First Party Data: What It Is, What It’s For, and How to Gather Your Own

If you’ve been marketing your brand for any length of time you’ve recognized how important data is to the success of your campaigns. From awareness to conversion, data is the fuel that drives performance for your marketing. But did you know there is more than one type of user data? Today we’re going to dive into the different types of data at your disposal and focus on one particularly powerful type that you may not be familiar with. 

A tale of two types of data 

Let’s start with what you may already know. The data you may be most familiar with, the type you are using when you select pre-existing audience segments on FieldTest, is called Third party data. It is called this because it is gathered, consolidated, and published for your use by a third party data vendor. This type of data typically shapes your prospecting campaigns and starts to give you that first glimpse of your campaign’s traction. It is a useful tool for brands getting started with their marketing who may have an idea of what their audience looks like but doesn’t have the traffic yet to confirm their intuitions.

While we recognize that third party data is integral to the success of many marketer’s campaigns, it’s not where their data story ends. After you have driven that traffic to your site using third party data you will begin to collect data on who is landing there, who is clicking around engaging with your site, and most importantly, who is purchasing your products. This data will paint a vivid picture of which specific members of these third party audiences are actually interested in your product. This vivid picture is the lesser known, and more powerful type of data: First Party Data

So just what is first party data?

As you may have gathered by now, First Party Data is any information, statistics, reporting etc. that you are learning about your actual customers and their purchases from your own website and data collection. It is an incredibly powerful tool for building effective marketing campaigns. It allows you to create audience groups tailored specifically to your unique customer profile, to market to the people you know will love your products, not just the ones you think might.

You see, when you use Third Party Data you are essentially displaying ads to people who are in a specific audience segment based on past purchases, web searches, etc. for a product, service, hobby or similar. Third party data, while incredibly helpful, is still best described as an educated guess when it comes to finding new customers. There’s a reason the word for this type of audience targeting is prospecting, with Third Party Data you are basically sifting for gold and hoping for the best.

If Third Party Data is heading out with a pickaxe and hoping to strike gold, First Party Data is having the keys to the jewelry store. Since it is informed by people interacting with your content, your website, your brand, it is the closest you are ever going to get to knowing exactly who your customer is.

First Party Data seems like a pretty powerful tool, if only you could get your hands on some, right?

Now if only someone could come along to tell you how to get it…

How to get your own First Party Data 

So we’ve established that first party data is amazing. How do we get it? If you are a FieldTest customer, the answer is simple: use the FieldTest pixels.

If you haven’t already installed these two powerful pieces of code onto your site, stop reading and go do that!

We have a full guide on how to install your pixels here. 

Why the urgency? Because the FT pixels are the single easiest way to gather your First Party Data for use in your campaigns. See, these snippets of code help notice similarities between customers who are converting on your site and can inform what we call a Lookalike Audience to help you find brand new prospective audiences who look a lot like the people who are converting right now. However, this kind of powerful tech takes some time to build up a proper profile (anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months depending on your current site traffic) which is why we cannot stress enough how important it is to get these pixels installed ASAP. Every view click and conversion on your site that isn’t collected by the pixel is one lost piece of First Party Data, a lost opportunity to build on your highly optimized audiences tailored to your unique profile.

The good news is the pixel gets smarter as time goes on, so the initial audience you create will only get better from here!

Get in touch to learn more about what you can accomplish with your data and FieldTest’s powerful audience targeting tools!