Intent data providers

Intent data answers one question for a sales team: which accounts seem to be shopping right now? It doesn't usually name the person reading. A typical feed says that a company's research on, say, endpoint security rose sharply this week compared with its own baseline.

Marketing teams use it to pick which accounts to advertise to; sales teams use it to decide who to call first. Because the signal is about an organisation, it is almost always paired with a separate contact source before anyone is approached.

Bombora, the best-known co-op operator, describes co-op data as first-party data from many partners that becomes a third-party source once pooled. Treat any provider's consent claims as statements to verify, not facts: ask which consent framework is used, who the controller is, and whether you may see the member-site list.

None of the major intent products publishes a price list. Procurement data gives the clearest picture of what organisations actually pay.

The number of topics tracked, the countries covered, and whether contact data and ad activation are included are the main levers. A standalone signal feed is the cheapest entry point; a platform that scores, activates and reports is several times more.

• Browsing is personal data before it is aggregated. A provider resolves individual reading sessions to a company, so its collection has to satisfy privacy law even if the output is account-level.
• Regulators have acted against browsing data sales. The FTC's 2024 order against Avast banned it from selling browsing data for advertising and required a $16.5 million payment, after finding that its Jumpshot unit sold consumers' browsing information.
• Auction data is narrowing. The FTC's Mobilewalla order restricted collecting data from ad auctions for purposes other than taking part in them, which bears directly on bidstream methods.
• Contracts should say who is the controller of what, and what happens to scores derived from data that later turns out to lack consent.

Before signing, give the provider a list of accounts that bought from you last quarter and accounts that didn't, without saying which is which. Ask for their intent scores for the months before each deal. If the buyers didn't surge earlier than the non-buyers, the signal won't help your team, however good the demo looks.

We should be plain about our role: DataBroker sells a course and software for people who broker data between companies. We don't sell intent scores or operate a co-op. The brokering opportunity here sits upstream.

Niche publishers, trade communities and B2B software companies sometimes hold research-activity data that intent providers would license, and a broker who can check the consent position and package it properly can introduce the two sides.