream data, map it to organisations (usually by network address) and sell topic scores or "surges" by account.
How do they compare?
| First-party intent | Third-party intent | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it comes from | Your own properties, or a partner platform with a direct audience relationship | A network of external sites, via co-operatives or ad bidstream |
| Context | Known: the page, question, webinar or category | Inferred from a topic taxonomy |
| Freshness | Near real time | Typically aggregated over days or weeks |
| Reach | Limited to people who visit the property | Broad, across many sites |
| Exclusivity | Yours, or shared only with the partner's customers | Often sold to your competitors too |
| Main risk | Low volume, and consent must be handled properly | Opaque method and weaker account matching |
Where does third-party intent fall short?
- The method is opaque. Most providers don't disclose which sites contribute or how scores are calculated, so it's hard to judge why an account is surging.
- Account matching is getting harder. Remote work, mobile networks and shared infrastructure make it harder to map network addresses to companies, which brings false positives and misses.
- Topics are generic. Taxonomies rarely match how your category is really discussed, so a surge on a broad topic may say little about your product.
- Everyone gets the same signal. If the same surge report goes to every vendor in your category, it tells you who's in market and gives you no edge in reaching them.
Where does first-party intent fall short?
First-party signals are only as broad as the audience that produces them. Your own site sees buyers late, once they already know your name. An independent publisher or community sees them earlier, while they're still framing the problem. Either way, volume is lower than a network-wide feed, and every signal depends on proper consent and privacy handling.
How we combine them in programmes
- We start wide, using third-party data, firmographics and your own account list to define a pool of accounts that fit your ideal customer profile.
- We use first-party signals, such as category interest, questions asked and webinar registrations, to decide which themes and accounts get attention this month.
- We borrow the words buyers use in their questions and discussions, because they make far better messaging than a topic label.
- We qualify interest by phone or email before an account reaches your sales team, since no signal replaces a conversation.
- We record which signals came before meetings and pipeline, and adjust the weightings on those outcomes instead of on the scores.
Privacy, consent and trust
Intent programmes only work while the audience keeps trusting the places the signals come from. That means honouring consent choices, respecting privacy law in every market you operate in, and never trying to identify individuals from anonymous browsing.
When we use signals from Techarda, an independent technology community, we only see aggregated category and engagement signals. We never see who an individual reader is. A member's details are shared only when that member explicitly agrees, one action at a time, for example by asking a company to contact them. Techarda explains how this works in its published methodology.
What should you ask any intent provider?
- Where exactly does the signal come from, and what consent covers it?
- How are organisations identified, and how do you measure match accuracy?
- How fresh is the data when it reaches us?
- Which topics map to our category, and can we see the underlying content?
- Who else receives the same signal?
- Can we compare your scores with our own closed-won accounts?
We're happy to answer every one of those about our own programmes. Ask us.