I've been doing some research on intent data and I have some technical questions, especially about how two businesses might be collecting "contact level" i.e. personally identified web traffic details without using third-party cookies.
Some quick background: Most of the large providers of intent data (bombora, the big willow/aberdeen/Spiceworks Ziff Davis, Tech Target etc.) offer "account" based intent data - essentially when users visit websites in their network, they do a reverse IP addresses lookup, match them to know IP addresses of large companies (usually companies with at least 250 employees) and note what topics are "surging" - aka showing unusual traffic on a given week. This largely makes sense to me. I'm assuming that when a visitor shows up at your site, google analytics and similar tools can tell you what google search keywords were used to arrive at your site, and that's how they can say things like - we can "observe intent signals across an unlimited number of contextual keyword categories, allowing you to customize your keywords and layer these insights onto your campaigns for optimal performance." Third party cookies, and data from DSP's (demand side platform's enabling ad buyers to buy ads across many platforms) are also involved in providing data, those these will be less useful sources of data after google sunset's third party cookies on Chrome.
Two providers - intentdata.io, and intentflow.com are offering contact level intent data. You can imagine why that would be of interest - if the director of sales is interested in your sales SaaS tool, you have a better idea of how qualified that lead is and who to reach out to. Only one of the two providers is specific about what exactly they're collecting - i.e. what "intent" they are capturing and how they're collecting it.
Intentdata.io looks like a tiny company (two employees on LinkedIn). The most specific statement I've found about what their data is was in an Impact+ podcast interview - Ed, the CRO at intentdata.io, mentions that the data is analogous to commenting on a Forbes article or a conversation on LinkedIn. But he's clear - "that's just an analogy." They also say elsewhere that the data they provide mentions specifically what action the contact took that landed them in the provided data.
Ed from intentdata.io is also asked about GDPR compliance in his Impact+ interview - he basically says, some lawyers will disagree but he believes their data to be GDPR compliant, and it is in use by some firms in the EU. He does mention though that some firms have asked them to exclude certain columns from the data, like email addresses.
Edit: Found a bit more on intentdata.io - looks like they build a custom setup to pull "intent" data for each customer - they don't have a database monitoring company interaction with content across social media and b2b sites, instead you provide them with "lists (names and URLs) of customers, competitors, influencers, events, target accounts and key terms that would indicate intent at different stages in the buying journey. Pull together important hashtags, details on your ideal buyer (job titles, functions, seniority) and firmographics (size, industry, location)" - then they create a custom "algorithm" from this info, and they iterate on that "algorithm" a little bit over time.
They also make this statement on their site: "IntentData.io's data is collected from observing public actions that users are taking around the web. That means that first, we observe action (not reading, searching, browsing, being shown an ad, etc.) which we believe is a more concrete manifestation of intent. Second, people are taking these actions publicly for the world to see. We do not use any cookies, bidstream data or reverse IP lookups."
Finally one piece of their sales collateral asks: What ad budget do you have for PPC nurturing ads? So their may be some targeted PPC ads involved in the "algorithm."
Edit 2: Their sales collateral also states that they use "a third-party intent data methodology that uses multi-variable linear regression analysis to correlate observed actions with a specific contact. This is the method that the LeadSift engine of IntentData.io data uses."
Intentflow.com seems like the sketchier of the two providers if I'm honest. They provide a video walkthrough of how they get their data at intentflow.com/thesis - but I'm not following how using "traceable urls" with no cookies involved, could give you contact level information. They also say they lookup what the most popular articles/pages are for 5k to 40k unique keywords or phrases that are related to 10-50 keywords or phrases you give them to target. And they use "traceable urls" to track who visits those sites. Again - no cookies involved. Supposedly fully compliant at least with US laws. They don't provide data for the EU "by design" so presumably they're not GDPR compliant? They also claim they can identify the individuals who are visiting your website, again using "traceable urls" - it seems clear from the pitch that you're asked to reach out to your backlink providers around the web to use this traceable url.
I've seen an interview where a rep from Bombora says they tried for a while to do contact level intent data and it wasn't very useful - and it wasn't really doable in a compliant way. Ed seems to be aware they've said that publicly, and he says "that's just not true."
So what's going on here? How exactly are these two small firms getting contact level intent data? Do you think they're doing it in a compliant way?
Got more information:
Intentdata.io use public comments, likes, shares etc. on blogs, social posts via web crawling and scraping for events, influencers, hashtags, articles etc. that the customer deems worth tracking. They do some work to try and connect the commenters with an identifiable contact. They bill on a quarterly basis for this.
Intentflow.com doesn't seem to use "traceable urls" at all. They take bidstream data, and identify the individual visitors via an "identity graph." They provide a minimum of 5k contacts per month at $2 per contact, making their data very expensive ($120k+ per year). You can't get lower than however many contacts their system spits out per month so it seems like there's not a good firm limit on what you will be charged. They say they can identify ~70% of web traffic, and they only provide data on US site visitors. Each row of their output would include not just the contact, but the site that contact was shown an ad on. Definitely interesting data - but I'm guessing they will be very affected by upcoming changes to third party cookies, privacy laws, etc.