Tracking Website Visitors
Lead Liaison gets lots of leads daily by tracking website visitors that interact with our marketing assets. In this article, we’ll discuss the opportunity created by website visitor tracking, explain how technology enables tracking, and summarize our website visitor tracking solution so you can begin finding new leads for your company today.
Benefit of tracking website visitors
Businesses miss an opportunity to collect a wealth of information on potential leads by not tracking website visitors. Brian Carroll, a lead generation analyst, estimates lead conversion rates are less than 4%. A lead conversion rate is the number of website visitors divided by web form submissions. For example, if there were 100 visitors on a given day then, on average, a maximum of 4 of those 100 visitors would complete and submit a web form. Web forms come in many flavors such as a request for product information, demo or contact us form. Turning this data on its head, it means 96% of website visitors are unknown, fly under the radar, never “raise their hand” or go unnoticed by a sales person. What if you could turn those hidden visitors into leads and prioritize the most interested prospects? This is the opportunity available to companies by tracking website visitors.
How website visitor tracking works
Fortunately, we get to drink our own champagne here at Lead Liaison – we use our own technology to create leads for our company. We get a lot of questions about our website visitor tracking technology and what value this adds. Let’s first talk about what tracking doesn’t tell us. People sometimes think tracking website visitors will reveal an email address, name and phone number for each visitor. It’s possible to do so only if the visitor “opts-in” (more on this later); however, no trustworthy software can identify first-time website visitors with this information unless the visitor is running software on their local machine that gathers information and reports it back to you. Software such as this is known as spyware or malware.
The legitimate way of tracking website visitors is done with cookies and an IP address. Cookies are harmless, legal, and used every day as a standard component by all browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and others). Cookies do not discover new information or collect information from other cookies, they only store known information collected from your website visitors by your website. To further dispel this myth, it’s not even technologically possible for a cookie to discover new information – browsers don’t allow it. The only cookies that can be used are those set by and rendered from your website. In summary, the cookie and IP address form the core of any website visitor tracking system. As validation, Lead Liaison uses cookies, IP address, and a proprietary user identification method for tracking website visitors.
The process of tracking website visitors
Lead Liaison categorizes website visitors into two buckets; known leads and unknown leads. Known leads are tracked website visitors who we have information on, such as a name or email. Unknown leads are tracked website visitors we know nothing about. Lead Liaison’s technology turns unknown leads into known leads by allowing unknown leads to opt-in. Unknown leads opt-in to the revenue generation cycle (sales cycle) through one of four ways:
- web form submission
- email campaign
- outlook email message
- manual sync by a user of our software
Once the lead opts-in, we establish a connection between the cookie and the users profile allowing us to identify past and future website visits. Visits as well as other activities created by our software, email opens and form submissions, are aggregated and displayed in our web application or CRM like Salesforce.com. By tracking website visitors a prospect profile is created. The prospect profile includes pages viewed (click pattern), time on site, search phrases used by the website visitor to find your website, lead qualification score via lead scoring and more. Additionally, business intelligence information is appended to the lead using proprietary technology to deliver an even more comprehensive lead profile.
If the website visitor’s online behavior, or “digital body language”, is indicative of any sort of interest then they’re deemed “sales-ready” and passed to our sales team, in real-time, for follow up. Alternatively, add the lead to a lead nurturing cycle for automated and personalized follow up and/or send them relevant content over time to further develop the lead. Here’s a summary of the value in tracking website visitors:
- Provides sales with a new source of leads
- Prepares sales with a profile of prospect’s interest
- Notifies sales when there’s a hot lead
- Identifies, in real-time, when a prospect is thinking about your solutions
- Validates prospecting efforts or meetings that generate actual interest
How to enable tracking website visitors
Enabling website visitor tracking is simple. A company adds a few lines of code (tracking code) to each page they need tracked. Every new visitor gets a cookie dropped on their machine. Combined with the IP address, this information can be used to track interaction with your website and append business intelligence information such as company name, revenue, location and more. As a rule of thumb, it’s easier to track a corporate IP address vs. a residential IP address. For example, if you’re a B2B solutions provider and your website visitor is accessing your website from their corporate office, Lead Liaison can identify their company name from the IP address. If the visitor is accessing your website from home, tracking shows the ISP, such as Road Runner or Comcast, as the company name, which isn’t very useful. Fortunately, advanced lead tracking systems such as Lead Liaison’s allow you to turn on/off tracking of residential IP addresses to filter B2B leads only.
Start tracking your website visitors today using Lead Liaison; see the “lead tracking” feature available in our platform editions, click here.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How else could lead tracking help you?
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