Top Website Visitor Tracking and Identification Software

Most marketers and salespeople know that only a small portion of regular website visitors convert to customers. Those that do are called inbound leads—a limited amount of people that are interested in your services enough to enter your sales funnel by themselves.

There’s definitely not enough of those; that’s why we are doing outbound—researching and reaching out to sales leads that can be a potential match for the company. That takes time and effort but it is one of the most effective strategies for sales development.

However, if there was an opportunity to see who visits your website, how engaged they are, and use that information to successfully nurture and target them, would you take it?

We think yes, and that’s exactly why you need website visitor tracking tools. We will walk you through how to track website visitors, why it is important, and what tools are worthy of your attention. 

What Is Website Visitor Tracking?

Website visitor tracking is a process of website visitor identification and monitoring of their activities, characteristics, and origins. The main goal of this process is to determine potential leads coming into your website and guide them via outreach toward the end of the funnel aka a deal.

Tracking website visitors can help you understand who visits your website, what they need, where they spend most of the time, what actions they take, and whether they are fit to be your customer. This data will equip your marketing and sales teams with enough tools to speed up and get the most out of your B2B lead generation efforts. 

Why Is B2B Website Visitor Tracking Important?

Most visitors of your website never convert—it’s true. However, it’s not because all of them are not fit to be your customers but rather because they need a bit more work to get there.

To succeed, you have to take your affairs into your own hands and reach out to quality leads. Web visitor tracking provides the missing puzzle pieces that show who exactly is a customer material. Website visitor identification has become essential for several reasons: 

1. It deepens the understanding of the buyer persona. 

Buyer persona and ideal customer profile (ICP) are at the beginning of every lead generation strategy: It helps you understand who you want to target, where they work, what their job title is as well as their location, industry, company size, age, and even interests. Based on that knowledge, you can determine what kind of messaging, call scripts, timing, and approach you need to close a lead like that.

However, a buyer persona (BP) is the most effective when it’s based on real data. You should analyze all of the customers you already have and create as many buyer personas as needed to fit every type of customer relationship you are looking for.

Here’s where website visitor tracking comes in to strengthen your understanding of incoming leads even more. It may open up new categories of data to the existing BPs or discover enough to create brand new ones.

2. It provides warm leads. 

After BP and research, you’ll have your first batch of cold leads and your main goal is to warm them up. In fact, that is why some marketers find lead generation so hard, and cold calling or emailing highly unrewarding, because they do not spend time on personalization and warming them up.

Usually, it takes lots of time and effort to warm up a lead: You’ll need to reach out to them on different platforms, fill it up with value, and sprinkle some personalization on top. And only those who respond or show some activity may convert to sales. 

What if you could get a warm lead without prior intentional warming-up? That's what web visitor tracking can do for you. When website visitor identification sees that a lead A (let's call her Jane) visited your website more than fifteen times in the last half an hour and works in the field that matches your BP, it’s your sign to pass that lead along to sales to nurture it. 

3. It shows the right direction for your outbound efforts. 

Website visitor tracking can actually provide a wide scope of data on everything that is happening on your website. Following your visitors throughout their buyers' journey can show you what page caught their attention the most, what button gathered the most clicks, and what channels brought them to your website in the first place.

For instance, if leads spend only a minute on your “About” page, that can mean either the design or the content is not impressive enough and needs altering. Or if you see a spike of visitors after a new podcast episode airs, this could mean that you’re doing a good job there.

Besides that, a website visitor tracking software can allow you to prioritize one lead over the others. Let’s remember Jane, a visitor to our website. If she is the only one showing such activity at the moment, we’d say go for it. But if there’s John that visited your pages thirty times and had way more clicks, we recommend tending to John first.

4. It allows you to tailor your content.

Your website is the main platform for your content marketing, so knowing exactly what content your leads need would be useful. Of course, there's search engine optimization (SEO) that analyzes the needs of an average user in the industry, but with web visitor tracking tools, you can go deeper and adjust the content based on the needs of your specific audience.

First, you can start by analyzing the behavior of your buyer personas:

• Is there a certain type of content they prefer more (guides, case studies, press releases, or news section)? If you see the demand and lack the quantity, add that to your content strategy. 
• How much do they spend reading it? If the time span is too short, perhaps you should steer away from long-form articles. 
• How did they find your content? If the organic search doesn’t bring enough results, be more keyword- and SEO-oriented. 
• How many pages on your website do they visit before performing an action? If it's just a couple, you should work on your organic link building to guide your readers toward the desired topics. 

5. It makes your ABM campaigns stronger.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses on key accounts and puts extra effort into personalization and nurturing. Whether you want to maximize results from the ABM campaign you have in place or just trying to kick a new one off the ground, web visitor tracking can assist you with it.

With the methods, we’ve already mentioned (analyzing where the leads come from, how long they stay, and what they read), you can alter your personalization and reach them at the right time on the right platform. Plus, you can specifically track the companies you are currently targeting to see how well you are performing. Perhaps your call-to-action (CTA) isn't gathering enough clicks and you need to tailor it more to the group you're targeting. 

How Does Website Visitor Tracking Software Work?

Most website user tracking tools use a reverse domain name system (DNS) or a website script to gather data.

Reverse Domain Name System

Every internet device had a unique internet protocol (IP) and there's also a reverse domain name system (rDNS) that returns the hostname of an IP address. Wait up, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

Basically, it’s like a help desk or an address book. In a forward DNS, you request an IP address of the desired company, and with a reverse one, it gives you the name of the company based on the IP you have. 

A visitor comes to your website, leaves a trace of their IP, and a website tracking tool matches it with a name and other data.

Script

Another way to gather information is by installing a special script on your website that will gather visitor information directly. It is usually also enriched with publicly available information such as employee headcount, address, social media profiles, and contact information.

Need more answers? Check out this short video on how to track website visitors like a pro:

Website Visitor Tracking FAQs

How do you track website visitors using Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the most basic tools for website user tracking. To do that, you should get an analytics property ID in an Analytics account, add it to your website, and wait up to twenty-four hours for the data to show up. Afterward, you'll be able to create reports on data such as the number of users, bounce rates, average session durations, sessions by channel, page views, goal completions, and more.

Can you see who visits your website?

Normally, no. Most of the time to find out who visits your website, you have to wait for them to perform an action and voluntarily provide their contact information (email sign-up, social sharing, call-to-actions, and so on). That very much limits your choices. But that's why there are website visitor tracking tools that tackle this challenge. 

Is website visitor tracking GDPR compliant?

The answer is—it’s supposed to be.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is meant to protect users' data privacy with a strict policy. Breaking those rules can lead to enormous fines and even court, so the tool you choose to track your visitors should be GDPR-compliant.

Website visitor identification tools should have clear privacy, terms, and cookie policy (with an option to opt out), and proper encryption to ensure safe storage of the data.

What's the difference between B2B and B2C website visitor tracking?

The fundamentals of website tracking are pretty much the same for B2B and B2C; the needs, however, differ. While B2B requires visitor tracking to know every person to further connect with them, B2C needs large scopes of data.

Imagine a shopping page that has at least 30,000 visitors every minute—finding out the person behind each one of those visits will compile an unnecessary load of information. So B2C website visitor tracking mostly works in the statistical format: how many views the page gets, how many purchases were made, how many of those visitors were from California, etc. 

What sales funnel stages is website visitor tracking active in? 

It is active and useful at stages from awareness to conversion. While it is hard to close a first-time visitor, even at the awareness stage website tracking tools prove to be useful. For instance, you could see what industry members are responding the most to your blog posts and adjust to the current needs.

At the consideration stage, you could create a landing page specifically for those visitors who saw your blog earlier. And for the conversion stage, create alerts for your sales team whenever some of those people get on the landing page. 

What kind of data can I get about my visitors?

Besides IP and company name, website visitor identification tools provide a variety of data connected to the website activity: link and button clicks, page visits, and visit duration. Also, information like what way (PPC or a search engine) or acquisition channel (form, live chat, or email campaign) brought a lead to your web page. Some tools also offer real-time tracking that allows you to react immediately to any new interaction. 

Best Website Visitor Tracking Software

There’s an impressive variety of website analytics tools nowadays: Some provide general website stats (we won’t be focusing on those) and some go deeper by tracking user behavior trends and identifying who visited your website in real-time. 

Website Visitor Identification Software

1. CIENCE GO Show

CIENCE GO Show is a visual website visitor tracking software that identifies users that browse through your website and offers a selection of features that come with it. In GO Show, you get to segment your leads based on the behavioral and demographic filters, and get clear data without bots or ISPs, all in real-time.

Besides that, this tool allows you to reach those leads through advertising (remarketing, retargeting, full reporting), marketing (contact acquisition, full-funnel marketing), and sales (notifications on new hot leads and specific activity).

It can also be easily combined with other CIENCE tools and services to provide a full-circle outbound sales experience.

2. Leadfeeder 

Leadfeeder is a website visitor tracking tool that offers source tracking, scoring, capture, and segmentation of leads to enhance your sales and marketing efforts. Their account-level visitor identification technology ties in every visitor back to a company. It also offer reports that can be integrated with many of the major CRMs and analysis of how warm the leads are. 

3. Salespanel 

Salespanel is a website visitor tracking software that identifies users, tracks their behavior, and assists in lead qualification. It also provides real-time tracking and combines it with your CRM. Its visitor intelligence generates data that can be leveraged for qualifying, nurturing, and closing leads. 

User Behavior Tracking Tools

4. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an A/B testing tool that tracks users' behavior and allows you to test ideas and variants for the best user experience. It includes features like snapshots, recordings, A/B testing, heatmaps, traffic analysis, error tracking, and surveys.

5. UserTesting 

UserTesting is a platform that offers usability testing by real people. A test user opens your website or app, and you get to see what activities were performed and how it affected the quality of UX. It is the most useful for prototyping, usability testing, and screen activity recording.

6. Optimizely

Optimizely is a website optimization tool that tracks user behavior for further improvement of web page and landing page performance. It is a part of its digital experience platform (DXP) that also offers marketing planning, content, and feature management. 

Free Website Tracking Tools

7. Google Analytics

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is one of the go-to analytic tools on the market that allows measuring website traffic and finding your worst and best-performing pages. The free version allows up to ten million hits per month and can segment users' demographics, see what device was used to access your website, and if they visited it before.

8. Mixpanel 

Mixpanel is an easy-to-use, free behavioral analytics tracking tool that focuses on how and why people engage with your website so you can improve overall user experience and conversions. 

9. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a free website visitor identification tool that analyzes data for a deeper understanding of user engagement. The Heatmap feature shows visually where the most engagement was on your page, and Session Recording shows the journey a user takes on your website. 

Get the Most Leads with Website Visitor Tracking 

Controlling the flow of leads in the pipeline, getting them warm, and using their web journey for a better user experience is a pretty good deal you'll be getting out of the website visitor tracking. When you get to know your leads, you are able to respond in a timely and personalized manner and save time, money, and effort. 

Plus, visitor tracking has one more major benefit: In times when prospects are hard to find and reach, you don't have to jump over your head. You could just use warm leads that are right there and make the most of them.