Intent data is one of the most oversold categories in go-to-market, and also genuinely useful. Both are true, and the difference between the two is almost entirely about which kind of intent you bought.
First-party: the strongest and most ignored
Your own engagement data — site visits, email opens and replies, content downloads, product usage, support tickets, past closed-lost — is the highest-quality intent signal available to you, and it is free.
It is also routinely the least used, because it sits scattered across four systems that do not talk to each other. Before you evaluate a single vendor, connect what you already have. On most audits this alone finds more actionable accounts than the intent product the client was about to buy.
Second-party: real, narrow, expensive
Review sites and comparison marketplaces know when someone researched your category on their platform. That is a genuine, specific signal — but it only covers the buyers who happen to use that platform, and it is priced accordingly.
Worth it when your category has a dominant comparison site and your ACV supports the cost. Not worth it as a general-purpose intent feed.
Third-party: where the noise lives
Aggregated content-consumption signals across a publisher network, resolved to companies by IP or identity graph. This is where scepticism should concentrate, for four reasons:
- Resolution is approximate. Company-level identification from network signals is inference, not observation, and it degrades badly for remote-heavy and smaller organisations.
- Topics are broad. "Researching marketing automation" covers a buyer, a competitor, a student and a consultant.
- You are not the only buyer. Every vendor in your category gets the same surge, on the same day. A signal everyone has is not an advantage.
- The baseline is rarely disclosed. A "surge" is relative to a normal that you cannot see and cannot audit.
Every vendor in your category gets the same surge on the same day. A signal everyone has is not an advantage.
Behavioural signals: often better than intent products
Observable facts about a company frequently outperform purchased intent, and you can build them yourself: hiring activity, leadership changes, tooling adoption, funding, product launches, office moves.
They are unambiguous, cheap and timestamped. A company hiring three people for a function has told you something more reliable than a topic surge score ever will.
How to evaluate any intent source
Run it as a holdout test, exactly like a channel. Take accounts flagged as in-market, take a matched set that was not flagged, run identical outreach to both, and compare reply and opportunity rates.
If the flagged group does not meaningfully outperform, you have bought a random number generator with a good dashboard. Vendors will not love this test, which is itself informative.
The rule we use
Weight first-party highest, behavioural second, second-party third, third-party last and only as a tiebreaker. And never let a purchased signal alone trigger high-effort outreach — require it to co-occur with something you observed yourself.