What is Third-Party Data?

First-party data, while highly accurate, has a fundamental coverage problem: it only reflects accounts that already know about you. According to Forrester, the average B2B company's first-party data covers just 5-15% of its total addressable market. Third-party data fills the remaining 85-95%, revealing prospects who are actively buying but have not yet visited your website or engaged with your content.

Third-party intent data is especially powerful for outbound teams. Bombora, the largest B2B intent data cooperative, aggregates content consumption data from over 5,000 B2B publisher websites. When employees at a company collectively increase their research on a topic relevant to your product, that "surge" is detected and surfaced as an intent signal — even if they have never heard of your brand.

The market for third-party B2B data is substantial: Grand View Research projects it reaching $4.7 billion by 2027. However, the landscape is shifting toward transparency and consent. The best third-party data providers now emphasize their collection methodology, consent frameworks, and compliance posture as key differentiators.

Third-party data is collected through several distinct methodologies, each producing different types of business intelligence.

**Publisher cooperatives** (Bombora, TrustArc) aggregate anonymous browsing data from participating B2B content websites. When business professionals read articles, download whitepapers, or watch webinars across cooperative member sites, that activity is logged, anonymized to the company level via IP resolution, and classified by topic. Intent surges are detected by comparing current consumption levels against historical baselines.

**Web scraping and crawling** powers technographic and firmographic databases. Automated systems scan company websites, job boards, social media profiles, and review sites to collect technology usage data, employee counts, job posting trends, and product information. Providers like BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, and HG Insights specialize in this approach.

**Public records databases** aggregate government filings, SEC documents, patent records, trademark registrations, and corporate registry data. These provide verified company information: legal name, incorporation date, registered agents, financial filings, and regulatory submissions.

**Data marketplace and exchange platforms** allow organizations to buy and sell audience segments and data sets. Platforms like AWS Data Exchange, Snowflake Marketplace, and LiveRamp facilitate B2B data transactions with identity resolution and privacy controls.

**Quality and freshness vary widely** across third-party data sources. Best practices include validating data against multiple sources, checking collection dates, understanding the provider's methodology, and testing accuracy on a sample before committing to a full data set. Decay rates for third-party contact data range from 25-40% annually.

Autobound operates as both a consumer and provider of third-party data. The Signal Engine aggregates signals from 400+ third-party sources — SEC filings, job boards, technology databases, review sites, social media, and news outlets — and synthesizes them into actionable prospect intelligence. For data platforms, Autobound's Generate Insights API and embedded solutions deliver this third-party signal intelligence directly into your product, enriching your existing data with real-time context.