You may have heard it before: only a maximum of 2% of website visitors actually make contact with a company whose website they have visited. This means that 98% of people who visit your website look around and then leave. This is the point at which, if your offer is aimed at B2B customers, you want to know who your B2B website visitors are. A large number of such visitor companies can be identified, while the people behind them remain anonymous in compliance with GDPR.

History

Until the beginning of February 2019, Google Analytics offered an "Internet provider" function for everyone. There you could see how many users came via e.g. Telekom, Vodafone etc.

For B2B analyses, it was more interesting to filter these visitors in Google Analytics and bring them into a user-defined report. Tidied up and filtered, it looked like this:

The internet providers marked as examples are companies with their own business line and therefore also appear in Analytics. Tip: This functionality can be restored with a few detours, including the Google Tag Manager.

The historical disadvantage

Even in the past, it was only helpful to a limited extent to de facto ONLY recognize the Internet provider, i.e. a company with a business line. Because even if, for example, a "Georg Thieme Verlag KG" was recognized, you usually knew little or nothing about it and were only allowed to google it once.

Much more is possible with B2B recognition tools

In this article, you will find out what information about website visitors is readily available, how you can access it and why it is important to do so. This is the only way you and your sales team can fill your pipeline with leads who are generally interested in your offer.

The benefits of identifying B2B website visitors

What good is it if you don't know who your website visitors actually are? And you don't have a tool to identify these B2B website visitors? This is a problem for several reasons. Firstly, it's impossible to say why these 98% of visitors leave the website without taking the next step in the buyer's journey. Are they not in your target market? Is there something wrong with a landing page? Are there inappropriate messages in your marketing campaign? Identifying these visitors will help you find the answers to these questions. The other problem is that you may be missing out on great sales opportunities. There's no telling which of those 98% could become a loyal customer with the right approach. Therefore, knowing your B2B visitors can make a big difference to your sales. Fortunately, it's easy to identify visitors in different ways.

What information is available about website visitors?

Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Tag Manager provides a great way to create a snapshot of a website's overall performance. It breaks down a website's visitors, their demographics, their behavior, how they were acquired and what the conversion rates are. Best of all, it's completely free.

Some key performance indicators to keep an eye on with Google Analytics

• Demographics - The age and gender of website visitors will tell you if they match your ideal customers.
• Location - As with demographic data, knowing the geographic location of visitors is useful to understand whether your digital marketing strategy is working to attract ideal customers.
• Device - This shows whether visitors are using a desktop, tablet or mobile device (smartphone).
• Acquisition - Knowing how a visitor came to the site can show you how well your marketing strategies are working. Be it via Google Ads, organic search, social media, email or something else.
• Behavior Flow - This shows the journey from popular landing pages to other pages on the site and highlights where traffic drops off and visitors leave the site.
• Session duration - Knowing how long visitors stay on a page gives insight into how useful they find it.
• Bounce rate - If a site has a high bounce rate, you should know that Google Analytics is not measuring it correctly in its default configuration, but you should also check the load time of a website. Or you might even want to rework the design.
• Popularity - Knowing which pages are the most and least popular can help you decide which ones are ready to be linked to ads. And which ones need a little more tweaking.
• What's not so easy anymore: Identifying website visitors. Via the network report, you'll only find a (not set) in the "Target group" category and the "Technology" subcategory in the Google Analytics menu.

Software for identifying B2B website visitors

Not all website visitor identification tools are created equal. Some are simple and budget-friendly and can identify previously anonymous visitors, but not much more. Others can turn that data into actions and show you which of those visitors are worth pursuing as a potential customer.

Common tools for identifying B2B lead potential

When identifying B2B website visitors, the IP dial-in address of the visiting organization is tracked via a script and broken down to the specific organization via reverse DNS lookup and matching with a company database. This gives marketing and sales a precise overview of the company from which individual contacts visited their own website. Newer providers for company identification obtain their tracking data via the Google Analytics API and automatically compare it with freely available data sources such as LinkedIn and Hunter.io. Although this is inexpensive, it is also prone to errors. Well-known tools on the market are LeadForensics (you won't find a price on the website, because the tool is very individual and in our opinion quite expensive), Wiredminds from Stuttgart falls into a similar, albeit somewhat cheaper category. SalesViewer from Bochum is cheaper, depending on the size of the website. Among the many newcomers, LeadInfo is an interesting alternative and our recommendation for customers who "just want to get started". Tracking and identifying company visitors on B2B websites is already an enormous enrichment for sales, customer service and the management level in normal times - even more so now in the absence of face-to-face events.

I am interested in a B2B recognition software with Oplayo tracking: Send me a non-binding inquiry

LeadInfo - Setup and user convenience

The initial setup of Leadinfo is very simple. As with similar solutions, the tracking code is simply copied and integrated into your own website via the Google Tag Manager. In our opinion, the browser-based user interface is quite clear. The companies are listed chronologically according to their last visit.

The LeadInfo interface

Functionality and sales integration

Leadinfo offers the option of defining so-called triggers. A wide variety of criteria relating to the recognized company and the metadata or even session-related information can be used to trigger specific actions. This can either be the addition of a keyword (tag) to structure leads and sort them according to sales topics or the sending of an e-mail notification. It is also possible to have daily, weekly or monthly reports sent to you with all the companies identified in the reporting period by making settings in the user profile. A strong plus with Leadinfo is the integration with more than a dozen CRM and pipeline management solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, HubSpot, SugarCRM and Pipedrive. In addition, Leadinfo offers an integrated chat-style feedback function (LeadGen Form) for integration on the website at no extra charge. Those who find the integration of such a function interesting can save themselves the purchase of a separate tool. Chats can be played out and personalized for recognized and unrecognized visitors. However, we advise against personalizing the chat window with the recognized company name or location, as Leadinfo does on its own website (see screenshot). We think there is too great a risk that a visitor will feel monitored and react negatively.

I am interested in B2B website recognition via Oplayo tracking: Send me a non-binding inquiry