Yes, you can identify companies visiting your website (sometimes referred to B2B website visitor tracking), but not all the time.
No, you can’t identify the names of people from those companies.
You will still need to use a range of contact methods to bridge the gap between knowing a company visited your website, and that becoming a stronger sales lead for you.
There are conflicting stories about whether you can see the names of companies visiting your website.
Through the service we’ve provided to our customers since 2012 (and available on a free 30 day trial with low-cost pricing if continuing afterwards), we prove that you can identify them BUT it’s only as good as how you use that information.
Unfortunately, there are some within our industry that portray B2B website visitor tracking as being some sort of magic solution (which it’s not, but can of course help when used effectively).
A company can often be identified by their IP address but in many cases they can’t.
Depending on your type of business and visibility online, you could expect to see anywhere from 5-25% of your total website visitors identifiable as a company.
That doesn’t mean the other visitors weren’t ‘company people’ – just that they couldn’t be identified by an IP address.
Anyone who says you can identify all companies visiting your website, or who says you can’t identify them at all … is wrong, and it’s easy to prove – here’s a simple example summarising companies visiting a website on one day (which was 16% of their total website visitors on that day):
No, you can’t see the name of the person who visited – you can only see the company name (and what they looked at page by page). Here’s an example:
There are some within our industry who claim to know the actual person who visited. That could only be achieved if there was a prior relationship that made that person identifiable. Anything else is just speculation and you still have to put the work in to find people within the companies that visited your website.
All our customers started with a free 30 day trial because it’s important to assess whether identifying companies visiting the website is something that can be capitalised on.
Some of our triallers discover that their culture or skillset doesn’t make it easy to follow up on companies that have been identified.
Others actively look forward to seeing which companies have visited their website in the previous day.
Whether people continue after their free trial depends on a number of factors, but mainly related to how effectively they’ve been able to capitalise on the knowledge that companies have been to their websites.
If free triallers don’t continue then it’s cost them nothing to see if it works within their business.
Although our triallers and customers receive a daily email showing the names of companies that visited their websites, most log into the system to see the detail level of what those companies looked at page by page. This video shows how they do that:
Every business has their own culture and thoughts about the subject of reaching out to companies that have visited the website, but there’s one scenario that applies to ALL businesses:
If an identifiable company has visited your website …
… but you can’t identify the name of the person from within that company …
… and their page by page movement through your website implies a level of interest …
… then surely it makes sense to try and find a way to capitalise on that?
It’s very typical that your website is just one of a few that a visiting company will have looked at and even in cases where they preferred what they’d seen on competitors’ websites, you do still have a limited window of opportunity to try and gain the potential business.
In other words, they are likely to eventually buy from someone and even if they didn’t make contact with you (because your website may not effectively reflect the quality of what you offer as well as a competitors’ website does, or because they’re not yet ready to buy from anyone because it’s too early in the buying process), then that’s a warmer lead than any other form of marketing you may be focused on at the moment because you can’t get warmer than knowing a specific company has an interest in what you have to offer.
So whether you personally think that people see such visitor tracking as being ‘big brother’ or ‘creepy’, it’s legal from a GDPR perspective (a company name is not personally identifiable data) and, as so many of our subscribers will confirm, the winners are those who find ways to link a company name to individuals within that company, but doing so in a way that is sensitive and intelligent.
Tracking and then contacting companies that have been to your website is a bit like someone looking in your shop window (your website), not being ready to engage/not being impressed enough, and walking away, followed by the shop keeper (you) running after them down the road to see what you can salvage.
What you (the shop keeper) ideally want is for the potential buyer to spend time in your shop and engage with you.
Therefore, although A1WebStats does give you the opportunity to try and salvage something from that company visit, the majority of the A1WebStats system functionality is designed to help you make positive changes to your website and achieve more return on investment from your marketing time and budget.
When website visitors data is used and interpreted intelligently (which is what A1WebStats helps with), that gives those companies (visiting your website) more reason to ‘enter your shop and speak to the shop keeper’.
Given a choice, you would probably prefer companies to make contact with you, rather than you having to chase them.
If you agree with that point, you may be interested in our stop chasing companies, start gaining enquiries article.
If you don’t agree, then you’re either a hardcore sales person who cares about nothing apart from identifiable companies information, or you need more convincing (which we’re happy to help with via the insights we provide during our 30 day free trials).
Regardless of our view that it’s better to focus on website strength, than it is to chase companies that have been to your website, many of our subscribers use A1WebStats purely to see which companies that visited their websites.
Every business is different in their approach to potential buyers. At A1WebStats we have dealt with over 9,600 businesses (as at 2024) and it’s clear which ones win vs which ones don’t have the required mindset.
The contact options that follow cover a range of methods for you to consider, including the subtle and the not so subtle …
The quickest route is to pick up the phone and call the company, asking to speak to the person in the department that you think best matches the interest in your website pages. It’s advisable to first of all use LinkedIn to try and identify the name of the most relevant person rather than being asked to be put through to a department.
If you can get through the gatekeepers and into conversation with someone, there’s a possibility it’s the person who visited your website from that company, but most times it’s unlikely. This requires a cautious approach and words to this effect can be useful:
Good Morning/Afternoon [Name of person], I’m [Name] from [Company] and, being a proactive company, we identified that someone from [their company name] visited our website yesterday. I took a guess that it may have been you but could equally have got it completely wrong! Just for information, the visitor seemed to be mainly interested in [give details of the products/services they seemed interested in].
At this point there’s a natural pause for the person in the company to consider what you’ve said and what you offer. If it wasn’t them, then they may be able to pass you onto someone else that it could have been, or supply you with an email address to send through an introductory email.
It’s not uncommon for people within companies to completely deny that anyone from that business would have been visiting your website. This is sometimes defensive (they don’t want to admit it) and sometimes is just being unaware that someone else within the business would have been visiting your website. The larger the company, the more likely that people don’t communicate well with each other.
If you can’t get through the gatekeeper, then they may still give you an email address that you can send an introductory email to.
Based on discussions we have with our subscribers, there are huge successes gained from picking up the phone, especially when that phone is in the hands of tenacious sales people who just love the thrill of all the rejections before they get someone that’s interested. We even have some subscribers who keep the A1WebStats system open all the time, identifying visiting companies and ringing them within minutes of them being on their websites. The recipients of such calls are usually impressed that the potential supplier is being so proactive, which often leads to business being gained.
For anyone on the receiving end of your phone call they are likely to fall into one of the following groupings:
Most people within companies are on the receiving end of endless sales pitches for products or services. They are also accustomed to poor customer service. Some of those people you will never win over. However, for many of them, to receive a proactive phone call, related to something that they, or someone they know within their business, has been interested in, and even if they didn’t like your website that much, they’re going to see that as standing out from the norm.
So what can you do when you’ve identified a larger business has been to your website and it’s feasibly numerous people that you should be speaking to?
This is tough but in reality you’re unlikely to get far from just a phone call and so have to consider some of the other methods here, perhaps utilising a phone call at a later stage when you’re closer to finding the best person to talk to.
But while we’re on the subject of phone calls …
Make a point of ringing the business when you believe there will be no-one there to answer calls, or at least no-one in the relevant department.
Leave a voicemail or a message with the person that answered your call, referring to the fact that you’d like to talk to the person who visited your website recently, seemingly interested in [insert here what the visitor looked at on your website].
Then follow this up during the next day, referring to the voicemail/message left.
This method is less threatening than someone at the company feeling as if they’re put on the spot. They may still not return your call or use a gatekeeper to stop you getting through to them, but they will have had time to think and may see your approach as being proactive without too much pressure (i.e. you left a message, giving them time to think).
If you don’t have the internal resources, or are uncomfortable with the idea of ringing up companies that have visited your website, then you can consider outsourcing those calls to external providers who make such calls as part of their day-to-day work.
The word ‘telesales’ often brings up negative thoughts but the more proactive ‘telesales’ operations are much more subtle and if they worked from guidelines agreed with you, then can often gain better results than you would internally.
Our subscribers who use outsourced resources to make calls see great success and it typically works like this:
This takes the pain of making calls away from you and into the hands of those more comfortable with the work.
You would of course have to consider the best way to pay for such services. We would always recommend setting a small budget to ‘test’ the outsourced resources (e.g. over a week, contacting say 50 companies in that time), so that you can assess what they achieve. Unfortunately though, there are few telesales operations that like to take on smaller jobs, which is crazy in our view because those smaller jobs can prove how good they are and then lead to more work.
At A1WebStats we hear stories of such outsourced resources that are successful, and others that aren’t so strong. It wouldn’t be fair to name them and so if considering this method, the ‘test for a week’ is a worthwhile investment (if you can get someone to agree to that), even if you have to do it for a few weeks until you find the right match.
If you know the company name that’s visited then you can use LinkedIn to filter down the employees in that company until you see some that could feasibly have been your visitor.
Each identified company will display a LinkedIn symbol in the top right of the first section, as you can see in the example below …
That takes you through to LinkedIn, where you can click on the company name and then click on the link to view employees, as shown in the example below …
What works quite well is to use the LinkedIn filters to filter company employees down to those that match certain parameters. For example, entering ‘marketing’ into the ‘Keywords’ or ‘Title’ fields will filter the results to people who match those parameters.
Further filtering the LinkedIn results will be particularly useful when the visiting company is larger.
When you have a list of employees from a company that could potentially have been visitors to your website you then simply do the following at a fast pace (you may prefer to allocate this daily job to someone else who may be logged into your LinkedIn profile):
Each day you (or someone you allocate the job to) should check who has visited your LinkedIn profile in the previous day. This is because some people’s natural curiosity will make them want to click on the profiles of people who they see have visited their LinkedIn profile. When they do that, you can then open up the conversation (e.g. via an InMail) saying similar to:
“Hello [their name],
I looked at your profile because we picked up that someone from [your company name] came to our website [website name] on [date] and looked at our pages about [details here].
It may not have been you personally who visited us but would you know who that could have been, as I’d be interested in seeing if we can help?
Thank you in anticipation that you can help
[Your name]”
That text could be cut and pasted in easily, tweaking the editable parts as necessary.
Realistically, the hit rate you’ll get is still only going to be perhaps 1 in 10, but if you create a standard process that anyone can undertake, then it doesn’t have to become a job that takes up your own time – and the outcome could be beneficial.
Obviously, you could of course instead directly connect with/contact the people you find on LinkedIn but, being a more direct approach, it’s not as subtle as the approach above.
If you’re interested in more detail about this, please have a look at our page Using LinkedIn to follow up on companies that visited your website.
We send an email to any identifiable company where someone has visited the A1WebStats website, seems to be interested in our service, but hasn’t signed up for a trial. This is typically when it’s not been otherwise possible to make contact in other ways (for example, having tried via LinkedIn but getting no positive response), so would usually be a few days later.
In our case, if the company website shows someone in a marketing or sales role, including their contact details, then it may go to them but otherwise it would go to the generic email address, asking to be passed on to the most applicable recipient. If there is no useful information at all, then a website enquiry form can be completed.
The message itself is friendly and basically refers to the fact that we’ve identified that someone from the company visited our website and seemed interested in our service. That’s followed by reference to the free trial available, while also reassuring the recipient that their details have not been added to a mailing list.
By creating an email template that can be edited to personalise it in a few ways, you would need a minimal amount of effort to contact any companies that have visited your website in the previous day(s). Of course, there are no guarantees of response but, based on our experience, it’s a strategy worth considering. Even if you only got a 1 in 10 success rate, that’s better than nothing.
You will have your own preferred methods to try and bridge the gap between knowledge that companies have visited your website, and an individual that you’d like to be speaking to.
Some people respond ok to a direct contact (e.g. a phone call), whereas others (the majority, in our experience) would prefer a less ‘threatening’ approach.
Here is an example of how to structure a softer approach:
It’s particularly important to measure results from the approach you choose to take as there will be benefits in refining the process, based on results you do or don’t get.
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