Website visitor tracking for B2B marketing: A beginner's guide

If you’re running a B2B marketing campaign and you don’t have website visitor tracking in place, it can feel a bit like aiming darts at a bullseye in the dark. You’re guessing where your target is moving along the campaign journey — and hoping to hit it out of sheer luck.

That’s where website visitor tracking comes in. By uncovering who’s on your site — and which visitors match your ideal customers — website visitor tracking enables you to run data-driven B2B marketing campaigns and serve up personalized experiences for potential customers. More importantly, it can help you increase conversions by targeting the prospects who are most likely to buy from you.

Why do B2B marketing campaigns need website visitor tracking?

Did you know that more than half of website visitors don’t fill out a form? And on average, 75% of B2B website visitors leave after viewing just one page. If your website is an integral part of your lead gen engine, you’ll want to convert as many visitors as possible — through a lead form or product sign-up, for instance — or you risk losing them forever.

Fortunately, there’s a solution. A good website visitor tracking tool can de-anonymize your traffic so you know who’s visiting your site even if they don’t complete a form or identity themselves. A website visitor tracking tool can also help you analyze visitor information by employee size, industry, technology used, and other firmographic or technographic attributes so you can determine if your campaigns are sending the right kind of traffic to your site.

For example, Clearbit’s Weekly Visitor Report helps you understand traffic quality by channel, making it easier to validate your marketing campaign spend and efforts.

What types of website visitor tracking tools do marketers need?

When it comes to website visitor tracking for campaigns, most B2B marketers use a combination of tools to understand traffic patterns, intent signals, and visitor behavior. Here are some you’ll commonly see in a marketing stack.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the go-to tool for getting an accurate overview of how your website is performing and how much traffic it attracts. It offers filters for breaking down your traffic by location, traffic channel, session time, and more. It’s also free, so many marketers start here when first setting up website visitor tracking.

While Google Analytics is useful for tracking website traffic, it also comes with a few limitations. One of the biggest gaps is that it can’t can’t categorize your website visitors by company name or industry. It’s designed to track only dedicated corporate IP addresses, which is limited to a small percentage of your website visitors from large companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The vast majority of your visitors would remain anonymous, making it harder to deliver a personalized experience to move them along the buyer journey.

Clearbit

In addition to understanding your overall website traffic, you need information that you can act on. For example, which of your target accounts are showing intent by visiting your website (and looking at high-intent pages like your pricing page)?

That’s where Clearbit’s Weekly Visitor Report comes in. Going beyond the limitations of traditional reverse-IP lookup tools, our proprietary machine learning algorithms analyze millions of data points that include geolocation, traffic patterns, and manual QA to identify and validate granular insights about website visitors.

Clearbit’s Weekly Visitor Report is free, easy to set up, and offers weekly insights. It can also track visitors who work from home. With employees around the world shifting to WFH during the pandemic, this meant that they were no longer associated with the IP addresses of their company offices. The Weekly Visitor Report’s proprietary mapping of a wide range of company domains to IP addresses tells you when someone from a key account is on your site — even for visitors that are working from home — so you can prioritize and personalize outreach efforts.

Mixpanel

Beyond traffic and intent, you’ll also want insights into behavior to understand how website visitors are converting (or not). If you offer a free or trial version of your product to get high-value leads, this is especially important.

Mixpanel is a behavioral analytics tool that can help you answer questions like where users are dropping off and which segments are more likely to convert, so you can find ways to improve the customer experience. Its powerful reporting feature can help you understand who your power users are and when they perform meaningful actions. It can also help you use this data to improve conversions, onboarding, and paid upgrades.

Hotjar

Another useful tool for B2B marketers is Hotjar, which is a visual user behavior tracking tool.

This kind of tool helps you visualize user behavior on your website using heatmaps. It also offers screen recordings that play back user clicks and mouse movements.

Hotjar is great for uncovering points of user friction on your website. With its heatmap and video recording features, your team can understand what elements of your website attract the most attention, what’s getting ignored, and issues that you might have missed in QA. This way, your team can make website changes based on how data (not feelings).

Ways to use website visitor tracking in B2B marketing

According to CMO Council, 43% of marketers agree that lack of data isn’t the problem. The real problem lies in making that data actionable.

At Clearbit we’re focused on helping companies grow faster and smarter by activating data at every stage of the customer journey. That’s why we built and launched a new version of the Weekly Visitor Report, which enables users to turn unknown traffic into pipeline and sales.

Here are a few examples of how to use the Weekly Visitor Report to accelerate revenue:

Identify high-value prospects on your site

Not all prospects are created equal — and neither are all closed-won opportunities. While it may sound counterintuitive, closing a sale with customers who ultimately aren’t a good fit can later mean higher churn, higher support costs, and higher dissatisfaction. Instead focus on defining and aligning  sales and marketing efforts on your ideal customer.

Sure, it’s not easy to turn away visitors when they land on your website. But focusing on your ideal customer profile (ICP) can lead to better results. Our free weekly website visitor tool helps you find the proverbial needle in a haystack. You can:

• Identify high-value prospects based on visit increases and high-intent pageviews
• Quickly qualify and action on companies that meet your ICP
• Tag, track, and share companies you want to pursue

For example, you can notify your sales team when key accounts are showing intent on your site to ensure timely and relevant outreach.

Understand what content is working (and what’s not)

With our free Weekly Visitor Report, you can understand what types of content and marketing campaigns are attracting your ideal customers. Then you can further refine your marketing touchpoints to ensure they’re effective and relevant.

For example, let’s say the report uncovers that the top four companies visiting your website organically via SERPs are mid-sized internet companies. If these attributes (company size and industry) align with your ICP, you might consider tailoring the content on your site for that audience. This could mean including more case studies featuring mid-size internet companies highlighting examples and use cases that address their specific needs.

You can then use Weekly Visitor Report to validate whether the tailored content worked (or not) by gauging traffic quality to your updated pages.

Get started with the Weekly Visitor Report

Want to turn more traffic into sales? Clearbit’s new and improved Weekly Visitor Report is now available. It’s free and takes just three steps to set up. Get started today.