What is Third Party Data?

Third party data is a oft-heard term in today's Big Data-driven business environment. But what exactly is third-party data? To better understand the place of third-party data in the larger business data ecosystem, let's first explain what comes before third party data..

First-party data is the customer data sets a business collects from customer or audience transactions and interactions. This is data a business holds as proprietary information about its markets. It is user consented information that can come from a variety of sources -- websites, apps, customer relationship systems (CRM), point-of-sale (POS) systems, transactions (ERP or accounting systems), or even IoT systems in some cases. 

Second-party data is usually used to describe first-party data from another business or organization that can be easily deployed to augment a company's internal data sets. Second-party data can come from partners or other business entities in a supply chain, for example. The data is not directly owned by the business consumer, but is often germane or closely tied to the consumer's business.

Third-party data can be described as data sets collected and managed by organizations that do not directly interact with customers or business data consumers. Third party data can include data sets that are "stitched" together from a wide range of sources or even come from governmental, non-profit, or academic sources. Weather data and public demographic data can be examples of third-party data. Third party data is often shared, bought, and sold on data marketplaces/exchanges.

Third Party Data and Snowflake

The Snowflake Marketplace provides a data exchange that gives data scientists, analytics and business intelligence professional access to a growing number of live and ready-to-query data sets from third-party data providers and data service providers.

With the Snowflake Marketplace, part of the Data Cloud, enhance business analytics with new third-party data or internal data from SaaS vendors you may be working with.

Data Sets that Drive New Insights

Peruse a wide range of open and commercial data sets across categories including SaaS vendors, public health, weather, location, demographics, location, and more.

Reduce the Cost of Data Integration

Drastically reduce the costs and effort associated with the traditional extract, transform, load (ETL) processes thanks to secure, direct, and governed access from a Snowflake account to ready-to-query data sets.

Access Data Faster

With Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and Collaboration, avoid the hassle and risk of having to copy and move stale data. Securely gain access to live, shared, governed data sets and receive automatic updates to that data in real time.

To learn more, read "How Third-Party Data Powers Marketing Analytics."