Visitor Identification Analytics for B2B Lead Generation

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1 Visitor Identification Analytics for B2B Lead Generation A guide to the use of visitor identification analytics and its place in B2B lead generation.

2 Visitor Identification Analytics for B2B Lead Generation. A guide to the use of visitor identification analytics and its place in B2B lead generation. By Matt Fenn About the Author: Matt Fenn is Director of Jumplead The B2B Analytics and Lead Generation Platform. So you ve decided you need to use website visitor identification to generate leads from your existing website traffic. What kind of results can you expect? What kind of information will be available? How actionable will the information be? Is identification visitors in this way ethical? These and many other questions are common concerns that should be addressed from the start. With the popularity of this technique growing particularly among B2B Marketers, it is my hope that this paper helps to you develop an informed viewpoint on the technology and its uses. This paper s objective is to guide you in understanding current visitor identification technology and deciding whether or not it represents a good match for generating leads for your business. What is Visitor Identification? Website analytics began in the 1990 s with the analysis of web server log files, these log files are created automatically by web servers and contain a range of information about any web page visited. This information

3 typically includes the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the visitor, the date and time, referrer URL (the page the visitor came from) and the software that the visitor is using. As website analytics began to mature, alternative methods of tracking activity were introduced, notably page tagging which had the benefit of requiring a person to view a web page before the activity was tracked. This helped to reduce the increasingly skewed figures that were being reported by log file analysis software which included visits by web crawling software (used by search engines), and excluded visits that were delivered cached pages. Visitor identification is a form of website analysis that focuses upon the visitor, rather than taking a statistical overview. Visitor identification is a form of website analytics that focuses upon the individual visitor rather than taking a statistical overview of the traffic that a website receives. The general goal with visitor identification is to gain an understanding the specific requirements of the organisations visiting your website. As with any other form of website analytics the search terms used, pages viewed and referring websites can be associated with the visitors to provide background as to the visitors requirements and intentions. Basic visitor identification information is available in most analytics services including Google Analytics (listed under Visitors > Network Properties > Service Providers ). Services designed to make use of visitor identification as a technique tend to combine a range of features designed to make the process of managing the information generated as timely and useful as possible. These features tend to include integrations with services such as LinkedIn to help leverage business networks in identifying decision makers, real-time alerts for notification of important lead activity to built in lead management and CRM integration. How it works. There are a number of steps undertaken by visitor identification systems that differentiate them from web analytics:

4 Where a web analytics system will identify an IP address and an owner of the IP address, a visitor identification system will use that as a starting point to identify the visiting organisation and match it to a set of contact information from one or more databases. Visitor identification works best for established B2B organisations with good quality traffic, either organic or resulting from well targeted PPC campaigns. Once the organisation is identified, contact information, address, and telephone numbers are available (these tend to be the main numbers) it is also possible to show relevant LinkedIn network connections. What kind of results can you expect for your business? A common mis-conception is that visitor identification can deliver the contact details of the individual visitors to your website. This is not the case. Visitor identification is based up the IP address of the visitor which identifies the organisation through which the visitor is connecting to the internet. This is an important distinction, as it means that individuals are not uniquely identified and their right to privacy is not compromised. Many providers of visitor identification services do not use cookies at all and as such are compliant with the EU Cookie Directive. There are a number of factors that influence the quality of results achieved by visitor identification for lead generation, and are all considerations when deciding if visitor identification as a good match for your organisation. Is your organisation B2B? Visitor identification identifies organisations that have their own IP address, these tend to be from SME to larger companies, governmental and educational establishments. Are your customers SME to larger organisations? Smaller home office based companies will connect to the internet using service providers (ISP s), and as such are difficult to identify.

5 Is your company and your website well established? A well established website with a plentiful supply of visitors will provide a good range of visitors to be analysed. Are you running extensive PPC campaigns? If you are well targeted PPC campaigns, visitor identification can identify those organisations that have responded to your advert but not converted. When applied thoughtfully visitor identification has the power to deliver valuable and actionable insight to sales, marketing and support services. Are you clear about the role of the decision maker in prospect organisations? Sometimes it can be difficult to target the decision maker within an organisation that you know has shown an interest in you. Being clear about the decision markers role will help, also using a service provider that integrates with LinkedIn can make narrowing down the search more straight forward. The challenge of making the information actionable. Gaining an understanding of who is using your website, when they are visiting, what they were searching for and the pages they viewed is the basis of what visitor identification service providers deliver. How that information is delivered to and understood by your organisation is the key to making these insights actionable and realising their value. Here are some common ways in which visitor identification can be used to provide value across an organisation: Marketing. Clarity as to the quality of traffic being generated by campaign activity, on a prospect by prospect basis. Sales and lead nurturing. Quality level ranking, combined with real-time alerts to allow immediate live-chat engagement, or round-up reports to follow up later.

6 Filter prospects by their location and forward to regional sales teams. Identify existing customers visiting pages for products and services as an opportunity to cross sell, increasing customer value. Create a hot leads list of organisations and get alerts when they visit the website and are actively engaged, take the opportunity to chat directly. Support services. Tracking and real-time alerts for existing customers visiting the support section of your website, respond with and or open a web chat session to help proactively to increase customer engagement. As you can see, the identification of visitors provides a basic level of business value, but when that process of identification is customised to behave in different ways depending upon how you classify the visiting organisations it s value increases as it becomes actionable across the organisation. What s instore for visitor identification? Visitor identification analytics with the opportunities afforded by the in-depth knowledge of customer behaviour is in a prime position to become a focal point for managing the process of interactions with leads from identification through to conversion and retention. Some providers are integrating lead and contact management functionality in order to realise the benefits of close integration between activity reporting and lead management / nurturing. Key considerations. Most providers offer a trial of their systems and it s well worth doing this in order to ensure that you are comfortable with the reporting style and that it delivers the information that you need.

7 Some providers require that you sign up for an extended amount of time, so always be clear about the level of commitment and whether you are being locked-in as part of a contract. Also pricing can vary widely between suppliers, so it s worth checking competitor pricing. How to reach us. If you want to contact Matt Fenn directly he can be reached at or via at matt@jumplead.com Thank you. Thank you for your interest in this free ebook. We welcome your comments, feedback and suggestions. Please consider sending us a note about how this ebook has helped you.