Where does intent data come from?
Intent data comes from three kinds of source. First-party data is behaviour on your own website, product and emails. Second-party data is another company's first-party data shared with you, typically a software review site reporting who researched your category. Third-party data is collected across many sites you do not own, through publisher co-operatives and advertising bidstream data. Public signals such as job postings are a fourth source.
First-party intent is the most reliable and the narrowest: page views, pricing visits, product usage and form fills from accounts that already found you. Second-party intent comes from sites where buyers compare vendors, so it is strong late-stage evidence but limited to accounts that use that site. Third-party intent is the broadest. In a co-operative, publishers contribute consented reading behaviour from their audiences and a provider maps it to topics by company. Bidstream data is taken from the requests exchanged in programmatic advertising auctions, which carry a page address and a network address. It is wide but coarse, and its privacy footing is contested. In every case the provider has to infer which company an anonymous reader belongs to, and that inference is a major source of error.
Hiring activity is a different kind of source because it is declarative. A company that posts a role has published, deliberately and under its own name, what it is staffing up to do, and the decision has already cleared a budget review. No identity resolution is needed. JobsPipe supplies that layer: POST /v1/jobs/search with company_name_or watches named accounts, job_title_or and skills_or find companies hiring for a function or a tool, and posted_at_gte limits results to new postings. Webhooks deliver new matches without polling.
When you evaluate a provider, ask which of these sources it uses, how readers are matched to companies, how consent is handled and whether you can see the evidence behind a score. Pairing sources works better than betting on one. The comparison at jobspipe.dev/intent-data-providers groups vendors by source type, and the JobsPipe free tier is enough to test hiring signals against your own account list.
The full treatment is on Hiring signals.
Related questions
What is the difference between first-party and third-party intent data?
First-party intent is behaviour you observe yourself on your own site, product and campaigns, so you know exactly what happened and who consented. Third-party intent is collected by someone else across sites you do not control and sold as topic interest by account. It reaches companies that have never visited you, at the price of more inference and more noise.
What is bidstream data?
Bidstream data is the information passed around when an advertising slot is auctioned in real time, including the page being viewed and details about the device and network. Some intent providers harvest it to infer which companies are reading about which topics. It offers wide coverage but weak context, and its privacy footing is contested, so ask any provider whether they rely on it.
Are job postings a form of intent data?
Yes, often called hiring-signal intent. A posting shows what a company is spending on, which tools it names and which team is growing, before any purchase research shows up elsewhere. It only covers what a company hires for, and the lead time to a purchase is longer, so it pairs well with behavioural intent and does not replace it.
Is intent data compliant with privacy law?
It depends on the source and the jurisdiction. First-party data collected with proper notice and consent is the simplest case. Third-party behavioural data depends on the consent gathered by the publishers or exchanges upstream, which a buyer should ask about. Account-level signals built from public company information, such as job postings, involve far less personal data. Your counsel should review any provider's terms.
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