Buyer intent data is key to building your sales and marketing campaigns. Check out this article to make sure you’re doing it right!
1. Not Tracking Your Entire Website
A successful first-party intent data strategy requires full visibility into how visitors engage with every corner of your website. If you’re only tracking limited areas like your homepage or a single landing page you’re missing out on critical insights.
Let’s say you’re tracking only your homepage and “Contact Us” page. You may notice traffic isn’t converting to MQLs or SQLs, but what you can’t see is that visitors are heavily engaging with product pages, case studies, or solution content. These interactions represent buying intent but without full page tracking, your team stays in the dark.
Full-site tracking allows your marketing and sales teams to:
- Map out the complete user journey
- Understand what leads up to conversions
- See what interests each visitor and act accordingly
2. Not Tracking Your Blog
Your blog isn’t just a traffic driver it’s a conversion engine. Companies that publish blogs generate 68% more leads on average than those that don’t. Yet, many teams fail to track blog engagement as part of their intent strategy.
Visitors reading blog posts about your solutions, use cases, or product features are displaying early buying signals. By capturing this data, you can:
- Gauge which topics generate the most interest
- Determine which blog categories correlate with conversions
- Personalize sales outreach based on article consumption
Especially during times when face to face channels aren’t available, blogs become a powerful, intent rich channel to watch.
3. Not Tracking Your Homepage
While it might seem obvious, some teams skip tracking their homepage thinking it’s too general to provide valuable insights. This is a big mistake.
The homepage is usually the first touchpoint for most visitors. Tracking this allows you to:
- Capture referral sources
- Trigger personalization experiences
- Identify bounce patterns
- See where visitors go next
Think of your homepage like a storefront. You wouldn’t ignore someone who just walked in so don’t ignore them online either.
4. Going Too Big, Too Early
First-party intent data opens up a world of use cases: personalization, lead scoring, sales alerts, retargeting, and more. But trying to activate all of them at once can overload your team and produce inconsistent results.
Instead:
- Focus on 1–2 use cases first (like personalized nurture emails or sales alerts)
- Set up the tracking infrastructure to support those use cases
- Optimize and measure before expanding
This phased approach helps you build a solid foundation and avoid data chaos.
5. Not Having a Clear Strategy to Use Your Data
Many teams implement intent tracking, but then… don’t do much with the insights. Without a clear plan to act on your data, even the best tracking setup won’t move the needle.
Before launching your campaign, ask:
- How will intent-based leads be qualified?
- What’s the difference between first-party and third-party lead handling?
- How will data be shared with sales teams?
- What messaging and content will be used to support sales outreach?
- Who owns what part of the funnel?
Having clear answers to these questions ensures your data translates into revenue, not just reports.
Final Thoughts
First-party intent data is one of your most valuable marketing assets but only if it’s tracked and used correctly. Avoid these five common mistakes, and you’ll unlock deeper insights, better targeting, and more conversions.
