Website Visitor Identification in '24: Best Tools & Comparison

Generating leads and converting them to sales is not an easy task for businesses in B2B environment. In most cases, almost 98% of website visitors remain anonymous and do not share any contact information with the website that they visit. ¹For marketing professionals, knowing which businesses have visited your website and which pages they are interested can support B2B lead generation. Website visitor identification software can help marketers

• generate more leads by helping them identify the companies to reach out
• be smarter in their outreach thanks to deeper insights about visitors

We looked at the providers in this space and prepared a shortlist for companies on a limited budget and shared our performance benchmark of 2 providers.

What is visitor identification?

Visitor identification, also called anonymous website visitor identification, is an account-based lead generation approach that helps organizations identify website visitors by matching the IP address of the visitor against a database of IP addresses used by companies. If IP matching does not work, these providers can also rely on digital fingerprints. Visitor identification software provides:

• Website Visit Information: Businesses that are visiting your website, the pages they have viewed, and the amount of time they have spent on your website.
• Company Contact Information: contact details for key decision-makers in the visitor’s company.
• Other company information: Some providers also share firmographic or technographic data, helping companies be more targeted in their outreach.

Why is it important now?

Only 2% of web visitors fill out any form to identify themselves. ² Visitor identification enables companies to reach out to the remaining companies and increase the number of high-quality leads. This is important since:

• competition in every industry is increasing and any information that helps marketers understand visitor’s likelihood to buy is valuable for B2B environment.
• traditional web analytics and lead generation tools do not provide necessary contact/company information of potential prospects.
• website visitor identification tools enable businesses to reach 98% of visitors who didn’t qualify as a quality lead before.

What are the benefits of website visitor identification?

• Website visitor identification software help businesses build a complete profile of their potential customers.
• It helps launch the right digital campaigns to attract the right types of customers. For example, a company’s visitors’ technographic or firmographic properties can help that company understand better the companies that are attracted by its marketing.
• Identifying visiting companies along with the specific material they are interested in can help shorten your sales cycle and eventually help close more business

What are its use cases?

Account-based marketing

Website visitor data is frequently used by B2B marketers in their account-based marketing(ABM) efforts to target leads. In ABM, the goal is to find accounts that are more likely to purchase so that the marketing budget is utilized better. Having knowledge of visitors’ companies, contact information of decision-makers and their interests is an important leverage for the marketing teams to achieve this goal.

Your visitors are also spending time across the web, researching different topics. This is commonly called intent data. Merging intent data with your visitors’ information can tell you more about your visitors’ interests. For example, knowing that a specific company is on your website but is not spending time in other company’s website indicates a stronger interest. Or if this visitor is also visiting specific competitors’ pages, it could be good to highlight your company’s strengths vs those competitors in your commmunication with that visitor’s company.

For example, Netfactor, ³ a vendor in anonymous website visitor identification, partnered with Bombara, an intent provider, to analyze content consumption of visitors. With this feature, businesses can understand how these accounts consume content across the web and identify companies that are interested both in their category and in their solutions.

Tracking existing clients and identify churn risk

By identifying existing customers’ visitors and pages they viewed, organizations can understand what they are looking for and target them with the right campaigns at the right time. With this strategy, businesses can increase customer lifetime value(CLV) for each client.

What are example case studies?

E-Careers

E-Careers is an e-learning platform offering business-related courses, training programs and technologies across the globe. They wanted to improve their B2B reach and understand the businesses showing an interest in their products so they implemented Leadforensics’ visitor identification tool. With this tool, they were able to identify a number of larger enterprise businesses that visited their website and targeted these leads. As a result, two big deals are completed and a number of others are in the pipeline.

ProspectSoft

ProspectSoft is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software company that operates mainly in the SME B2B market space and offers integration to 4 of the main SME accounting solutions. ⁴ They were using traditional web analytics tools and driving high-traffic to the webpage but they weren’t experiencing the benefits in terms of sales performance. The firm could identify companies visiting their website and distinguish their hot leads from the cold. Thanks to visitor identification, ProspectSoft claims to have dramatically increased the leads converted into sales.

What are the leading website visitor identification vendors?

• BounceX
• VisitorQueue
• HubSpot Sales Hub
• KickFire
• Leadberry
• LeadBoxer
• Leadfeeder
• LeadForensics
• Salesviewer
• SharpSpring
• Snitcher
• VisitorTrack

What is the most affordable website visitor identification software?

This is a very helpful technology for any company that receives a large number of web visitors. And we are also such a company. We love to try the solutions that we write about. As Steve Jobs explains in detail (See the video below), we believe that you have to experience the product and be influenced by its success and failure to really understand it. So we set out to find the right player for us.

Budget is always a big limitation so we looked at affordable solutions in the space. And we knew that we needed at least a few thousands or unlimited account identification or else we would be getting information only a tiny fraction of our users.

We identified Snitcher and Leadberry for our shortlist since they provided unlimited leads for a limited cost. We evaluated them for 1 week using their free trial. After evaluating their accuracy according to the table below, we have decided to continue with Snitcher:

Observations from our experience

In short, we are not impressed. This could be because we relied on just 2 vendors or because of the limitations of the technology but we were expecting higher accuracy. If vendors volunteer to be measured, we will regularly do this measurement and publish results. So if you represent one of the vendors in this space and would like to showcase your accuracy, please reach out to us by leaving a comment.

Identified accounts << Number of visitors

First of all, we were surprised that only a small percentage of visitors were identified as leads. Of course every visitor can not be an account, multiple people from the same company could be browsing our website but still the number of leads identified fell short of our expectations.

Registered accounts <> Identified accounts

We thought almost all companies that signed up to receive our whitepapers and vendor evaluation sheets would be identified as accounts by the visitor identification software. We were wrong. Since software appears to identify only a small percentage of visitors as accounts, most accounts that provide us their contact details were not identified.

Software provider comments

Snitcher team mentioned that “since many people are working from home at the moment, they are harder to identify and results are worse than under normal circumstances.”

Our recommendation

As you have seen in the performance evaluation, the software is far from perfect which may be due to the increased work from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, it still has the potential to add tremendous value. We get contact information from just a few percentage points of our visitors while these tools provide us the companies of 20-40% of our visitors which is a massive improvement in understanding our customers.

If you want to learn more about B2B marketing, we have written a 4 step guide to B2B marketing. and extensive guides on marketing analytics and first-party data.

If you still have questions about website visitor identification, we would like to help:

External Links

• 1. “WHY ANONYMOUS WEBSITE VISITOR TRACKING..?” VisualVisitor. Revisited January 16, 2023.
• 2. “WHY ANONYMOUS WEBSITE VISITOR TRACKING..?” VisualVisitor. Revisited January 16, 2023.
• 3. “The Biggest Predictive Marketing Innovation Yet – Now in VisitorTrack!” Netfactor. November 30, 2018. Revisited January 16, 2023.
• 4. “PROSPECTSOFT CASE STUDY.” Spotler. Revisited January 16, 2023.