Zero-Party Data — Glossary

A customer tells you directly

A shopper answering a short on-site quiz that asks their skin type and preferred contact frequency, selecting the options themselves.

Zero-party data is what a customer chooses to tell you outright.

The term comes from Forrester Research, which coined it in 2018, and it caught on as the timeline for phasing out third-party cookies became clearer. Examples are everyday: answering a quiz about your skin type, picking how often you want to be contacted, naming your use case in a post-signup survey, or stating your company size when you register.

It helps to see all four tiers together:

Zero-party data. Shared on purpose and explicitly. The most accurate, with the cleanest consent. For example, "I have oily skin, dry hair, and a sensitive scalp."
First-party data. Behavior the brand sees on its own surfaces, pages viewed, items added to cart, sessions, time on page. Reliable, but inferred.
Second-party data. Another company's first-party data, shared through a partnership. Its quality depends on how well that partner collects it.
Third-party data. Bought from brokers and aggregated from many sources. Low quality, often weak consent, and disappearing in most regions.

The case for zero-party data in 2026 is structural. Third-party cookies are effectively gone, iOS 14.5 and later sharply limit behavioral tracking, and guidance from the UK ICO along with EU ePrivacy enforcement keeps raising the bar for first-party tracking too. Zero-party data is the one category that gets better under stricter privacy rules, because asking people directly is exactly the model regulators favor.

For ecommerce, the patterns that collect the most are a quiz on the homepage or a category page (skin type, room dimensions, use case), a preference center after the first purchase (frequency, channel), and a post-purchase survey (satisfaction, and what almost stopped the sale).

Yokaify gathers zero-party data conversationally: it asks the same one or two questions a quiz would, but inside the chat, and that answer feeds the same personalization a quiz response would. The onsite conversion agent reference covers the broader pattern.

Last updated May 31, 2026.