For commercial products and services organizations, a website is often a validation tool. Clients want to get a general sense that your organization is legitimate and understand the scope and quality of the services you provide or the the products that you offer. However, if those potential clients leave the site without actively making contact by filling out a form, sending an email, or dialing up the phone, you may lose a valuable opportunity. What if you were able to see the companies that are visiting your site without taking action to identify themselves? You could actively engage them or put them into your sales or lead generation funnel.

Luckily you can see many of the companies that are visiting your site using analytics tools or third party web applications.

In Google Analytics, if you go to the network report (Audience > Technology > Network), you will see that much of traffic is from common internet service providers, but if you dig deeper, you will also see a number of listings for companies and institutions.

The data doesn’t provide the company for every visitor and you don’t get specific details about the individual that is performing the search, but you can get some valuable insight about potential leads based on their visit behavior. If you combine the network parameter with the session data, you can get a sense of the engagement level of those visitors and can either promote those organizations in your lead pipeline or add them if they don’t already exist. If nothing else, it’s a reason to start a conversation with some otherwise unnoticed potential clients.

Although this information is accessible in most analytics tools, there are several third party applications that will aggregate and clean up the data for you. Some of the common providers include:

Apps That Show Website Visitor Data

Most of these services are use monthly subscription payment models that range from a flat $59 per month for VisualVisitor to several hundred per month based on the volume of traffic that your site receives.

Each of the apps provides a dashboard that filters out the network domains that aren’t related to a specific company and they each provide their own spin on the dashboard layout. Each app has it’s own take on reports and integration with other services like CRM systems or analytics systems. LeadFeeder, for example, provides a view of connected LinkedIn profiles related to each company and pulls some of the page view data from Google Analytics. LeadForensics uses their own javascript code to pull in the page view data to their app.

If you are interested in exploring one of these systems for your business, I would review the features noted on each of their websites and conduct a trial of the ones that look most applicable to your business.

Personally, I demoed LeadForensics, LeadLander and LeadFeeder and I’m currently using LeadFeeder because it provided the right combination of price and features. And for your viewing pleasure, here is a watchlist of the animated explainer videos of each of the six applications noted above. Enjoy!