How B2B Website Visitor Tracking Can Boost Your Sales and Marketing Strategies

Sales Prospecting 101: You have to understand your prospect to sell successfully.

Unfortunately, too many B2B sales teams neglect this vital strategic advice, thinking they can get by just responding to those who make the first move — whether that’s through forms, chatbots, or the like.

But how great would it be if you could get a picture of who those leads actually are? And access their contact details or know their job role?

And how about uncovering the exact right time to reach out to those leads?

B2B website visitor tracking can achieve all this (and more). By leveraging this kind of software, you can create a more accurate picture of who your visitors are, what they’re interested in, and how to engage with them — making your sales team more efficient.

B2B Website Visitor Tracking: The Basics

B2B website visitor tracking is exactly what it sounds like: monitoring and analyzing the behavior of visitors to your B2B website. This tracking can happen both online (seeing what visitors are viewing on your website) and offline (what they’re looking at beyond your website).

This visitor behavior data — like which pages they visit, how long they stay, and what actions they take — is incredibly powerful for sales and marketing teams, because it gives you a sense of where that lead is in the buying cycle.

Today’s B2B sales funnel is more complex than it used to be. Back in the day, your sales strategy might have been to meet people at trade shows, gather their contact information (their phone number), and then find a time to reach out to them. And then reach out again. And again. And again.

Now, buyers aren’t just getting information directly from your company. They visit other websites, watch comparison videos on YouTube, discuss solutions with their network on LinkedIn, and listen to B2B podcasts. And so much of this is impossible for B2B sellers to track effectively.

In fact, the vast majority (67%) of the B2B decision-making process takes place away from your sales reps through online and offline research and discussions with other buying group members.

This is the dark funnel. And it’s making your sales team’s job harder.

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‎Your website isn’t the starting point of the buyer journey anymore. Often, it’s not even the endpoint. Buyers take an incomprehensible, untrackable journey when making decisions, taking in an almost limitless amount of information across various channels.

So, the moment this lead (finally) arrives on your website, you need to be certain about the information they’ve gathered and how close they are to buying.

That’s why B2B website visitor tracking is so powerful.

Understanding the Buyer

Traditionally, marketing teams might spend hours each week analyzing Google Analytics, attempting to make sense of all that data and how it should affect their sales and marketing strategy.

In reality, it’s very difficult to accurately transform that quantitative website visitor data into a picture of who each visitor is. To coordinate a successful account-based marketing strategy, you really need to know who each visitor is and where they currently fall in the sales funnel.

Typically, the B2B sales funnel can be roughly split into four segments:

• Awareness: The lead is aware of the problem and solution.
• Consideration: The lead is learning how to solve the problem, and considering various solutions.
• Decision: The lead is engaging with B2B vendors.
• Purchase: The lead is ready to buy.

Each of these segments should correspond to different actions from the sales and marketing side (which really go hand-in-hand.)

For example, someone in the awareness stage might learn about the problem and solution through your blog. So, maybe you push them similar content via email or ads.

On the other hand, someone displaying the intention to buy will need more thoughtful, personalized engagement with a sales rep to help action that purchase.

What is De-Anonymized Data?

Deanonymized data from visitor tracking software enables you to build a more accurate picture of the buyer journey and create more strategic sales and marketing campaigns.

Deanonymized visitor data includes:

• Demographic data
• Browsing history
• Purchase records
• Location data

It can be split into onsite and offsite data. Onsite data is collected from interactions that occur directly on your website. This includes information such as page views, clicks, time spent on the site, form submissions, and other user interactions within the company’s online environment.

Offsite data is collected from interactions that occur outside of your website. It includes information from social media platforms, third-party websites, online advertisements, email campaigns, or any other online channels not directly controlled by the company.

Ideally, you want a combination of onsite and offsite data to corroborate accuracy. It’s no good just relying on one source — say, for example, data from sources like Clearbit or Bombora.

To be sure you’re actually seeing exactly who is on your website, you need to combine sources. This is called the data waterfall approach (and it’s what Warmly does best.)

‎Leveraging data from multiple touchpoints, both first-party data from your website and third-party data from other vendors, gives you the highest confidence that you’re getting accurate insights into your website traffic.

Company vs. Contact-Level Deanonymization

Deanonmization can happen at the company level (identifying the organization that leads belong to) and the contact level (identifying individuals).

Company-level deanonymization will give you information on the organization visitors belong to without necessarily revealing individual visitors’ personal information. This approach provides insights into the types of businesses that are interested in a company’s products or services, allowing for targeted marketing campaigns and lead-generation efforts aimed at these organizations.

While company-level data is great, the combination of company and contact-level data really packs a punch.

Contact-level deanonymization involves identifying individual website visitors and uncovering their specific contact information, such as email addresses, names, and other personal details. This process allows businesses to personalize their interactions with these individuals and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly.

Unfortunately, identifying contact-level data about website visitors can be tricky, and many solutions will only offer company-level deanonymization. Others, like Warmly, do.

‎How to Deanonymize Website Visitors

There are several different ways to de-anonymize, and the richness of the data can differ depending on your chosen method.

For example, most people are familiar with the idea of tracking someone based on IP location. But unlike some of the more targeted tactics, IP location reveals much broader data stats (probable company, general location).

‎While visitor IP information is great for tracking general trends, it scratches the surface of what website visitor data can really do for your sales and marketing teams. Plus, in the age of remote work, where people are site surfing from all over, it’s increasingly difficult to link an IP address to a specific company.

Let’s take a look at some of the other methods of deanonymizing visitors.

Forms

When someone uses their contact information to fill out a form, a site can cookie that person. This means that whatever email address they used in the form can be associated with the browser they used when surfing the site. When that user returns, the website recognizes that unique identifier.

There are a couple of caveats to keep in mind. First, to stay compliant with GDPR, the user must opt-in to cookie tracking. Second, form fills are statistically very low for most websites. Depending on the industry, they typically have a completion rate of between 3 and 5 percent. So, it’s important to supplement your form fills with other data collection methods.

Outbound Emails

Sales emails that contain links are another way to track website visitor data. This is done via query parameters: extra information added to the end of a URL that contains unique identifiers linked to your visitor’s email address.

Logins

You know how sometimes, instead of requiring a new username and password, a website will give the user an option to log in with Google, Microsoft, or a social media account? Well, it’s not just about convenience for them. The website also gains access to the user’s email address from the service they used to log in.

Every action they take on the website, such as clicking buttons or reading articles, is tracked via cookies. So, the next time they return to the website, it recognizes them based on these cookies.

The website also receives the user’s IP address when they log in. By combining their email, cookie data, and IP address, the website can identify them, even if they haven’t explicitly provided personal information.

Chatbots

When users engage with a website’s live chat feature, they’re usually prompted to provide their email or other contact details.

Any information shared by the user during the chat session, coupled with details like their browser type and the pages they’ve visited on the website, all come together to form a comprehensive profile of that visitor and what they’re looking for.

All of the above information can be resynced back to your CRM system and, coupled with other contextual information about that visitor, can lead to a holistic understanding of each visitor and how likely they are to buy from you.

‎Deanonymization From Start to Finish

Left totally unattended, only about three percent of visitors will fill out any kind of contact form. That suggests that only a very small proportion of your overall traffic comes from people who are actually in the market to buy.

So, how do you capture more leads when they’re actively on your website? And how can you re-engage the rest offsite?

Additional resources are inevitably required to understand and implement that kind of sales strategy. Website visitor deanonymization software can provide that valuable data.

There are four primary stages of the buyer’s journey where that de-anonymized website visitor data be leveraged:

Identify and Target your ICP

Being able to track exactly what visitors matching your ideal customer profile (ICP) are doing on your website is ideal. Identifying your ICP, and analyzing how closely website traffic matches it is the first step to a successful lead generation campaign.

By analyzing visitor data, you can identify patterns and characteristics of visitors who match your ICP. This includes factors such as industry, company size, job title, and more. Then, you need a qualification strategy for filtering only the most valuable leads that match your ICP, getting closer to that 3% of traffic that will ever buy from you.

Tracking visitor behavior with deanonymization software allows you to continuously refine and update your ICP based on real-world data, ensuring that your marketing efforts target the most relevant audience.

When you identify accounts that meet your ICP, your first move is to capture them while they are still on the website (usually with a chatbot). If they exit your website, you can track their offsite data to determine where you need to go to bring them back.

Deliver the Right Buyer Experience

Buyers want a buyer journey that’s as easy and straightforward as possible. But we also know that B2B buyers can each take a seemingly random journey from identifying a problem to purchasing a solution.

So, instead of driving all your website traffic to a specific purchasing page or piece of content, you need to meet each buyer where they’re at. This requires you to understand the intent each buyer is demonstrating.

Buyer intent data incorporates information such as the content each visitor looks at on your website, how long they stay on your site, and offsite information like what they’re looking at on the web. Other buyer intent data includes job changes and interactions via email and website chatbot.

Basically, the world of intent data is vast. You need to review all of these sources to be confident about whether a lead is demonstrating intent or browsing for other reasons.

This data, alongside your ICP and visitor deanonymization information, helps your sales reps filter and categorize leads more efficiently. Then, knowing what they’re looking for and why, you can deliver them the content they’re looking for at the exact time they need it.

The result? You give your prospects what they want, right when they want it. No more marketing into a void, wasting precious sales and marketing resources.

‎Prioritize Offsite Outreach

Your website can be the make-or-break factor behind a good portion of online purchases. If users don’t find what they’re looking for in five seconds, 61% of users will leave your site and look elsewhere. And once they’re gone, good luck getting them back because 88% of users won’t return to a site after a bad experience.

Of course, you want your leads to stay on your site. But you should also give your sales reps the tools to reengage prospects outside this single channel.

When you have a holistic understanding of your leads and their digital footprint, choosing the right channel for outreach becomes effortless (and many outreach solutions give you the option to do this automatically).

LinkedIn messages, emails, and targeted ads are all viable options when you have a holistic understanding of your leads and their digital footprint.

Monitor Marketing Efforts

Website visitor data gives you insight into which marketing campaigns resonate the most with your target audience: Page views, bounce rates, time spent on a page, and conversion rates gauge the performance of marketing touchpoints.

Generally, this can help you hone your marketing strategy through trends and patterns in visitor behavior. It also helps you ensure that your resources are being used in the most useful way possible.

Evaluating Website Deanonymization Tools

You need to find the right solution to gather the data, de-anonymize it, and inject it back into your existing workflows to leverage website traffic data.

When you’re looking for a de-anonymization tool, there are some important considerations to keep in mind.

Cookie Regulations

Regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) are cracking down on loose data protection and user privacy. This is leading to stricter requirements for obtaining consent and handling personal data.

This has implications for tracking website visitor data. To maintain tracking effectiveness, there is now a shift towards alternative tracking methods such as browser fingerprinting and cohort grouping. B2B companies must prioritize compliance and continually adapt their tracking strategies to meet evolving requirements.

Let’s be clear: laws that protect users are welcome and imperative in our digital world. Data tracking tools now have the opportunity to get creative and provide valuable information without compromising anyone’s privacy (and we, for one, have gladly stepped up to the plate).

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Contact vs. Company-Level Data

As we mentioned earlier, data de-anonymization at the contact and company levels can help accomplish slightly different things. If you want to get a bit more targeted with your data collection, you’ll want to find a website visitor tracking tool that de-anonymizes at both the contact and company levels.

Although company-level data is really valuable for account-based selling, it won’t necessarily help your prospecting. To really engage with leads on a human level, you need to know exactly who they are — and contact-level data accomplishes this.

Buyer Intent Data

Buyer intent data is a pivotal consideration when seeking tools to enhance your sales and marketing efforts. Without it, you’re left with primarily onsite data; while this is extremely useful, it leaves you with major understanding gaps regarding where a lead actually is in the buying process.

When your goal is optimizing the entire typically asynchronistic buyer journey, this is a major non-starter. So, be sure to look for tools with buyer intent data capabilities.

Lead Scoring

It’s not enough to see everyone that arrives on your website. To inform your sales process, you must see how important each prospect is on a scale. In doing so, you can allocate sales resources better and focus your sales reps’ attention on prospects most likely to convert into customers.

Essentially, lead scoring means less wasted time on lukewarm leads.

Warmly categorizes leads on a spectrum from hot to plain old bad. Each heat score is tied to specific data, such as third-party (offsite) data from vendors such as Bombora and 6Sense, demographic and firmographic information, and historical information in your CRM.

The variety of input data — across first and third-party sources — ensures each lead receives an accurate heat score. However, this variety also reflects the wayward path that B2B buyers take throughout the buying journey.

‎Tech Stack Integration

Remember, the entire purpose of tracking website visitors is to enrich your sales and marketing workflows. This is difficult to do when you cannot push that de-anonymized data back through your sales funnel, CRM, or marketing automation tools.

It’s not just about identifying leads; it’s about empowering your sales team to perform the right actions with that data. There’s no point gathering all this valuable data on the people arriving on your website if you don’t use it to inform your sales strategy.

So, the best B2B website visitor tracking software will enable your sales reps to do more than reveal companies and contacts. Look for tools that use a comprehensive data waterfall collection process to reveal visitors and expose buying intent data, then use that to implement omnichannel outreach to the right people.

Warmly: The Comprehensive Sales Orchestration Platform

Warmly combines best-in-class intent data with seamless tech stack integrations to help your sales teams work smarter, not harder.

We start by identifying visitors (on the company and contact side) and then combine this with buyer intent data from best-in-class data sources to show you exactly who is in the market to buy.

Then, we give your sales reps the tools to act on this information with seamlessly integrated outreach via email, chatbot, and LinkedIn messages.

Here are a few of our features and how they go beyond any other platform in terms of website visitor deanonymization.

Deanonymization the Warmly Way

Sure, Warmly can tell you who has been visiting your website (we deanonymize 65% of companies and 15% of people.)

However, we also use additional data sources to help you identify the members of a buying group at a particular company, so your sales reps can go after the actual people who are going to purchase.

This ensures that you’re spending your time talking to people who actually have the power to say yes to your pitch, and not just responding to the first marketing exec that starts a conversation with your chatbot.

‎But Warmly also integrates with Connect the Dots to introduce you to prospects at your target companies. So, you can see 2nd and 3rd-degree connections across a particular company, making your LinkedIn or email outreach speedier and more effective.

Omnichannel Outreach for Better Prospecting

Given how looping the current buyer journey is, your sales strategy must be equally varied and far-reaching. So, Warmly isn’t just a visitor deanonymization tool. We orchestrate the entire sales process from lead identification to closing.

After you’ve identified your website visitors, you can start conducting outreach based on the various signals we’ve collected. For each lead category (the warm to bad leads we’ve outlined above), we offer tailored outreach strategies to get the most out of your (often stretched and inevitably busy) sales team.

These strategies take place on your website and off your website, so you can target buyers in the spaces that will lead to the most successful conversations.

‎For example, for a bad lead, we’ll automatically turn off Warmly’s inbound chat — because why should your sales reps take calls from people who aren’t going to buy?

If we think a lead is reasonably likely to buy from you at some point (but probably not right now), we’ll route them inbound through our AI Chat. Our contextually aware AI software uses signals from your CRM and the lead’s browsing history to gain additional insights into why they’re on a particular page and the info they’re looking for.

For these medium-warmth leads, you can also start a proactive outreach campaign across email and LinkedIn. Warmly integrates with prospecting software including Outreach and Salesloft, and if you want, you can automate the entire process with our AI Prospector.

For those hot leads, though, you’ll want to get your best sales reps on them quickly. If you can’t react quickly enough, the prospect will likely just go to someone else.

When we know a high-intent lead has just arrived on your website, a designated sales rep will get a Slack notification, allowing them to hop on a live video chat right there on your website.

Afterward, Warmly can initiate email and LinkedIn outreach to keep you top of mind and make the purchasing decision easy.

‎Seamless Integration

SMBs don’t have the budget to purchase dozens of different tools when one could do everything for them. At the same time, you need the flexibility to choose solutions that work for you and your team.

Warmly integrates with multiple different CRM and outreach tools, so you don’t need to worry about coming up against any roadblocks when implementing your B2B sales strategy.

Plug Warmly in, activate integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Apollo, Outreach, Salesloft (and more), then set up auto-prospecting to reach out to high-intent leads as soon as they land on your site. It’s as easy as that.

Get Started with Warmly Today

You could be set up with Warmly in less than an hour (that’s much faster than our competitors.)

Simply add a script tag to your website, enable our first-class integrations with the rest of your tech stack and… that’s it. You’ll start seeing exactly who is on your website and get real-time alerts to Slack to help your sales reps convert high-intent leads.

The best thing about Warmly? You can start right now for free. Or, book a demo with one of our sales reps to see Warmly in action.

Cover image by vectorjuice on Freepik