While Valuable, Publishers Can't Afford to Get Distracted by First-Party Data

Publishers and platforms alike are increasingly aware of the value in their first-party data. In a world with limited cookies and identifiers, first-party data sourced from a clear value exchange with a site visitor becomes one of the safest ways to understand behavior and deliver targeted media. In this rush to wrap their arms around their audience, publishers are starting to package and market their data a bit differently. As with everything in the ad-tech space, sometimes the marketing doesn’t match up with reality. And sometimes publishers may be reaching beyond their capabilities. Such is the case with intent data. Recent announcements from IDG, Ziff Davis, Tech Target and others would have you think that every publisher has intent data at their fingertips. That’s unfortunately not the case. While publishers may be able to infer some level of intent based on user behavior across their sites, there are limitations to what an individual publisher can do. Even worse, the rush to hop on a trend and market intent data' may result in many publishers misallocating resources and deceiving ad buyers at a critical juncture. LinkedIn Kick-Starts Process of Using First-Party Data for B-to-B Marketing What is true intent? Let’s first tackle what intent means in a b-to-b environment. B-to-c intent is relatively easy to comprehend. A consumer conducts a search for a product or service, visit an ecommerce store, put an item in their shopping cart but then leave. Those are all clear intent signals. B-to-b intent is different because buying decisions are not made by individuals but instead by a committee. Intent, therefore, is only signaled when there’s strong activity on a company level. It’s not an individual action, but many actions by many different individuals. Of course, buying committees can’t all add an enterprise-level product to a shopping carts because that’s not how b-to-b sales work. Instead, it demonstrates intent to buy by increasing research activity on a topic or group of topics. Understanding intent requires a few specific things. Seeing intent requires an accurate identity map (for recognizing the companies that site visitors work for), a contextual understanding of the pages, a way of determining if/when research activity rises above the baseline and traffic that covers a substantial portion of the market. The potential publisher trap Publishers may look at the list above and determine that they already have some of what they need to get going and need only build a few final pieces in order to get up and running. This may be interpreted as an advantage: with traffic and contextual analysis and some first-party data in hand, how hard can it be to map this into an effective intent solution? It's harder than it looks. The fact of the matter is, first-party intent data on publisher sites is, by definition, limiting. A single publisher does not possess enough scale to be comprehensive enough for a signal that can be utilized effectively by marketers. Then there’s the piece that most publishers likely don’t have: the propensity model for determining change in activity level. B-to-b sales are often a long, involved process, and teams can’t chase every single person who reads one article related to their business. A single user identified after visiting a single page isn’t an example of using intent data; it’s just basic contextual targeting. The publisher value prop Ultimately, publishers that can build out all four components will just create thousands of small and unusable silos of data. Single-point intent solutions will work best as supplemental sales products at best, and publishers should avoid putting all of their eggs in this basket because it isn’t a sustainable business model. To be clear, publisher traffic and contextual insights are incredibly valuable now and will continue to be into the future. They just do not meet the bar of company level intent data. Publishers eager to demonstrate the power of their first-party data shouldn’t be so concerned about wrapping it in an inaccurate label due to market hype. Instead, they should focus on creating a unique first-party data story specific to their audience, firmographic insights and content. Publishers that can identify more of their own users open the door for more measurable campaigns and attribution, which are what b-to-b advertisers want.