Only a small percentage of your web visitors will fill out a web form or reply to your chatbot.
Without a strategy for identifying those that bounce, most of your traffic will never enter your sales pipeline.
Fortunately, there are tools and techniques that will turn you into the Sherlock Holmes of web identification, successfully uncovering the companies that visit your website.
1. Website Visitor Identification Software
Website visitor identification software automatically identifies your site’s anonymous visitors (at the company level) and analyzes their data in real-time.
These tools reveal a visitor’s company affiliation, online behavior, and contact information, allowing you to immediately follow up in a personalized manner.
Web visitor identification tools also typically come with the following features:
Company-level identification: Reveals the names of the companies visiting your site.
Comprehensive visitor profiles: Collects information about decision makers at companies, including job title, email address, phone number, location, firmographics, and more.
Real-time alerts and notifications: Sends notifications to the right rep when a high-value lead is on your website or views specific pages.
Visitor behavior tracking: Monitors a visitor’s journey through your website, including pages visited, content downloaded, and forms submitted.
CRM and marketing automation integration: Connects with your sales and marketing tools to automatically transfer lead data and trigger workflows.
Modern AI tools can be very advanced. Artisan’s Watchtower feature, for example, predicts buying intent by matching anonymous visitors with enriched company profiles.
A web visitor identification platform is just as essential a tool for startups as it is for Fortune 500 companies. It’s a must for any company looking to boost lead generation by converting more of its anonymous website traffic.
2. IP Tracking & Reverse IP Lookup
Businesses can manually identify the companies their web visitors work for through a combination of IP address tracking and reverse IP lookup tools.
The most common IP tracking method is to create a JavaScript IP tracking code that you place on your website. This code auto-captures the IP addresses of your visitors.
Once you have the IP addresses, you can find which company the address is associated with through a process known as reverse IP lookup. For this, you’ll need an “IP to company database.”
With tools like IPinfo or IP Netblocks, you can submit an IP address to find the company and domain name associated with it, as demonstrated in the image below:
Once you know the company name, you can use a B2B database tool like Artisan or Cognism to find more information about the company: revenue, employee count, contact information of decision-makers, and so on.
These B2B databases are also excellent for finding new B2B leads and optimizing sales intelligence.
IP tracking does, however, come with the following limitations:
IP tracking won’t reveal a visitor’s full name, only their company affiliation.
VPNs and proxy servers can hide a user’s real location.
Visitors often share the same IP address, complicating your research.
Privacy regulations like GDPR can limit your ability to use personal data.
In addition, manual IP tracking is also slow and tedious compared to using a web visitor identification tool. Instead of setting and forgetting web tracking, you have to “hand submit” your list of IP addresses every time you want to reveal your visitors.
3. Cookies & Tracking Pixels
Cookies are text files that websites store in a user’s browser. They’re useful for visitor identification because they allow website owners to identify returning visitors and collect behavioral data about them.
So, how do you track cookies?
In a nutshell, you embed a snippet of code (often JavaScript) into the HTML of each web page. The code automatically assigns a unique identifier to each new visitor and stores this data in a cookie. When someone revisits your site, you know if they’ve been there before.
Unfortunately, cookie tracking won’t tell you the name of the company on your site. But that doesn’t mean it's without value. Simply knowing if a visitor is new or returning helps you personalize web content, like popups with the phrase “Welcome Back.” Plus, it’s useful for marketing tactics like retargeting campaigns.
In addition to tracking cookies, you can also track pixels, which help you gather insights on visitor actions. They work in much the same way as cookies, except instead of tracking returning users, they track events like pageviews, downloads, and form submissions across whole user journeys.
Consent is important when using cookies and pixels. You know how sometimes you visit a website and are immediately directed to a pop-up asking for permission to accept cookies?
That’s because to comply with regulations such as CCPA and GDPR, website admins inform their visitors of the cookies they’re using and give them the option to manage their cookie preferences. Make sure you align with local data privacy regulations when setting up cookie and pixel tracking.
4. CRM & Marketing Automation Integration
Syncing website visitor data with your tech stack is relatively straightforward. This opens up a wide array of automations, including the automatic creation of new records in your CRM when a visitor’s identity is successfully revealed.
The most common method is to integrate your web visitor identification software with your CRM platform. Most tools connect seamlessly with popular CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce.
Another route is to use marketing automation tools to create web forms and embed them into your site. These forms should offer a lead magnet in return for the visitor’s contact information. The data is then automatically tracked in your CRM and can trigger sales automations.
Here’s a quick example of an automated CRM and visitor tracking workflow:
A web visitor submits a web form to download an eBook .
The lead information is sent to the CRM, which turns it into a contact record .
The lead data is built out with an automated enrichment tool.
A sales rep receives an email notification about the event and follows up with the warm lead.
Most web visitor identification tools should connect with your marketing automation tools. And you can usually set up multiple helpful automations, such as auto-adding quality leads to current email marketing campaigns and auto-triggering personalized emails based on web visitor behavior.
5 Best Website Visitor Identification Software
Web visitor identification tools automate the process of uncovering and learning about your web visitors. Let’s look at five of the best software solutions, including pricing and core features.
1. Artisan
Artisan is an AI-powered sales platform that turns anonymous web visitors into comprehensively researched lead profiles, all on autopilot.
These profiles contain the following up-to-date data points about web visitors:
Company name
Key decision makers
Social activity
Technographics
Funding rounds
LinkedIn profiles of decision makers
Powered by AI BDR Ava, who is trained on your ideal customer profile, Artisan automatically scores, segments, and surfaces your highest-intent web visitors, thus ensuring your team prioritizes the most lucrative potential customers.
When autopilot is turned on, Artisan automatically reaches out to the web visitors it qualifies as leads. That means you can rest easy knowing your formerly anonymous web visitors are now being engaged with highly personalized cold emails and LinkedIn messages.
But Artisan is much more than a web visitor identification tool.
Ava can automate every aspect of your outbound sales process, from finding and researching leads to sending them personalized email sequences. Artisan consolidates your entire cold outreach tech stack into one powerful AI platform.
This all-in-one functionality makes it particularly good for companies that want to scale their outreach efforts without hiring new reps while still achieving higher cold email response rates.
Key Features
AI web visitor identification
B2B contact and company database
End-to-end cold outreach automation
AI BDR that builds and runs personalized outreach sequences
Automated outreach to qualified visitors
Lead scoring and segmentation
Pricing
Contact Artisan for a customized quote based on your business needs and scale.
2. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo Sales is a sales prospecting software that comes with a B2B contact database, conversational intelligence, and sales engagement tools.
The platform’s web visitor identification feature, known as WebSights, reveals the companies and decision-makers visiting your site. It also tells you about their browsing patterns, including the web pages they visit and how often.
With WebSights, you can also create plug-and-play integrations that automate CRM record creation and other workflows that you’d like to trigger after a visitor is identified.
When setting up visitor tracking, you can assign buying intents to certain web pages. For example, you might set the pricing page as a high-intent page, while the about us page is medium-intent.
ZoomInfo then uses your criteria to automatically score the intent of the anonymous web visitors it uncovers. This intel helps your reps prioritize their outreach.
As for analytics, ZoomInfo’s reporting features enable you to uncover web visitation patterns, whether that’s which pages are most visited or which companies are most active on your site.
Key Features
B2B lead database
Company-level visitor identification
CRM enrichment
Visitor behavior tracking and buyer intent data
Web analytics and reporting
Pricing
Contact sales for pricing.
3. Lead Forensics
Lead Forensics is a dedicated B2B lead generation platform.
When a company employee is on your site, you’ll receive intel about their company name, address, industry, revenue, employee count, and more.
There’s also an option to upload your ideal customer profile into the software so that reps receive alerts when lookalike leads visit your site. Salespeople receive these notifications in whichever platform they use for outreach, as LeadForensics integrates with several popular CRMs and email automation platforms.
Lead Forensics is also great for account management. Its web visitor identification tool automatically tracks B2B customer behavior on your website and sends you alerts when they visit a specific page. This helps you strike at the best possible time.
Key Features
B2B web visitor tracking
Firmographic data
New lead real-time alerts
CRM integrations
In-depth analytics
ICP-based lead prioritization
Pricing
Contact sales for pricing.
4. Snitcher
Snitcher is a web visitor identification tool that uncovers the companies visiting your website in real-time.
Instead of treating each visitor equally, Snitcher scores leads based on their online behavior and how closely their firmographics match your ideal customer profile. It also identifies web visitors that are most likely to buy.
Based on rules you establish in the system, Snitcher also auto-routes leads to the right sales rep. The seller will receive an enriched account record directly in their CRM.
Better yet, Snitcher connects with outreach platforms like Lemlist or Apollo and automatically adds the highest-value leads to your outreach sequences.
You can also configure Snitcher to automatically organize the new leads it discovers into audience segments. This feature proves helpful when you want to add lists of similar leads to targeted lead generation campaigns.
However, this all comes at a cost. Some users on G2 find the pricing inaccessible, especially when they don’t have the traffic to warrant such an investment.
Key Features
Company-level web visitor identification
Real-time alerts
Lead scoring
Visitor activity tracking
B2B web analytics
Automated workflows and triggers
Pricing
Free trial: Two weeks
Premium: Starts at $49 per month (for 50 company reveals)
Agency: $249 per month (starts at 750 company reveals)
5. Warmly
Warmly is an AI revenue orchestration platform that automates warm sales prospecting.
Warmly specializes in web visitor identification, offering it through the Website Intent feature. This tool automatically monitors web activity and builds lists of companies visiting your website.
For each prospect, Warmly tells you about their firmographics, demographics, technographics, and online behavior.
Unlike many similar tools, which only reveal the company name, Warmly also identifies the names of the individuals visiting your site.
So, instead of just learning that Pipedrive is on your website, you’ll see the name of the exact stakeholder from Pipedrive. This way you can reach out directly instead of playing a guessing game of which person at the company is on your website.
One small problem. Warmly states that it succeeds only 15% of the time in identifying the names of individuals. But at least they’re being honest, and that’s still much better than having no clue who is surfing your site.
Setting up web visitor tracking is simple. All you have to do is embed Warmly’s snippet of code into your website. You can also configure Warmly to send you real-time notifications via Slack or Teams when a lead is on your site.
With pricing starting at $499 per month, it may be a bit too high for small businesses.
Key Features
Company-level web visitor identification
Person-level web visitor identification
Integrations with marketing automation tools
Lead scoring and routing
Contact database and lead enrichment
Pricing
Data Only: Starts at $499 per month (5,000 warm leads per month)
Business: $19,000 per year
Enterprise: Custom pricing
Use AI Visitor Identification to Drive More Leads
The average web form conversion rate is very low. Most studies put it at around 2%. Without a focused strategy for revealing the identity of your web visitors, you’re missing out on a large number of potential customers.
While manual visitor identification strategies like IP and cookie tracking are somewhat effective, they’re time-consuming and highly limited in what they can reveal.
AI web visitor identification software like Artisan, on the other hand, automates the process of uncovering the names of companies on your site. All while providing a host of other helpful features—from prospecting to outreach—for generating leads.
