Intent data is behavioral information that suggests a company, or people at it, is researching a topic, product category or vendor, and may therefore be in or near a buying cycle. It is used in B2B to decide which accounts to contact first and what to talk about.
Where firmographic data tells you whether a company fits, intent data is a guess about timing. It is a probability, not a fact: research can come from a student, a competitor or a team that has already bought.
How intent data works
Every intent product does the same three things: collect behavior, attribute it to a company, and compare it with a baseline.
- Collect. Page views, content reads, searches, review-site visits and ad impressions are recorded with a topic label.
- Attribute. The behavior is tied to a company, usually through IP-to-company matching (see reverse IP lookup), cookies or a logged-in profile.
- Score. The provider compares a company's recent activity on a topic with its own normal level. A "surge" is a statistically meaningful increase, not just a high count. Bombora, for example, treats a Company Surge score of 60 or more on a topic as spiking (Bombora, "Understanding Company Surge Scores").
First-party vs third-party intent data
| First-party intent | Third-party intent | |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Your website, emails, product, events | Other websites, review platforms, ad networks |
| Examples | Pricing page visits, repeat visits, integration page reads | Topic surges on publisher sites, competitor comparisons on review sites |
| Strength | Directly about you, high accuracy | Sees accounts before they visit you |
| Weakness | Only covers accounts that already found you | Noisy, topic-level, harder to verify |
| Cost | Low: you collect it | Licensed from a provider |
Where third-party intent comes from
- Review sites: companies browsing a category, comparing vendors or reading your profile on a software review platform. Narrow but strongly purchase-related.
- Publisher co-ops: networks of B2B publishers that share content-consumption data, mapped to topics. Broad coverage, early signal, weaker link to a specific purchase.
- Bidstream: data taken from programmatic ad bid requests, which carry the page URL and device information under protocols like IAB Tech Lab's OpenRTB. Very large volume, but consent and accuracy vary, so ask providers how they source and attribute it.
- Search and keyword data: inferred from search ads and keyword research rather than tied to companies.
Example
Example (illustrative): a payroll software vendor tracks five topics. One target account shows a third-party surge on "payroll compliance" and "HR software comparison" for three weeks. In the same month, two visitors from that company read the vendor's pricing page and an integration page for their accounting system. The fit is good (300 employees, right region). The account moves to the top of the SDR list, outreach mentions the accounting integration, and the website shows payroll-compliance proof to visits from that company. The third-party surge alone would have earned an ad impression; combined with first-party signals, it earns a call.
How B2B teams use intent data
- Prioritizing outreach: ranking target accounts by fit plus recent intent.
- Choosing the message: the surging topic tells sales what problem to open with.
- Ad targeting: concentrating spend on accounts showing activity in the category.
- Website personalization: showing content matched to the topic an identified account is researching.
- Churn and expansion risk: spotting customers researching competitors.
Our view: start with first-party intent. Pricing and integration page visits from an ICP account are worth more than any purchased topic score, and they cost nothing to collect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is intent data accurate?
Accurate enough to rank accounts, not accurate enough to treat as fact. Attribution depends on IP matching, which struggles with remote work and VPNs, and topic models can misread what a company is researching. Validate a provider by checking whether surging accounts actually convert to meetings at a higher rate than non-surging ones in your own CRM.
Is intent data legal under GDPR?
Company-level signals are lower risk than person-level ones, but if data is tied to individuals, cookies or device IDs, GDPR and ePrivacy rules apply, including consent for tracking. Ask every provider how data is collected, what legal basis they rely on and whether they can document consent. Bidstream-sourced data deserves the most scrutiny.
What is the difference between intent data and buyer intent keywords?
Buyer intent keywords are search terms that suggest purchase readiness, such as "pricing" or "alternatives", used mainly for SEO and paid search. Intent data is account-level behavior collected across many sources. The keywords tell you what to target in search; intent data tells you which companies are researching.
Related
Compare vendors in our review of intent data providers, see how signals feed the website in intent data for B2B website personalization, and find search-side signals in buyer intent keywords. For company resolution, see visitor identification.