As a sales or marketing professional, the more you know about your potential customers, the more targeted action you can take to attract and convert qualified leads.
Web visitor tracking gives you important insight into the people interacting with your website. Not only can a tracking solution show you where and how visitors are spending their time, but the right website visitor tracking tool can also tell you exactly who those visitors are.
In this quick introductory guide, we answer all the key questions about web visitor tracking, including what it is, how to do it and how to make sure you’re compliant with the rules and regulations.
We also look at some of the many benefits of using website visitor tracking and show you how an add-on like Pipedrive’s Web Visitors can help bring in more sales than working with a platform like Google Analytics alone.
What is web visitor tracking?
Web visitor tracking is a process you can use to both analyze the activity and visitor behavior taking place on your website and to identify the individual users and companies that are:
- Viewing your web and landing pages
- Watching your videos
- Clicking on your links, sales pricing and offers
You can use Pipedrive’s Web Visitors add-on to track which companies are visiting your site and then use Prospector credits to reveal the contact information of relevant people for each organization.
By uncovering which organizations the people interacting with your site work for, you can build out comprehensive lead and customer profiles that will extend your sales and marketing reach.
How can I benefit from web visitor tracking?
Dedicated web visitor tracking provides a level of contact detail that isn’t easily achievable with broad scope programs like Google Analytics. With this contact data in hand, you can better align your marketing and sales efforts and ramp up results in both areas.
Find out who’s interested in your products or services
Once you understand which companies are visiting your site, where your web page traffic is coming from and the user behavior when it gets there, you can create more focused content and campaigns and provide a better user experience.
Attract and convert more high-quality leads
With an optimized website and behavioral analytics that give you insights into who it’s attracting, you can spend less time looking for new leads and more time following up with the potential customers coming to you.
Pipedrive’s web visitor tracking tool, for example, enables you to:
Discover companies from your website traffic that previously remained unconverted or anonymous
Identify how they found you
See what they engaged with, what they’re interested in and how long they stayed
You can then use these insights to optimize your site’s content and tailor your outreach to new leads or existing customers.
By identifying the company name of site visitors and decision-makers that are already engaging with your content and campaigns, you can discover new segments, generate leads you didn’t know you had and anticipate their needs before you even make contact.
Web visitor tracking puts you in front of more prospects
According to our State of Sales Report 2020-2021, 51% of sales professionals regularly, usually or always struggle to find sales leads.
Google Analytics can tell sales reps a great deal about the number and source of individual visitors stopping by your website to learn about your products or services. But without some way to identify and reach out to those prospects, you’re missing an opportunity to introduce hundreds of new leads into your pipeline.
Web visitor tracking can help you go beyond page views and bounce rates, giving you comprehensive user data to build a cohesive, revenue-generating engine that accelerates sales growth.
Here’s how.
Use the aggregated data and metrics you collect when you track users to show which content is attracting top prospects, how they’re finding your website and which of your marketing campaigns are most successful
Turn the visitors you attract from specifically named companies into warm sales leads to save time and reduce the need for cold calling or emailing
Use what you learn about the ideal customers you close to make both your digital marketing and your sales activities more productive
By creating an efficient feedback loop like the one described here, you can use website visitor tracking software to help convert more of your visitors into sales leads and more of your sales data into engaging web content.
And the best part is that you don’t need to be a tech expert to understand how to use and benefit from a web analytics tool.
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How does web visitor tracking work?
Web visitor tracking integrations typically work in one of two ways.
Some solutions install a simple script (or set of instructions) on your website that works behind the scenes to interpret your visitors’ click requests and collect data directly. Others sync with Google Analytics, allowing you to extract pertinent data from there.
In both cases, however, web visitor tracking doesn’t just reveal the identity of the companies browsing your site, it enhances data with publicly available contact information like physical and website addresses.
To understand how web visitor tracking does what it does, all you really need to know is this:
- Every device that communicates over the internet has an IP (internet protocol) address
- An IP address is a numerical label that identifies and locates its user
- Web visitor tracking uses a lookup process known as reverse DNS to translate that numerical information into the name of the company visiting your website
For a better idea of how this process works, imagine using the internet to look up the phone number for a client or business. Now turn that information request around and imagine using a phone number to look up the client or business it belongs to.
That’s essentially what reverse DNS does, except that it uses an IP address rather than a phone number to identify your web visitors.
Web visitor tracking technology helps you engage with more customers
In today’s turbulent selling environment, investing in lead nurturing and sales technology like web visitor tracking is more important than ever for engaging with customers.
According to recent sales trends, 47% of sales professionals believe seller engagement will only increase as more selling is conducted digitally.
So there’s no better time to start leveraging website analytics to:
Enhance your customer journeys and experience. Gain a deeper understanding of your prospects, regardless of the industry you’re in.
Identify your heat maps. See what is and isn’t working on your website.
Boost conversion rates. Understand which website visitors are most likely to convert into buyers.
By introducing a tracking feature like Pipedrive’s Web Visitors into the analytics mix, you can engage more leads with no extra effort.
Web Visitors makes it easy to take advantage of data tracking technology in three simple steps:
Install a tracker script on your site
Web Visitors identifies companies that have visited your website
Web Visitors enriches this visitor data with information you need to know
With the detail it provides, web visitor tracking technology is often considered the missing link in many data analytics solutions.
Can I just use Google Analytics?
Salespeople and marketing teams often rely on the volume of data provided by Google Analytics to understand their website performance and traffic. However, as solid as its features are, Google’s platform doesn’t provide the level of identification that web visitor tracking can offer.
If you can, combine your Google Analytics and web visitor tracking tool data. Using a dedicated web integration to track visitors reveals information about the people visiting your website that isn’t readily available using Google Analytics alone.
So, while Google’s analytics has a free plan, it has some limitations when it comes to generating more sales.
The data sampling technique that the free version of Google Analytics uses to quickly generate certain reports may distort your results
Despite filtering options, Google’s platform isn’t perfect when it comes to detecting and blocking the bots and spam traffic that can skew your analytics
Because Google Analytics doesn’t provide automatic identification, you’ll need a third-party service or add-on to find out which specific companies are visiting your site
Unless your website visitor has a dedicated corporate IP address, drilling down into the visitor identification features on your Google Analytics dashboard will show only the name of the host or provider they’re using to access the internet.
And that’s not very helpful when your aim is to identify, qualify and get in touch with new prospects.
Having a minimum number of qualified sales prospects isn’t just a determining factor of sales team success, a lack of qualified opportunities equates to a lack of sales.
Fortunately, you can use a tool like Pipedrive’s Web Visitors in conjunction with Google Analytics to supplement your acquisition, demographic and conversion data and achieve complete marketing and sales functionality.
Web Visitors takes the information provided by Google Analytics and analyzes it against a database of corporate IP addresses to identify the actual companies exploring your website.
Combine web visitor tracking with Google Analytics to generate more sales
Using web visitor tracking and Google Analytics together is one of the best ways to take your existing marketing and sales strategies to the next level.
For example, you can take advantage of their combined force in your marketing applications to:
Create more precise customer personas and buying journey maps
Support and refine your SEO and content strategy and develop and track more robust social media and sales campaigns
Promote warmer sales lead generation
Once your marketing efforts are attracting the right prospects to your website, you can then take concrete steps to get them into your pipeline by:
Identifying and creating them as new organizations in your CRM
Tracking their evolving interest by monitoring their website visits and session recordings
Following up at the right time by reaching out to decision-makers with a personalized sales message
Our State of Sales 2020-2021 Report shows that, despite the clear correlation between lead generation technology and sales success, only 63% of survey respondents are using technology or automation tools to source leads. This is up 12% from last year, partly due to the fact that much of the salesforce is working from home due to COVID-19.
Pipedrive can help you get the most from your analytics data by providing the technology to identify potential customers visiting your website and the opportunity to convert more leads into buyers while remaining data compliant.
Is web visitor tracking data compliant?
Data compliance laws set out in policies like the EU’s GDPR (general data protection regulation), Canada’s CASL (Canadian anti-spam legislation) and the CAN-SPAM Act in the US dictate how you must process and protect customer data.
They also govern the ground rules around marketing communications and set the fines for non-compliance.
While the rules and regulations for processing personal data also apply to B2B companies, the GDPR says you can engage in marketing activities like cold calling and cold emailing if you can prove there’s legitimate interest.
That means you can collect and use the data generated by web visitor tracking technology to contact new prospects through direct marketing communications, so long as you:
- Declare your usage of tracking technology on your website. Your privacy, terms of use and cookies policy should be visible and easy for web visitors to access, and should clearly state how the data you’re tracking is being used. You should also provide users in certain regions with the ability to turn off tracking.
- Follow the rules governing what you can and can’t do with your customer data. Make sure you understand the email and data protection laws in place in the various countries governed by the GDPR or similar legislation.
- Give prospects the opportunity to opt out of your marketing communications. Even if your email outreach program follows all applicable laws, for example, your messaging should include an unsubscribe option.
One of the easiest ways to make sure you’re using customer data properly is by choosing web visitor tracking technology that lets you control the data you collect in compliance with established privacy regulations.
Pipedrive’s new tracking add-on ensures only data from publicly available information sources is processed.
Putting web visitor tracking to work
Web visitor tracking is an indispensable tool for finding out who your web visitors are, where they’re located and how they engage with your website. Now it’s time to put that knowledge to work improving your marketing and sales activities.
Every time a company visits your site, Pipedrive’s Web Visitors will identify how they found you, what they engaged with and how long they stayed.
You can then analyze visitor behavior along with your other website data to:
- Compile a list of key sales leads
- Customize your content and prospect engagements
- Move promising customers through your sales funnel faster
You can use Prospector credits to reveal your web visitor’s contact information meaning you can follow up with visitors that previously remained unconverted and anonymous. You can then transfer your contacts to your Leads inbox in Pipedrive to give you greater visibility of your progress.
Final thoughts
A visitor tracker for websites is a powerful tool that can help sales and marketing teams identify and reach out to potential customers. With a website visitors tracking solution like Pipedrive’s Web Visitors, businesses can gain insights into visitor behavior, track which companies are visiting their website, and uncover contact information for relevant decision-makers. Web visitor tracking can also be used with Google Analytics to supplement acquisition, demographic, and conversion data for a comprehensive marketing and sales strategy.
A special thanks to the Leadfeeder team for their expertise in the creation of this article.
