Third-party intent data has been sold hard to B2B teams for several years now: a feed telling you which companies are researching your category, so you can reach them before your competitors. When I've had access to the underlying performance in client accounts, the results have been consistently underwhelming — and the reason is structural rather than a matter of picking a better vendor.
What third-party intent actually tells you
That somebody, at a company matching an IP range, read something on a publisher site loosely related to your category. Not who. Not why. Not whether they have budget, authority, or any connection to a purchase. Often it's a researcher, a student, a competitor, or someone who clicked a link from a newsletter. The signal is real but so diluted by the time it reaches you that acting on it looks a lot like acting on a list of companies in your sector.
The signals that actually predict a purchase
They're mostly in systems you already own and don't join up. Someone from a target account visited your pricing page three times this week. A trial user connected a real data source. An existing customer's usage doubled. A closed-lost opportunity from last year opened your email. A named contact changed jobs to a company on your target list. Each of these is specific, first-party, and describes a person rather than an IP range.
- Repeat pricing page visits from a known account — the strongest web signal there is
- Product usage crossing a plan limit or adding a second user
- Job changes among past champions — your warmest available list
- Re-engagement from a closed-lost opportunity after a quarter of silence
Signals are worthless without a defined response
Most teams that build signal tracking stop at the dashboard. A signal that nobody acts on within a day is just a log entry. Decide in advance: which signal, who responds, within what window, saying what. Then measure whether the response happened, not just whether the signal fired. In every account where signal-based work has actually produced revenue, the operational discipline mattered more than the sophistication of the detection.
When third-party data is worth buying
Narrowly: to help prioritise an already-defined target account list, not to generate one. If you have two hundred named accounts and need to know which twenty to work this month, an intent feed can be a reasonable tiebreaker. Used that way it's a prioritisation aid at modest cost. Used as a source of new accounts, it's an expensive way to build a list you could have built from firmographics.
The best intent data in your business is generated by people already interacting with you. It costs nothing and almost nobody has plumbed it into anything.
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