How to Identify Website Visitors: Step-by-Step Guide for 2024
Identifying website visitors is a key part of any successful sales and marketing strategy — and here’s why.
If you don’t know who’s visiting your website and how they’re engaging with it, you run the risk of:
- Missing qualified opportunities who aren’t filling out your forms or signing up.
- Not understanding if your marketing campaigns are reaching the right target audience.
- Confusing which pages or prospect segments are underperforming and which convert.
- Not getting enough quality leads in front of your sales teams.
- Ineffective outreach campaigns.
- And more.
This detailed guide will show you how to identify website visitors and use the data to increase website conversions and outreach response rates.
How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors on Your Website?
Although it may sound tricky, the answer to this question is surprisingly simple:
The best way to identify website visitors is to use a dedicated lead enrichment and website de-anonymization solution that can do all the heavy lifting for you.
Lead enrichment tools are an essential addition to your GTM tech stack. They help automatically find information on your prospects, like:
- Contact information
- Firmographic data
- Demographic data
- Technographic data
- Online behavior tracking, etc.
As a result, your sales and marketing teams will get a 360-degree view of leads to create better-tailored funnels optimized for conversions.
Not all of them, however, can reveal website traffic.
Below, we’ll explain exactly how to identify website visitors by using Warmly — a revenue orchestration platform that helps you:
- Reveal and enrich accounts and visitors on your site.
- Pull intent data to discern your visitors’ levels of buying interest.
- Automatically connect with qualified visitors through LinkedIn, email, or website chat.
Here’s how to find out who’s on your website in 6 steps 👇
Step 1: Sign up for a free Warmly account
First, to use Warmly, sign up for a free account.
The setup is super easy — you’ll reveal visitors on your website within minutes of signing up.
Step 2: Add Warmly’s tracking script to your website
A tracking script is a code snippet you add to your website to track and identify visitors.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Go to Settings
- Click on General Settings
- Click on Script Setup
- Copy the script
- Paste in the <head> tag or before the </body> tag of your website
You can add the tracking script using Webflow, WordPress, or Google Tag Manager.
The processes differ slightly depending on your tool, but nothing overly complex.
Watch this walkthrough video for a step-by-step guide, or follow along below 👇
💡 Note: Although we recommend adding Warmly’s script to your entire site, you can add the tracking script to:
- Your entire site
- Your sales and marketing emails
Below, we’ll explain how to add the tracking snippet to emails.
(Optional) Step 3: Add Warmly’s tracking script to your emails
If email outreach is a major part of your marketing strategy, this is a nifty trick to add to your stack.
Adding tracking scripts to emails will allow you to match emails to IP addresses. This means that if someone clicks on a link in your emails, Warmly will then be able to know when that person comes back to your website.
Moreover, you’ll be able to identify leads who’ve come to your website through a specific email campaign, making attribution easier and more precise.
To do this, open:
- Settings
- General Settings
- Email UTM Param Setup
- Add Warmly’s UTM parameters at the end of URLs linked in emails (similar to UTM parameters for marketing campaigns).
More of a visual type? Check out this walkthrough video.
Step 4: Head to “Warm Visitors” on the Warmly platform
Once you’ve set up the tracking script, all it takes is a little time to see the first results.
Wait a few hours after adding the code snippet, and then head to Warm Visitors to see whether Warmly identified visitors.
There, you’ll see each visitor’s detailed profile, including:
- Firmographic data from Clearbit, such as title, email, company information, etc.
- CRM data like deals and account owners.
- Sequences that the visitor may be in from Outreach or Salesloft.
- Buying intent data from Bombora and 6Sense, like topics recently searched for.
- Web sessions’ details, etc.
See it in action ⤵️
As we’ll explain in the next step, you can access each visitor’s profile by clicking on it.
Alternatively, you can create lead segments that filter Warm Visitors.
For example, filter for visitors who fit your ideal customer profile, have a valid email, have engaged in the last 3 days, have a senior title, etc.
To do this, head to:
- Settings
- Add Segment
- Add Criteria
There’s a wide range of data points to choose from.
For example:
- Company details
- Person details
- CRM information
- Session activity
- Research intent
- And more.
Step 5: Click on a visitor to reveal what they’re interested in
This is where the real magic happens, as Warmly allows you to see beyond basic visitor identification.
Visitors’ profiles show you the whole picture, focusing on the pages a prospect has visited on your website.
This helps sales understand what the prospect cares about, how to engage them, and where (email, website chat, or LinkedIn).
To access this view:
- Go to Warm Visitors
- Click on a specific visitor
In addition to their engagement with your website, you’ll find:
- The company’s information
- The number of visitors coming from that same company and who they are (if Warmly could reveal them)
- Time spent on your website
- The specific web pages they visited, etc.
All this helps pinpoint a company’s or an individual contact’s level of interest in your brand. If you don’t go into this much detail in your approach, your sales efforts likely won’t convert.
(Optional) Step 6: Set Slack alerts when qualified visitors are on your site
Customers who’ve seen a 3–5x return on identifying website visitors have one thing in common: they set Slack notifications that alert GTM teams when high-intent or warm leads are revealed.
Timing is everything. Adding this step to your workflow allows reps to act fast enough to strike while leads are warm.
In a nutshell, whenever a visitor who fits specific criteria lands on your website or interacts with it in a certain way, Warmly will send a Slack notification via DMs or a channel.
To set this up:
1. Go to Settings
2. Click on Integrations
3. Choose Slack
4. Click Connect Slack
5. Set Who to @mention on Slack. This lets you set rules like tagging the CRM’s account manager for that account on Slack.
6. Add a notification. You can build a custom message or choose from templates
7. Filter leads with Segments if you want notifications to go off only for specific visitor types
8. Add conditions you want to trigger the notification (e.g., specific pages visitors went on, starting a session, requesting to speak with an agent, responding to chat, etc.)
Receiving alerts when extra-important leads visit your website allows you to react quickly. You can tune into their sessions and observe their progress in real-time.
That way, you can answer questions or engage them via chatbot or live video chat options.
Here’s an example:
And there you have it, folks — website visitor identification deployed in just a few minutes!
Data Enrichment Tools vs Traditional Methods of Identifying Website Visitors
Before platforms like Warmly and others, businesses had to resort to other methods for identifying and engaging website visitors, such as:
- Forms (think Drift)
- Chatbots (think Intercom)
- Simple IP location
- Website analytics tools (a combination of Google Analytics and Mixpanel, for example)
While most of these are still somewhat leveraged, relying on them alone will leave many high-intent conversations on the table.
Why? Let’s look into the downsides of each:
1. Forms
When a website visitor fills out a form with their contact info, they’ve decided on your solution and want to move forward. They’re out of the “dark funnel.”
Also, forms force prospects to contact you in a specific way. Some prospects may choose not to submit their information because they don’t want to fill out your form and be contacted later on by a rep.
There are many other ways to meet people where they’re at and when they’re most interested.
De-anonymizing your website traffic helps you avoid losing good leads for no reason other than not knowing who they are when they’re looking at your site.
2. Chatbots
When a website visitor engages with your chatbot, it implies they’d like to learn more about your products and services.
However, leaving real humans with generic, automated responses will unlikely get you anywhere.
You’ll need a more tailored approach to push leads to conversations with you or purchasing decisions.
3. IP location
Before remote work became widespread, it was relatively easy to determine when a website visitor was coming from a particular company, thanks to IP location detection.
That enabled tapping into all the relevant firmographic data and understanding exactly who you’re dealing with. Today, things are not so simple, so IP location can only be used when combined with other methods.
4. Analytics tools
Analytics tools help gain overall metrics relating to website traffic.
However, they primarily focus on website performance and gather data from interactions alone. Although helpful for marketers building your site, they can’t deliver the combined data you need to take action.
Lead enrichment and revealing tools, on the other hand, do. They combine WHO you should focus on and WHAT they’re interested in WHEN they’re showing interest.
How to Get the Best Out of Visitor Identification Data
Once you’ve identified website visitors, it’s time to use all those invaluable insights.
There are several things you can do with the data acquired from tracking and identifying website visitors, including:
1. Improve targeting & personalization
Your website may not be as fine-tuned for your target market as you initially believed. The wrong people can end up on your website, or your messaging can be off.
Conversely, it may turn out that you don’t know your target customers as well as you thought.
Identifying website visitors and monitoring their website interactions (e.g., time spent on particular pages, number of returns to high-intent pages such as pricing, downloads of specific resources, etc.) can all help you:
- Make marketing campaigns more targeted
- Optimize your website for your target audience
- Improve sales prospecting
- Weed out visitors who don’t fit into your ICP profile so you won’t waste time on them.
💡 This is precisely how Warmly enabled Namecoach to get 20+ meetings in just 6 months and achieve a 282% ROI to date.
2. Leverage more engagement options
Once you know the person or company account that’s landed on your website, you can tailor a more personalized approach and get them to engage with your brand more easily.
You can also map them to other channels and adjust your cadence accordingly.
In the chatbot example below, Desanka knew the visitor had read our ZoomInfo alternatives blog. That information helps craft a message that doesn’t feel generic and gets more replies.
💡 Check out how D2D Experts increased their engagement by 50–60% with Warmly’s help.
3. Find more qualified pipeline
De-anonymizing website traffic increases the number of opportunities in your pipeline simply by uncovering high-intent leads your sales team didn’t know about.
You can also move deals along your pipeline faster when you see who’s visiting your website, what content they’re looking at, and whether they’re exhibiting high buyer intent behavior.
There are several things Warmly does to help you book more meetings and increase deal conversions.
By giving your reps a website de-anonymizer like Warmly, they can:
- Enter account meetings with more insights
- Share help documents based on page visits
- Engage new prospects visiting your site within an active account
- And more.
💡For example, if you know that a decision maker has viewed one of your competitor’s pages and that a call is coming up, you can proactively prepare answers that emphasize your product’s advantages.
Start Identifying Website Visitors with Warmly
We hope this in-depth guide gave you a new process to try out for your sales and marketing strategy.
If you’re ready to unlock your website’s full potential, try Warmly for free today and convert website visitors.
💡 Note that you need to upgrade your Warmly account to the business plan to unlock some enrichment and revealing capabilities, like premium integrations and live calls.
Need to see more of the platform? Book a live demo with our team, no strings attached.
