From insights to action: How first-party data drives growth
According to AWS, link management is an essential infrastructure for any enterprise tech stack and data will be one of the most critical resources for any business in 2025. The rapid growth of data-driven marketing and artificial intelligence in the past several years has made having a clear data strategy more important than ever. To remain competitive, businesses like you need to know as much as possible about their audience.
Previously, you could partner with third-party providers, use tracking cookies, and implement other strategies to capture and share information about consumers throughout your industry. But, the rise of privacy literacy and customer protection regulations has made these strategies significantly less effective. You need a new way to securely gather those insights while cultivating trust with your audience.
First-party data is that new way. It provides your team with unique insights about your customers and audience without the risk and complexity of navigating the requirements of third-party data sources. To understand what makes first-party data so powerful, you first need to understand what it is and how it works.
What is first-party data?
First-party data is data you collect from customers, prospects, and leads. It’s generated when someone uses your product, interacts with your website, or engages with your business through social media or customer support. Think of first-party data as your company’s unique insights into users and audiences.
First-party data includes tracked customer behavior, purchase history, user feedback, demographics, website traffic, feature usage stats, survey answers, and more. You can capture this data in various ways. Typically, companies use a combination of analytics and customer data platforms (CDPs) to facilitate gathering each piece of information.
First-party data differs from second and third-party data because no one outside your organization is required to collect or manage it
Why is first-party data so valuable?
First-party data is THE key to understanding your audience and customer base. It provides all the information you need to build personas for those who interact with your business and helps you learn more about what drives their engagement.
With the rise of privacy literacy among the general populace and increased customer protections related to third-party data collection, like GDPR and CCPA, first-party data helps you build trust with consumers and stay compliant with global regulations.
As your team controls the collection, storage, and analysis of first-party data from start to finish—you’ll have the visibility required to ensure that every piece of information you gather about your audience is accurate. Whenever a prospective new customer lands on your website, clicks through to a particular product or feature, and looks to learn more, you’ll know. And you’ll be able to track their intent and retarget with ads to push potential new customers further along the buyer’s journey, for example.
With the rise of AI and large language models (LLMs), first-party data is poised to become an even more valuable resource for businesses looking to implement new technology in highly specialized fields. Niche industries require a lot of subject matter expertise and domain-specific knowledge, which are only available via first-party data sources. More generalized AI models, like those built by OpenAI and Meta, can’t understand complex, domain-specific issues by training on public data sets.
How Rebrandly supports first-party data initiatives
With Rebrandly Analytics, you gain access to first-party data your team can use to drive actionable insights on audience engagement, campaign performance, demographics, and more. Real-time data helps your team better understand how people interact with your links across different initiatives within your marketing strategy.
You can easily create dashboards for specific campaigns, aggregate those into more high-level insights, and capture data to inform future decisions about your product or service. Automation helps you streamline reporting by providing up-to-date insights directly to the people who need them throughout your organization.
With our dynamic link infrastructure and link analytics, you can automatically turn these first-party data insights into real-time results. Based on specific demographic data, it’s easy to route different individuals to different pages, integrate with other tools throughout your martech stack, and build relationships with your audience that provide long-term value for everyone involved.
Your ability to analyze all this information in real-time is the key to providing seamless experiences for your audience and customers. As every industry becomes more competitive, understanding first-party data will help you efficiently evolve with customer needs.
First-party data transformation for modern businesses
“Good professional services companies are really well organized around four key questions: Does [the service I provide] help my client grow? Can I do a lot of it? Can I differentiate it in my methodology? And how do I make money?”
Rebrandly CEO Carla Bourque recently spoke with Google’s Michael Kaplan in a fireside chat about the impact of shifting your focus to first-party data. Although their conversation focuses primarily on marketing agencies, their advice applies to any organization.
Every business must understand the importance of unifying first-party data from touchpoints throughout the customer journey. That’s the only way to answer Michael’s question above. Most organizations already have a sophisticated data capture and analysis framework in place across campaigns and customer interactions; agencies are in a position to help turn that data into actionable insights that can inform strategic conversations with clients.
“The agency’s ability to leverage their 10,000-foot perspective is something a lot of clients don’t know how to utilize fully,” shared Carla when discussing how agencies can adopt a more data-driven approach to their relationships. We all know the trap of focusing too much on the details in any campaign. It’s human nature to inspect and evaluate everything that happens and optimize accordingly. But that kind of granular analysis can get in the way of creating large-scale value. Modern organizations must recognize that first-party data, while useful for individual insights, is also a powerful tool for understanding your impact on overall business objectives.
To differentiate your business, take cues from agencies,look past the time constraints and undervaluation of experimentation, and lean into the data. Agencies must define data-driven objectives and business goals for their relationships and revisit them often. With increased competition in almost every industry, clients now need unique insights from experimentation and first-party data more than ever. Agencies are positioned to help design better testing frameworks for everyone involved.
That’s a significant shift in thinking because, typically, agencies are on the receiving end of the data conversation. Instead, they must see themselves as intermediaries, ensuring that client data is up-to-date and protected. Their relationship must help clients understand how to use the data more effectively to obtain meaningful business insights. Using first-party data is one of the best ways to ensure data quality and security. You can make these changes as well; you just need to revisit your proprietary data and look for opportunities to dig deeper.
“Sometimes it’s as simple as connecting the dots and accessing data…extracting knowledge and insight to inform action.” Says Michael, speaking about how agencies can help clients better use their data. Ultimately, it’s about transforming the relationship, and sometimes, that means changing the client’s tracking infrastructure, but other times, it means ensuring all data points and touchpoints are covered effectively.
Aiding that transformation is where an agency’s 10,000 ft. view comes into play. They can see clients’ challenges from the outside and make objective suggestions to facilitate change. Those conversations will help agencies navigate the complexities of the transformation in data-driven marketing and inform the impact first-party data has on the future of their relationships with clients. So, take a page from best-in-class agencies and step back to examine your current data infrastructure.
Lean into your first-party data with Rebrandly
Considering the many ways companies can utilize first-party data to understand and monetize their audiences, it’s easy to see how this information can enable large-scale organizational change. Armed with unique insights, your team can build a more comprehensive picture of your customer’s needs and create valuable experiences that help them realize their goals.
Rebrandly Analytics provides the granular data capture you need to develop actionable audience intelligence for your business. Real-time discovery of comprehensive engagement metrics gives you detailed insight into how individuals interact with your links while also building a baseline understanding of how every campaign performs. You can implement this information to optimize campaigns, inform strategic decisions, and communicate your progress toward company goals.
Learn more about Rebrandly Analytics and how to leverage first-party data with Rebrandly.
