B2B teams invest heavily in paid campaigns, organic social, content assets, events, cold calls and more to drive relevant traffic to their websites. However, only about 4% of this traffic makes itself known through form submissions — leaving GTM folk in the dark about the remaining 96% of anonymous accounts.
Without the right tools, this translates to hundreds, if not thousands of potential deals down the drain every year — simply because teams are unable to identify the majority of in-market, brand-aware accounts already visiting their websites.
Visitor identification software (aka website deanonymization) helps B2B teams discover these anonymous accounts and spot hidden opportunities based on firmographics, intent, and engagement.
This blog highlights everything you need to know about visitor identification: what it is, how it works, where it helps, and what you should look for in a visitor identification tool.
What is visitor identification & why is it important?
Visitor identification is the process of discovering anonymous companies visiting a website using IP-lookup technology. Visitor identification tools also enrich this information with firmographics and engagement data such as:
- Country & State-level geographics
- Technographics
- Industry
- Page views
- Button clicks
- Scroll-depth
This data is valuable as it can be leveraged to identify, qualify and convert sales-ready accounts with intent-based outreach and targeted marketing efforts (as opposed to expensive, inefficient spray & pray tactics). In short, more pipeline with already existing traffic!
Note: Privacy-first intelligence solutions like Factors do not identify, monetize, or share personal information or user data such as mail IDs or phone numbers in either raw or derived forms. Visitor identification tools only match IP-to-company data at an account level.
How does visitor identification work?
Not to get too technical but visitor identification uses rDNS or reverse IP-lookup to discover anonymous accounts visiting a website. This is essentially a tiny line of code that sits on a website to track and match IP addresses. So, if an account lands on your website from a corporate network, visitor identification tools will connect the IP-address back to an IP-database and map it to a company name or domain.
Once the company is identified, the database can also share up-to-date firmographic information (industry, company size, geography, etc) to help qualify accounts based on your ICP criteria.
Now, it’s important to note that IP-lookup is never 100% accurate. There may always be situations where a visitor is working out of a non-corporate network resulting in imperfect account matches. To counteract inaccurate account identification, Factors works with industry-leading data partners (6sense and Clearbit) to deliver best-in-market identification match rates of up to 64%. For context, this translates to about 27% more companies identified than the closest alternatives out there.
The benefits of website visitor identification
So far, we’ve explored what website visitor identification is and how it works. But how can it actually help marketers and sales folk? Here are a few benefits our customers have been realizing:
1. Intent-based sales outreach
It’s all too common for B2B teams to purchase account lists and have SDRs reach out with “personalized” mails and cold calls — only for the outcome to be a disappointing response rate of less than 2%.
And if you think about it, it’s really not surprising. While it’s easy enough to find a list of companies that would, in theory, make good customers, it’s nearly impossible to know when these accounts are actually in-market to purchase your product. It’s throwing sales resources at the wall and hoping something will stick. Not very effective.
With visitor identification, sales teams can discover companies that are problem, solution and brand aware, and reach out to them with relevant messaging based on their previous engagement. For example, an ICP account may be visiting your product comparison blog and your pricing page. Based on this, we can assume that they’re in-market and are weighing out their options. In this case, reaching out with tailor-made messages around limited time offers or battle cards will certainly be more persuasive than a generic mail that says “Hey! Let’s chat”.
2. Revive lost opportunities
In addition to helping teams discover and target net new logos, visitor identification softwares can alert you to previously lost opportunities that are back in market Factors takes account intelligence a step further by capturing engagement across websites, G2 reviews, and LinkedIn ad impressions, at an account level. Custom alerts can be configured to notify teams in real-time via Slack or MS Teams when once cold accounts are showing signs of spark — so you can strike while the iron’s still hot.
3. Maximize return on ad spend
Even early-stage B2B teams invest significantly in search ads, paid social, and other digital marketing channels. Unfortunately, even the most optimistic benchmarks place conversion rates at around 10%. This means that for every 100 paid visitors or accounts that view an ad, only 10 of them actually sign-up for a demo or trial. At scale, this becomes priceyyy!
With visitor identification, marketing teams can identify which accounts the remaining 90% of traffic is from, filter those accounts down to ICP companies, and re-target them efficiently to drive far more conversions. This helps wring out every last bit of RoAS from your paid efforts, resulting in more pipeline, with less spend.
4. Create content that converts
B2B teams often pump out content assets with little visibility into which companies are reading what. With insights from visitor identification, marketers can track what assets and pages target accounts care about most and personalize efforts accordingly. Additionally, teams can see what assets work best at attracting ICP traffic and iterate upon their content strategy accordingly.
Without a visitor identification tool, marketers would only be able to see the number of anonymous sessions and total time spent on blogs. But with a visitor identification tool, it could be revealed that enterprise accounts spend more time around privacy-compliance material while early-stage teams spend more time comparing pricing and cost-effectiveness. Accordingly, marketers can personalize campaigns and outreach based on what’s relevant to the target audience
What should you take into account when purchasing a visitor identification software?
- Accuracy: There are several visitor identification solutions out there, but only a few offer robust, uncompromising data quality. Factors connects with a database of over 50B+ IP-addresses to provide industry-leading identification rates of up to 64%.
- Integrations: It’s one thing to identify anonymous accounts, but it’s just as important to have that data be accessible to relevant stakeholders. Factors integrates with CRMs, Ad campaigns, CDPs, G2 and more so you can identify accounts across websites, ad impressions, product reviews and push relevant data back anywhere you like with Webhooks.
- Scalability: As your business continues to grow, so will the volume of website traffic. Ensure that your tool of choice is capable of scaling with your growth. Factors’ plans start at identifying as few as 100 accounts per month all the way up to 10,000.
- Support: Visitor identification software can be tricky. Consider the quality and extent of customer support you’ll receive when making a purchase decision. Factors, for instance, offers dedicated customer success management to all its paid plans to ensure that customers get the most value out of the platform.
- Cost: Consider the stage your business is in when making a purchase decision. Tools like 6sense and Clearbit are phenomenal enterprise-grade identification tools but can run you a pretty penny as they offer much more than is needed. Learn more about Factors pricing here.
About Factors
Factors is an account intelligence and analytics platform that helps B2B teams discover, qualify, and convery hidden opportunities across their ecosystem. What makes Factors different from other visitor identification solutions out there? Here’s a breakdown:
- Data quality: Factors achieves an identification match-rate of up to 64% — that’s 27% more accounts than the closest alternative.
- Granular analytics: Factors is built upon strong analytics and attribution foundations. It provides far more granularity in terms of website metrics, impression tracking, and other KPIs as compared to alternatives.
- Scoring & timelines: Factors tracks account-level activity across websites, reviews, ads, offline events and more to provide a bird’s eye view of the customer journey and score accounts based on engagement and intent.
FAQs
- Can Factors identify individual users who visit my website? No. Factors is a privacy-first intelligence solution that does not collect user-level data unless users choose to share this information. Factors does not identify phone numbers, mail IDs, or any other personal information from anonymous website visitors. Our data enrichment is limited to company-level properties such as account names, industries, technographics, etc. Factors has no ownership rights over your user data. We do not share or monetize first-party data collected from clients (you) in any way, shape or form. If granted access to client data, we do so only as a data processor under our DPA.
- Is Factors privacy-compliant? Privacy and security are central values to our business. Factors recognizes the importance of protecting vital account and user-level data entrusted to us by our clients and data partners. Accordingly, Factors is aligned with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) standards. We continually strengthen our already robust protection measures via regular revisions of our policies and practices.
