How Intent Data is Collected and the Types You Need to Know

Data plays a key role in building better marketing strategies that help you generate more engagement and convert leads into customers. Collecting intent data gives you more information to use in your campaigns, and it’s particularly valuable for businesses hoping to build effective personalized marketing strategies.

We’ve compiled a guide to collecting intent data to enhance your audience targeting methods and gain access to critical, actionable insights from various digital platforms. You should always seek the necessary advice when collecting data regarding privacy and other applicable laws.

How is Intent Data Collected

Intent data comes in many forms, meaning there are diverse ways of collecting it. These are some of the most common methods that you can use to collect intent data for your business.

First-Party Intent Data Collection

First-party intent data is collected from your owned digital properties, including your website, email platform and social media accounts. It provides valuable insights into your audience’s behaviors and preferences, and since you can collect it directly from the source, it tends to be both accurate and reliable.

Collecting first-party intent data is as simple as using the analytics features built into or on top of your website. Your email marketing platform and social media accounts likely have integrated analytics features. You can use an integrated analytics dashboard for your website if it’s built into your content management system (CMS) or an external platform such as Google Analytics. 

First-party intent data is important to collect because it’s the most direct way of understanding customer engagement. You can get critical insights, like what content your audience engages with most, which can inform strategy improvements.

Third-Party Intent Data Collection

Third-party intent data is collected from external sources outside your ecosystem of owned digital properties. Data from ad networks, third-party websites and public social media pages are good examples of third-party intent data.

It provides insights into how your audience behaves outside of your properties. This is both a benefit and a weakness because it gives a broader view than first-party data but is inherently less reliable than the more direct first-party data.

Third-party intent data is valuable only if it is provided by trustworthy aggregators or data vendors. Provided you can validate the accuracy and reliability of the data, it can be just as useful as first-party data in providing insights into your audience’s behaviors.

Advanced Data Collection Techniques

The advancement of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) is opening up new intent data collection possibilities. These technologies make it easier to analyze large datasets to extract impactful insights.

Using them can allow you to get more meaningful data than ever before. Whether you’re using a built-in AI analysis feature in your website analytics platform or building your own NLP model to gather insights from third-party sources, you can save time and boost the accuracy of your analysis.

Types of Intent Data

Different types of intent data are best suited to helping you understand various elements of your audience’s behavior or preferences. These are some primary intent data types to prioritize in your collection efforts.

Search Intent Data

Search intent data is any data that reveals what your audience is looking for on search engines like Google. It can provide valuable insights into the topics or products your potential customers are researching.

Key search intent metrics to pay attention to include:

• • Search volume
  • Clicks
  • Impressions
  • Click-through rate

Collecting and analyzing search intent data can help inform your organic marketing strategies. Notice search volume increasing for a cluster of keywords relating to a specific topic, for example. You can decide to create more content about that topic to capture searches.

Engagement Intent Data

Engagement intent data tracks how users interact with content across various digital platforms, such as your website, emails and social media posts. It’s a great indicator of what content topics and formats best suit your audience, providing insights that can steer your content strategy.

Key engagement intent metrics to track closely include:

• • Page views
  • Session length
  • Likes or comments
  • Click-through rate

Paying close attention to engagement data across your key platforms will help you understand how best to target your audience in future strategies. If you notice that a particular content format generates high engagement on social media, for example, you can prioritize it in future content plans.

Technographic and Firmographic Intent Data

Technographic data and firmographic data provide deep insights into your audience’s preferences and demographics. The former data type profiles the technologies your audience uses, while the latter provides fundamental information about their business, like what industry they operate in, their size and what revenue they generate. 

These intent data types can help you better understand your buyer personas, delivering information that makes it easier to target them with marketing strategies. They’re handy if you carry out account-based marketing or use a segmentation strategy. 

Practical Applications of Intent Data in Marketing

Collecting intent data is only the first step in the process. To get value from it, you must think of ways to apply it in data-driven marketing strategies. Done right, this can yield truly impactful performance improvements. Here are some of the best ways to use your intent data, whether it’s first- or third-party. 

Personalizing Marketing Campaigns

Intent data is instrumental in creating powerful personalized marketing campaigns that target the unique needs and preferences of individual segments of your overall audience. It provides direct insights into how your audience behaves, from the topics they want to read about to the content formats they engage with most.

Suppose you segment your intent data based on audience characteristics, like demographic details or position in the buying funnel. In that case, you can create highly targeted personalized campaigns that increase engagement rates and conversions.

You can also leverage intent data to implement dynamic content personalization, adjusting email copy, social media post imagery and website content hubs to suit diverse user preferences. This helps you deliver a better user experience, ensuring that your audience always receives relevant content in the perfect medium at an appropriate time. 

Enhancing Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing involves targeting specific “accounts,” which can mean individual businesses or narrow segments, with precise campaigns. Intent data can help you establish these accounts and devise strategies that will help you address their specific needs more effectively. 

You can use the data you collect from your content across various first-party and third-party properties to identify segments of your market with strong buying intent, for example. You can then use broader intent data to build a more robust understanding of what content types they respond best to, giving you all the information you need to develop an effective targeted content marketing strategy. 

Conclusion

Intent data is instrumental for businesses hoping to understand their audience’s needs, preferences and behaviors better. It can help you build better audience targeting strategies, steer your content production plans and create seamless marketing funnels that address specific segments or accounts. 

Start collecting and analyzing intent data using the tips we’ve provided above, and you’ll achieve better marketing personalization results than ever before.