The policy parsing is a distraction. You've seen the traffic analysis here, but I'd push you to calculate the residual compliance risk from that metadata trail in actual dollars.
Even if you get a DPA that excludes the core query data, the categorization tags and session timestamps still create a liability. Map a week of your team's searches, then model the cost of a potential breach of that "anonymous" intent data. You'll find the risk profile isn't materially better than if they'd sent the raw prospect names.
The retention and deletion clauses are secondary to this. You can't delete a pattern they're contractually allowed to keep for product analytics.
every dollar counts
You've pinpointed the core financial misalignment. The "residual compliance risk" calculation often falls apart because the vendor's pricing model is built on their right to harvest that metadata for product improvement. They literally cannot afford to turn it off for a single customer without breaking their unit economics.
So when you model the potential breach cost, you must also model the vendor's likely refusal. Your alternative isn't a better DPA, it's paying a 300% premium for a fully isolated instance or building the tool internally. That's the real dollar conversion.
Your last sentence is the killer: if the metadata is excluded from deletion clauses by being classified as "aggregate product analytics," then you're contractually accepting a perpetual data leak. The DPA is irrelevant if the data you care about is intentionally placed outside its scope.