How Visitor Tracking Can Help Marketing Teams? [Hint: It’s Not Just for ABM]

Understanding your target audiences have never been more critical. But at the same time, it has become harder to achieve that.

As you may well know, more and more users are opting to browse anonymously. Also, with users rejecting cookies, it has become harder to keep track of the visitors' sources. Though visitors like the content your website offers, they don't want to be identified.

This means that visitor tracking efficiency at the user level has become obsolete.

Now, this raises the question.

How can you understand your target audience if you can't even track your website's visitors?

Is there an alternative way to keep track of the visitors? Yes, there is. Visitor tracking at an account level.

It helps marketers gain valuable information about their website's visitors without compromising the users' anonymity.

In this blog, we will discuss:

• Why marketers need to know their visitors,
• The legal aspect of visitor tracking,
• Its benefits,
• and how Factors can help.

Why do marketers need to know who's visiting the website?

Consider this. You are a CMO at an enterprise providing software solutions for large businesses. You and your marketing team have worked round the clock to implement an actionable marketing campaign. Together, you have pushed SEO-focused blogs, eBooks, guides, newsletters, and other offline campaigns.

Finally, after six months, it's time to analyze the results.

The traffic has risen, the bounce rate has lowered, and the ranking has climbed. But above all these positives, you found the conversion rate to be the same.

On average, out of the 100 visitors, only three fill out forms or sign up for demos/newsletters.

Even after everything, you couldn't convert any more than earlier.

The thought of submitting the report to the CEO and stakeholders is frustrating. The more frustrating part will be explaining why there is such a low number of conversions.

If only you could know why. Yeah, sure, it might be because your campaign didn't attract the intended audience. But how can you say that without knowing who your visitors are?

Exactly!

This is where visitor identification comes into play.

By tracking visitors at an account level, you can identify the companies your users come from. Along with that, you get to know more about these companies, including their industry, the number of employees, and their revenue range.

So when considering our example, you will be able to pinpoint users from large businesses. Furthermore, you can tailor your marketing efforts and effectively communicate with them.

There are three major benefits of visitor identification:

1. Allows marketing teams to plan campaigns and sales outreach by analyzing individual companies.
2. Company-level visitor identification allows real-time engagement through website and chatbot personalization.
3. Allows measurement of inbound marketing efforts like Ad campaigns, content marketing, etc.

So, which metric should you track to focus more on conversion?

The metrics like website traffic, number of clicks, etc., have proven to be vanity metrics. What you want is quality leads; for that, the metric to focus on is Qualified Traffic.

We define Qualified traffic as the percentage of website visitors who meet your ICP criteria, specified by your company-level attributes such as industry, revenue range, number of employees, etc.

When considering our example, the qualified traffic will be the percentage of visitors who belong to large businesses. [Keep in mind that we only added the type of business for examples purpose]

But...Is visitor tracking even legal?

In short, yes, it's legal.

As per the data protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA, every website operator must obtain consent from their users before collecting and processing data. Also, they must provide clear and transparent information about the data collected and how they will use it. Therefore, as long as everyone complies with these laws, visitor tracking is considered legal.

With that said, de-anonymization tools do not track or identify individual users. Instead, it simply identifies the companies the visitors belong to. This is achieved by analyzing the IP addresses and other data from the visitors' web browsers.

And by tracking and analyzing the users' website activities, you can get valuable information about the interests and needs of a prospective company.

Consider the same example from the previous section. You are the CMO of an enterprise providing software solutions to large businesses. Using marketing analytics tools like Factors, you have tracked your website's visitors. They were mostly from large businesses, more specifically from the healthcare industry.

So, considering this, you can create a customized marketing strategy targeted at the healthcare industry, like ebooks, blogs, ad campaigns, etc., on regulatory software solutions and how they can help healthcare companies comply with regulations.

Furthermore, this should help you convert more traffic and identify how to get more visitors from these companies in the first place.

How visitor tracking can be the secret ingredient to better marketing efforts

As we discussed, visitor tracking is an invaluable part of marketing teams. It provides insights into your website visitor's behavior, which helps you make sound decisions & improve your marketing efforts.

Let's see how it can make your marketing campaigns better.

Sheds light on the entire customer journey

Companies cannot collect their visitor's data without their consent. Also, nowadays, almost all users prefer to browse anonymously. They are reluctant to share details like email IDs and phone numbers and often choose to decline third-party cookies. This makes it harder for marketers to track their target customer's journey.

By combining de-anonymization technology with an advanced web analytics platform, marketers can identify the accounts the visitors belong to, even if they browse anonymously. Thereby enabling marketers to:

• Identify the qualified traffic sources [Initial contact]
• Understand user behaviors within a website [Customer path]
• Connect conversions to all prior interactions[Final contact]

You can also determine the effectiveness of offline campaigns with visitor tracking. For example, consider an offline event you organized. Representatives from multiple companies interacted with you during the event. And they have shown interest in your product/service.

You upload the information about these attendees, including the companies, into the CRM. And now, by using de-anonymization, you can keep track of users from those companies who visit your website. Thus, enabling you to analyze the impact of the offline event quickly.

Metrics such as an increase in website visitors from target accounts and an increase in engagement (time on site, number of pages viewed) can serve as early indicators of the performance of offline campaigns.

Allows you to identify which pieces of content resonate with your audience

Visitor tracking allows you to track how people use your website.

You can see which pages your audience visits, the time they spend on each page, and their path within the website. Thus, it enables you to understand the type of content your audience wants and determine low-performing web pages.

Leveraging these information, you can make your content more appealing and relevant to your target audience. This can attract more qualified traffic, improve engagement, and increase conversion opportunities.

Consider our example. You see that your users have gone through a series of blogs. More specifically, blogs focusing on the use of regulatory software in healthcare. So, as a marketer, your best move to convert them now will be to focus on that particular niche. Provide case studies or success stories of your business in the healthcare industry, which could build trust in your business, thus, helping with conversion.

Helps improve your buyer personas with visitor information

The buyer persona is a crucial part to consider for marketing teams. It provides a better understanding of your target audience, including their pain points and goal. Moreover, with a good buyer persona, you can align your marketing effort to improve customer satisfaction.

What visitor tracking can help you with is taking the guesswork out of the way. When creating a buyer persona, there is no room for guesswork. With that said, visitor tracking can help you create a data-driven buyer persona. The following are some crucial data it can provide you with.

• The type of business
• The industry
• The employee range
• The location
• The revenue range

Furthermore, it can provide insight into the prospect's behavior and journey within the website.

Consider the same example. During the early stage of your growth, you focused on the buyer persona of B2B businesses in the IT industry with revenue greater than $100 million.

However, as you take a closer look with the help of deanonymization, you find a new section of your visitors. They are from the Healthcare industry, searching for regulatory software solutions, and have a revenue ranging between $5 - $25 million.

Combining this with the visitors' location, content consumption pattern, and conversion trends, you can now create an additional customer persona to expand into.

Lets you embrace the power of retargeting

By combining visitor tracking data with CRM data, companies can create focused marketing campaigns directed at accounts based on their buyer journey. And retargeting would be more effective as you will be targeting accounts already aware of your business.

In a B2B context, retargeting can effectively increase conversions and return on investment (ROI). In addition, research shows that retargeted ads have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than other digital ads, primarily because of brand familiarity.

Though retargeting specific individuals is possible, it's limiting in a B2B context. In a B2B business, multiple stakeholders are involved in the buying decision. Hence it will be a more effective strategy to track the accounts from a specific business. This way, you can understand the high-intent pages they are visiting and engage with the entire buying committee from these accounts on platforms like Linkedin.

So, when considering our example, once you know the companies your visitors are coming from, you can run targeted ads on social media platforms like LinkedIn to your relevant buyer personas and increase your CTR and conversions.

Paves the way for account-based marketing

By identifying the online behavior and preferences of specific accounts on your website, you can customize future marketing campaigns for higher effectiveness.

Now consider our example. Visitors from healthcare companies are showing interest in information security. So, when creating marketing campaigns for these companies, consider emphasizing security and compliance. This way, you can appeal to their pain points and concerns and enhance the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

You can further personalize your campaigns depending on the prospect's stage in their buying journey.

For example, suppose the users are looking into top-of-the-funnel topics. In that case, you can target LinkedIn ads with topics like "10 Ways Regulatory Software Can Boost Efficiency in the Healthcare Sector". And for those looking into the bottom-of-the-funnel topics, you can drive ads with pricing plans and discounts.

Thus, website visitor tracking ultimately paves for account-based marketing.

Guides your optimization efforts

Visitor tracking helps provide insight into the customer journey. We have already discussed this. You can know how the users interact, what they interact with, how long they stay, etc.

By analyzing this data, you can identify and remove areas of friction in the customer journey.

For example, consider a landing page for a software solution. Let's say you found the bounce rate for that particular web page from Google Analytics to be 75. The score is high and not good, so obviously, your next step will be to update this page.

But is it viable? You don't know for sure that all the visitors coming to that web page are your target audience. No, not with Google Analytics. You can't.

This is where de-anonymization comes in. You can filter out the visitors to this page according to your required parameters. Since, in the example, we consider large businesses to be the target audience, we can add revenue range and the number of employees to filter out the rest.

Now with only the target audience, you see that the bounce rate of the landing page is 50, which is good. This also means that the landing page is working for your intended users. So, there is no reason to update this anymore.

And the only reason for the bounce rate to increase was the visit of users from small and medium businesses. Thus, website visitor tracking helps you understand your website performance and lets you know whether it needs optimization or not.

Also, by understanding which sources drive qualified traffic, you can improve your existing marketing strategies and make them more targeted.

Helps you curate specialized offers

Suppose the visitor tracking data shows several companies in a particular niche repeatedly visiting your website. In that case, providing special offers catering to those companies can help them make decisions faster.

Consider our example. You are seeing a high percentage of visitors from the Healthcare vector visiting specific landing pages. In that case, you can create a specialized offer with those features for that industry. And these target offers can increase the likelihood of converting a customer.

Your offers could be discounts, free trials, or even a bundle offer.

Track your website's visitors with Factors

Factors is a unified platform that provides robust capabilities for analyzing marketing and revenue data, with powerful integrations across campaigns, web, CRM, chatbot, and more.

Our platform offers a range of features to help marketers and businesses gain insight into website visitor behavior. Also, with Factors,

• You can easily track the overall traffic to your website,
• Filter out the qualified traffic from them.
• And the de-anonymization feature helps identify the companies your visitors are from and further helps map the customer journey of these visitors.

The crux of defining a targeted marketing campaign is to understand the customers. You need to know who they are, their steps before converting, and more. Thus, helping you focus on qualified traffic to increase lead generation and conversions.

Get in touch with our team for a demo, or sign up here for free and use Factors to get the most out of visitor tracking and elevate your marketing efforts.

Bonus FAQs

Can Google Analytics track individual users?

Yes, in a way.

If your website includes a login system, Google Analytics can track individual users using its User ID tracking feature. But you have to assign each user by yourself, which is time-consuming and laborious.

How can I use visitor tracking for lead generation?

Visitor tracking enables you to gain valuable information about your website's visitors. You can understand

• Where your visitors are from,
• How they interact with your website,
• The type of content they are interested in,
• Their journey within the website,
• Which pages are driving conversions, and more.

By using this information, you can create more relevant content and run marketing campaigns that are more targeted. This can help generate more leads and increase opportunities for conversions.