How to use webpage intent to identify ready-to-buy accounts
A visitor’s path on your website can be illuminating. With marketing budgets shrinking and fewer people filling out forms, marketers can find new sources of pipeline by looking at how accounts are moving around their website — and identifying the ones that demonstrate purchase intent, based on what pages they visit.
It’s unlikely you’ll want your sales and marketing team to follow up with all accounts that visit any page on your site.
But if you classify your pages as high-intent, medium-intent, and low-intent, you’ll have a framework to help spot the accounts that appear more ready to buy than others.
How to determine a webpage’s intent level
- First-party intent data is collected from people’s direct interactions with your brand, such as a demo request or webinar registration. A webpage visit falls into the category of first-party intent data.
- Second-party intent data is collected and traded between partners, such as sharing leads from a comarketing campaign.
- Third-party intent data is collected and sold by outside entities that don’t have a direct relationship with your audience, such as keyword intent collecting by a publishing co-op.
List all the pages on your website in a Google sheet — you’ll be tagging them as high, medium, or low intent.
A good starting point is to map each page to your funnel. Visits to bottom-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel pages typically indicate higher intent than visits to top-of funnel pages do.
Then, fine tune. If you use a marketing attribution model or another type of page tracking, it can help you see how different pageviews correlate to the buyer’s journey.
Are there certain pages that typically lead to opportunities? These may indicate higher intent. Do you have content that visitors tend to read for months without starting a trial or requesting a demo? These may belong in the lower-intent bucket.
Here are some examples of how you might group pages by intent level. Please note that this looks different for different companies — it depends on your web traffic patterns.
Example of page intent level classification
A second layer of intent level is frequency. Visiting your Partner page by itself may not indicate high intent, but if an account is repeatedly checking out your Partner page in combination with other pages, you might start seeing their intent level differently.
How to tailor outreach based on intent level
Once you’ve categorized your pages as high, medium, or low, you can assign different follow-up and activation steps to them. What channels should sales and marketing use to follow up with a website visitor — ads, website personalization, nurture sequence, BDR email, or something else?
Broadly speaking, your follow-up can be divided by high-intent and low-intent visitors:
- High-intent visitors should speak to sales right away if they have high fit.
- Low-intent visitors can be added to an ad retargeting campaign, email nurture sequence, or serve as a secondary prospecting bucket for sales. These activities can build up intent over time – the buyer’s journey isn’t static.
Make sure your follow-up is appropriately different for accounts with a high fit score vs. low fit score.
This segmentation, and the follow-up outreach, can happen automatically. Let Clearbit Reveal place website visitors’ companies into different audiences based on their activity on your site — Clearbit Capture also automatically creates new accounts for companies not already in your CRM.
This allows you to trigger intent-based outreach on a per-audience basis, like syncing one audience to Facebook for an ad campaign, or sending another audience a personalized drip email sequence by integrating Clearbit with your email platform.
You can tailor your activation method based on the specific page an account is visiting:
- Pricing page visits: Email the account asking if they have specific questions about pricing and packaging options.
- Product page visits: Share product videos and additional resources; show retargeting ads related to the solutions they viewed.
- Homepage visits: Personalize the website experience based on industry, technologies the visitor uses, etc. to surface relevant content that raises a visitor’s intent level.
At Clearbit, we assign intent levels to different webpages on Clearbit.com, then group the accounts that visit our site into 7 golden audiences based on their webpage visits and fit score.
We use this as a source of warm leads for BDRs. When a high-fit account visits the pricing page, BDRs even get alerts so they can act quickly before moving on to lower-intent buckets.
Special pages: How Clearbit uses intent-based outreach for our Forms product
If your company has a strategic focus on promoting one particular product, you can create custom audiences that pinpoints accounts with high intent to buy that product — or who are interested but need a little nurturing.
For example, when we launched Clearbit for Forms as a standalone product, we promoted it through a number of webpages and content assets, like product pages and a blog announcement.
Our Marketing Operations Manager, Ryan Mercer, built an audience in Clearbit that identified companies who landed on those Forms-specific pages. If an account visited at least three in a month, and if their fit score qualified, then LeanData routed the account to our BDR team.
The assigned BDR received a sales alert so they could start warm outbound right away, using a custom outreach sequence for this Forms campaign.
Guide web visitors along their buyer’s journey
Your website is an amazing source of warm accounts, but not all page visits are created equal.
Classify your webpages as low-, medium-, and high-intent to figure out the best way to follow up with accounts who visit them. Mapping pages to ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu stages is a simple way to get started: The lower in the funnel, the higher the intent. Then, fine-tune using your web traffic patterns.
A visitor’s path on your website can be revealing. Using Clearbit, you can see where they’re going — it’s a clue to what they want and how you can help.
