What is Intent Data And Its types | Ampliz

6 min readApr 8, 2022

“ Intent Data “- this phrase is making quite a noise in today’s B2B and B2C marketing and sales campaigns. But is this only a buzz word or is there a logic behind it?

Does it really help close more deals or come up with better marketing strategies and campaigns?

Let us dive deep to understand how it works.

What is Intent Data?

In simple words, “ Intent Data “ represents the purchase interests of your digital audience. It is a dataset that analyses your customers based on their digital behavior and predicts their purchase cycle. So, if you are facing difficulty understanding your customers and interest, this dataset may just be the solution.

Intent Data harvesting begins when someone initiates a search for something online or visits a website. It analyzes, understands, and produces insight based on the behaviors and engagement of the prospect. Intent Data helps businesses understand the prospect’s journey and purchase interest.

B2B intent data consider aspects like the websites a buyer visits, the products or services they’re looking into, their level of engagement, and purchase intent. Most B2B buying journeys include extensive investigation where these content exchanges can provide valuable insight into buyer intent.

Key Components of Intent Data

Intent datasets are curated by tracking the content consumption of buyers. Irrespective of the type of the Intent Data, there are four components to it:

Content repository: Content is integral to the B2B buyer journey. It includes web pages, landing pages, resources, blog posts, and videos.
Content with topic metadata: Content must be analyzed to measure content consumption and reveal consumer intent. Content with descriptive metadata provides context, processed to infer intent.
Technology to map individuals: The capacity to recognize a buyer is required to develop an intent dataset. On third-party publisher sites, an individual’s IP address is logged to identify the organization they are from; on owned sites; this can be connected to CRM or marketing automation software that sits behind web and email to identify the buyer properly.
Technology that tracks individuals: Once an individual is cookied, content metadata can be utilized to create an ‘interest profile.’ Prospect’s Interest Profile is a collection of topics that evolves with the content journey, demonstrating intent.

What are the different types of Intent data?

1. First-Party Intent Data

“ First-party intent data “ is your go-to Intent Dataset, generated solely by your sales & marketing campaigns and digital presence.

It includes businesses’ online research activities revealing prospects’ purchase intentions acquired through

Your website visits
Landing pages visits
Social media followers
CRM insights
Marketing automation platform
Email responses.
Resource downloads.
Blog subscriptions.

2. Third-Party Intent Data

It is as the name implies. “Third-Party Intent Data” is intent data from a third party. Nowadays, many intent data vendors or technology providers offer add-on data or intent-driven solutions. This data may come through

Information collected by data vendors
Product review sites
Channel partner of intent data providers
Public data or ad exchanges
In combination with their first-party sources.

The key difference between first-party and third-party intent data is that first-party intent data is yours. You hold a competitive novel dataset of your visitors that no one else has.

If you purchase third-party intent data, your competitors may have access to the same dataset. Furthermore, every third-party data is accompanied by compliance concerns and limitations.

What are the Sources of Intent Data

Intent Data are accumulated from different sources, among which four are widely used-

1. Ad Exchange Data

Intent data gathered from online ad bidding. This data identifies the volume and coverage of intent signals. This data is extensive and provides a comprehensive outlook, and can play a critical part in understanding your target customers and their buyer intent.

2. Co-Op Data

Co-op data is harvested from publishers, tech suppliers, agencies, firms, and other digital resource providers. The signal volume is usually high, and the coverage is generally pretty broad but less than ad-exchange data.

3. Publisher Data

Intent Data is also collected from a publisher’s (including review sites) own portfolio of web properties. This data may be of good quality but lacks the coverage provided by exchange-based and co-op data.

4. Social/Public Data

Social media is an absolute gold mine when we talk about Intent Data. Detailed insights into the social profiles of your targeted prospects can tell you a lot about their behavior and buying intent. You can also measure where you stand in the competition with your rivals.

While other data mining processes focus on content consumption, data derived from social media focuses on customer engagement and behavior across platforms related to your products and services. Hence, these insights can reveal a lot to help you revise your strategies.

How Does Intent Data Influence Businesses?

As you have already understood, First-Party Intent Data is your novel data derives from solely your marketing operations.

This data is unparalleled and possessed only by you.

There are several ways to leverage the data to drive engagement and revenue for your business.

B2B organizations typically have a “data gap” among their digital audience. While many of your prospects may show a direct interest in purchasing your products or services, but, what about those prospects who are yet to be influenced? Utilize the insights offered by intent data to engage every single prospect in your product.

While third-party intent data providers may help you with a broader perspective on more generalized topics, first-party intent datasets empower you to execute tailored topic taxonomies according to your business needs. Deploy intent data to build an ‘interest profile’ that visualizes prospect intent.

Third-party intent data has compliance limitations in providing individual information. However, since first-party intent data is owned by you, it gives you a peek at the intent of your every buyer. Understand buyers’ journey and persona to find out ways to engage them.

Though with the help of a bit of technology, no visitor can remain completely anonymous, we would consider visitors who have not submitted their information by themselves on your website as anonymous. It is very important for business growth to bring traction here. Create a personalized experience for them with the support of intent data. Track their digital footprints on your website and drive them towards your intended action with Web Personalization.

B2B firmographics are unstable, hence unreliable. Intent Data analysis can provide you with a real insight into your customers’ organizational status, buying capacity, and other vital factors. This valuable information will help you qualify your leads and pursue them accordingly.

First-Party Intent Data makes it extremely easy for the marketing team to run their operations. Intent Data Analytics expedites customer segmentation and demand generation processes, empowering the marketing team to focus more on personalized content and other strategic tasks.

Intent Data to Rise as the Next-Gen Business Intelligence

Over the past few years, data intelligence has been playing a pivotal role in business operations. The world of business recognizes “Data as the new oil.” The business industry’s evolution bears witness that the automation of simpler tasks often becomes the hardest.

Whereas, in the early 2010s, marketing automation created a buzz and changed business operations, so forth, now is the time for data intelligence.

The importance of Firmographic data, technographic data, and propensity data are already recognized by leaders. Now Data Intelligence is more robust with the ascent of Intent Data.

Intent data sources and types can be varied. But what remains constant is its value. B2B organizations have realized the critical role of intent data in building a result-driven and sustainable marketing and sales strategy.

The power booster is here, and it is up to the businesses and organizations if they can effectively use it to identify shifts and opportunities in the target market, map and update the typical buyer’s journey, comprehend competitor strategies and business decisions and identify acquisition targets.

Originally published at https://www.ampliz.com on April 8, 2022.