Updated: December 2024 to include most recent statistics and strategies.
If you look at Google Analytics, or any other analytics software, you’ll likely see thousands of people visit your website every day. Who are they?
Unless visitors have converted into leads by filling out a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, or interacting with you on social media, you don’t really know anything about them. Identifying anonymous website visitors is crucial, especially in B2B marketing, to convert them into leads.
In fact, only up to 30% of your traffic might be identified by sophisticated visitor identification tools today, leaving 70% completely anonymous.
So then what happens? Marketers try to fill the gap by hoping visitors will fill out a form or respond to chat with their email address.
However, up to 67% of your website visitors will abandon a contact form if they encounter any complications and up to 80% of visitors will abandon if asked for their email address too soon.
So how do you make sure you don’t miss any of them? Let’s look at the best ways to find out who your website visitors really are.
Hint: The only way to get actionable insights on EVERY anonymous web visitor is by analyzing their micro behaviors and buyer intent, as that does not require identification.
Understanding Website Visitor Identification
In today’s digital landscape, understanding who visits your website can be crucial for optimizing your marketing and sales strategies (especially if you run an ABM strategy).
What is Website Visitor Identification?
Website visitor identification involves uncovering the identities of individuals or companies that browse your site. By leveraging various techniques and tools, businesses can gather valuable information about their website visitors, such as IP addresses, email addresses, website behavioral information, and more.
The goal of website visitor identification is to provide businesses with detailed insights into who is on their website, enabling them to personalize their marketing efforts if those contacts or accounts are high priority, increasing the chances of conversion.
Who is visiting your website, really?
Currently, most companies get visitor information in a process called “website deanonymization” which occurs in two primary ways: IP addresses and form fills, neither of which offer perfect results. Still, it’s beneficial to see how both detecting IPs and scanning through heatmaps can help your sales process.
Deanonymization of anonymous website visitors and companies via IP addresses
Every website visitor has an IP address that could be linked back to their ISP (internet service provider) and, ultimately, their physical location.
This is one method through which martech tools “deanonymize” website visitors.
Some visitors might have the same IP address if they work for the same company. This is how some online tools are able to tell you which companies are considering your solution (by registering multiple hits from the same known business IP).
This data used to be more valuable before the widespread adoption of remote work in the past few years. Now, visitors from the same company are likely to have vastly different IP and be much more difficult to correlate.
Nevertheless, if you use a tool to uncover IPs and they do match potential clients identified in your ABM process — this is valuable data!
However, there are three major problems with website deanonymization through IP addresses:
- Increasingly strict privacy laws are preventing some tools from seeing and accessing a visitor’s IP address
- The work from home boom has confused IP address lookups because the addresses no longer match the company, instead they are a personal home address
- Therefore, the average match rate of website visitors is only 30% of IP address lookups - leaving the remaining 70% of traffic as anonymous website visitors.
Deanonymization of visitors and companies via form fills or chat
The other major method to deanonymize visitors is through getting their personal information via form fills or online chat.
This means that instead of using the IP address to find out who is on your website, you rely on the visitor identifying themselves by passing through their information - you've probably all seen the typical "content download form" or "contact form" or chatbot asking for your email address before continuing.
However, there is a significant challenge in relying on this approach - most website visitors want to remain anonymous, and are reluctant to give up their personal information until they've received significant value. The percentage of traffic willing to do this is typically in the range of 1.5 to 3%.
Even worse, asking your website visitors for their email address in chat can sabotage conversion rates up to 80%!
So, if deanonymization isn't creating significant results for anonymous visitors, what will?
Is there a better way to identify anonymous visitors? Yes, and only AI can do it
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the field of website visitor identification.
It's clear that you cannot identify the contact or account for every anonymous website visitor - in fact, only an average of 30% can be identified leaving the rest anonymous.
That means website deanonymization is leaving revenue on the table. .
But AI-powered tools like Lift AI can now analyze hundreds of "micro behaviors" for each website visitor to determine a buyer intent score. This means you can identify the buying intent of anonymous visitors, even if they don’t fill out forms or provide contact information.
The secret behind Lift AI is a unique machine-learning model that’s been trained on billions of website visitors and their buying behaviour. As a result, Lift AI can spot even the smallest behavioral signals and assign accurate buyer intent scores to any visitor.
Instead of deanonymizing visitors like traditional software, Lift AI assigns a buyer intent score to every single visitor based on their unique behavior, where no personal data is required.
In addition, you can connect Lift AI to any other app in your marketing stack. Take live chat, for example. If you use a platform like Drift, you can create custom playbooks for each level of buyer intent. Then visitors with high buyer intent would be connected directly to your sales teams, while medium- and low-scoring visitors could be greeted by a nurturing bot or a self-help guide.
Then your sales and marketing teams would never miss a single lead with high buyer intent.
And it's extremely effective.
Lift AI customers report that their chat conversions generally increase anywhere from two to 10 times within 90 days of using Lift AI. Formstack, for example, improved their conversions by 420%, while PointClickCare increased its funnel by 400%, which translated into over $1M in incremental revenue just in the first year.
Why The Future of Anonymous Website Traffic Must Be Behavior
The traditional "ID reveal" method used in most visitor identification software (which only works on up to 30% of visitors on average) is going to get even harder due to privacy law.
We're seeing more regulation around website visitor tracking including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and regional data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
That means revealing the account or intent of visitors may become difficult, leaving behavioral scoring as the preferred method of identifying anonymous website visitor intent.
But There's Still Room for ID Reveal AND Behavior
The best marketing strategies combine both website behavioral buyer intent scoring, which provides intent data for every single visitor, PLUS ID reveal for accounts and contacts. That way, marketing and sales teams can hone in on leads that show a strong Lift AI intent score AND a strong ICP fit for their ABM strategy, marrying the best of both worlds.
Try Lift AI on your website — free for 30 days in a Proof of Concept. No credit card is required. Just install a small Lift AI snippet on your website and it will automatically start scoring. Plus, the Lift AI support team is always there to guide you through the process, if needed.
Now you can see that identifying visitors on your website is largely a solved problem — thanks to the advancements in AI technology and solutions like Lift AI. In addition, you can still supplement Lift AI with your existing tools to extract more value from them in real-time.
