What should you think about when choosing a third-party data partner? Get the Essential Checklist

Third-party data can help innovative businesses that want to understand their audience, know the competition, and grow their customer relationships. Because the data comes from outside your own touch points, it can help you understand changing consumer behavior, market-level trends, competitive insights, travel and visitation patterns, and more. Data intelligence has never been more important, and when combined with your own first-party data, third-party data gives you the real-time insights that complete the picture on consumer behaviors.

However, working with third-party data has its own set of challenges, with questions such as:

• Where does the company get the data? How do they collect it?
• How hard will it be to use the data?
• How do I know that the data is high quality?

These can be difficult questions to answer, and that’s before you even plan how to use that data in your operations and marketing strategies. Here's what to look for when evaluating any third-party data provider, so that you know you’re choosing a quality partner for the long-term.

7 keys to evaluating a third-party data partner:

Privacy compliance

Make sure your third-party data partner respects consumer privacy and meets the necessary privacy requirements including GDPR and CCPA.

High level of data quality

Use only high-quality and precise data, and make sure your data has been cleaned, de-duplicated, checked for accuracy, and structurally prepared.

Significant sample in your markets

To ensure that a partner’s data is relevant to you, ask to see some sample data and check that there is a significant sample in regions where you operate or are looking to expand.

Full-stack solution

To determine whether a solution can give you a 360-degree view of consumer behavior, look for partners that offer a full-stack solution, minimizing data leakage that comes with point-based solutions.

Easy to use across your organization

To overcome data silos with a solution that can be used across the organization, look for partners that provide flexibility, including an interface that is easy to use for non-technical users.

Responsive to platform changes

With increasing platform limitations around internet browser cookies, email tracking, mobile phone identifiers and more, you should only work with partners that use privacy-respecting measures.

Planning for growth & scalability

Your data partner should also have a plan for growth. They should be open to talking about how they plan to keep up, including how they will continue to update their data to keep up with the quickly-evolving industry.

Get the Essential Checklist

With recent shifts in consumer behavior, we are once again in the very early stages of understanding just how people move, what they do and what they want. Consumer demands, global markets and even technology itself will shift, and increasingly at a faster pace. Any data partner must have a plan to adapt and grow for years to come.

For each of the keys above there are several indicators that can tell you whether a partner will be a good fit. Our handy 2-page Essential Checklist can help you keep track of all the critical indicators.