What is the difference between first-party and third-party intent data?

First-party intent is behaviour you observe yourself, such as visits to your pricing page or a trial signup. Third-party intent is behaviour a vendor observes elsewhere on the web and sells to you, usually aggregated to company level.

Does intent data tell me who to contact?

Usually not. Most third-party intent is reported per company, not per person. You still need to find the right person inside the account and a reason to write to them.

Is intent data worth paying for?

It depends on deal size. It is usually bundled into enterprise contracts, so it tends to pay off for teams selling large deals to a defined account list, and less so for founders selling smaller deals.

What is intent data?

First-party, second-party and third-party

First-party intent is yours: page views, demo requests, trial activity, email clicks. It is the most accurate and the smallest in volume.
Second-party intent is another company's first-party data shared with you, such as a review site telling you which companies viewed your category page.
Third-party intent comes from a provider that watches content consumption across many publisher sites and reports which companies are reading more than usual about a topic. Bombora is a well known supplier, and tools such as Common Room include its data in their plans.

How a topic surge score works

Third-party providers usually express intent as a score per company per topic, compared with that company's own baseline. A worked example: say a 300-person logistics firm normally generates a handful of article reads a week about "warehouse management software". Over three weeks that roughly triples, across several employees and several publishers. The provider marks the company as surging on that topic.

What the score does not tell you: who is reading, why (a student intern writing a report reads too), or whether they have already picked a vendor. It is a reason to look closer, not a reason to send.

How to measure whether intent data works

Run a simple holdout. Split a target account list in two. Prioritise outreach to surging accounts in one half and work the other half in your normal order. After a quarter, compare meetings booked per account contacted. If the surging half does not clearly win, the data is not earning its cost for your market.

Common mistakes

Reading company intent as personal intent. A surge at a 5,000-person company could be anyone.
Over-trusting narrow topics. Small companies generate too little reading to surge at all, so intent data is thin for small business markets.
Opening with the data. "We saw your company researching X" reads as surveillance. Use it to choose who to contact, then write about their problem.

Related terms

Intent data is one type of buying signal. Web-visitor identification through reverse IP lookup is the first-party version. Both are commonly used in account-based marketing.

How Sluice approaches it

Sluice does not resell third-party topic intent. It works from public traces with a named person attached: who engaged with a post, who wrote a review of a competitor, who is advertising or hiring, plus first-party visitor identification for companies that own their network. If company-level topic intent across a large account list is what you need, a platform such as Common Room fits that better; see Sluice vs Common Room.