What is intent data?
Intent data is the trail of behavioral signals a potential buyer leaves while researching a purchase — the pages they view, how often they return, what they compare — collected and scored to estimate how close they are to buying.
First-party vs third-party intent data
First-party intent data comes from your own properties: your website, your docs, your pricing page. It's the most accurate and the most privacy-safe, because the buyer is literally researching you. Third-party intent data is bought from external networks that track research across other sites — broader reach, but noisier, more expensive, and harder to defend on privacy grounds.
How intent scoring works
Raw signals become useful when they're weighted and scored. A pricing-page view says more than a blog skim; three visits in a week say more than one visit a quarter ago. Scoring models combine page value, frequency, recency, and depth into a single number — typically 0–100 — so a team can rank accounts instead of guessing.
Why it matters for B2B teams
Most B2B buying research happens anonymously — analysts consistently estimate the large majority of the journey is done before a buyer ever talks to sales. Teams that read intent signals reach buyers while the decision is still open; teams that wait for form fills compete for a shortlist that's already been written.
How teams put it to work
The common loop is: identify the companies behind anonymous visits, score their intent from behavior, and route the hottest accounts to sales with context on what they researched. Tools like ANONECT run that loop end-to-end on first-party data — but whatever the tooling, the principle is the same: act on demand while it's forming, not after it's decided.