5 types of customer data

Customer data capture comes in many forms. With the increasing focus on balancing privacy with personalization, it's essential to understand each data type and how it can be used in marketing and customer experience efforts.

	No-party data	Zero-party data	First-party data	Second-party data	Third-party data
Relationship with the customer	Direct	Direct	Direct	Indirect	None
Data collected with consent?	N/A - no data collected	Yes	Yes	Yes	Unknown - depends on provider
Data shared?	No	No	No	Yes - with trusted partners	Yes - with many companies
Data format	Anonymous, session-specific	Individual	Individual	Individual	Aggregate
Relies on third-party cookies?	No	No	No	No	Yes
Relies on first-party cookies?	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Accuracy	High	High	High	High	Low
Reliability	High	High	High	High	Low
Data collected	Interaction data, including patterns and sequences Page insights, such as topic and theme Contextual insights to generate marketing signals Behavioral machine learning (ML)	Communication preferences Product & service preferences Custom account settings Company/product -specific data such as skin type, investing strategy, etc.	Email Phone number Purchase history Support history Loyalty program info Website/app activity Social media profiles Customer feedback Customer surveys	Email Phone number Purchase history Website/app activity Social media profiles Customer feedback Customer surveys	Income Age Education Websites visited Survey responses
Works with opt-out?	Yes	No	No	No	No