Capturing Web Site Visitors

The website is essentially a passive medium. If someone comes to your website, what have you accomplished? Not much more than awareness-building. Some studies have shown that as few as 2% of website visitors ever become "actionable" prospects.

As marketers, our challenge is to "de-anonymize" the website visit. We need ways to capture visitor contact information, so we can keep the communications going. The standard technique to date has been simply to ask. We invite visitors to register, and we give them something — we make an offer — in exchange for the data.

Marketers are having success with all kinds of offers intended to capture visitor information, among them:

• a subscription to an email newsletter with product updates or useful how-to information

• a survey or quiz

• a contest or a drawing for a prize

• a downloadable document, like a case study or a how-to guide

If the offer is sufficiently valuable, then visitors are generally willing to give up some information to get it. The best technique is to ask for a minimal amount of data to start — just the name and email address, for example. Then, the marketer begins the communication stream. As prospects become more comfortable with the relationship, they will gradually contribute more information about themselves and their needs.

These are the legitimate ways to "de-anonymize" the website visit. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous website owners are guilty of using "sniffer" technology to sneak into the visitor's hard-drive, or read batches of outbound data, and grab the visitor's email address. This deplorable behavior is universally detested, and possibly illegal. However, it's hard to prevent.

Business marketers have an easier time with data capture

The situation is easier for business marketers. They certainly use offers at their websites, but they also have access to a new technique involving data matchback to the company domain name of the visitor and the keywords the person was searching on.

The reason is that when employees use company computers to surf the Internet, their company can often be identified by the sites they visit. The website can track the number of visits from that company, the time when they came, what pages they visited, and what keywords they were searching on. This information can be very valuable to a sales department, who want to know what kinds of companies are interested in their products.

Consider the example of Plexis Healthcare Systems, a provider of insurance claim management software. When someone is searching around the Web and stops by the Plexis site, a service called VisitorTrack grabs up information from the visitor's browser.

VisitorTrack identifies the visitor's company name and the keywords the person was searching on. This is matched against other data about the company, for example, online data such as other visitors to the site from the same company, or offline data such as company address, industry, individual contacts and so forth. VisitorTrack generates a report and delivers it to Plexis for follow up.

From Plexis's point of view, knowing that people from a certain firm have been trolling around their website is a trigger. A sales call into that firm may result in some business.

According to J.T. Gillett, marketing manager at Plexis, the service has been a hit: "Our target for VisitorTrack is 10-15 leads per month, as determined by the number of visits, the visitors' line of business, as well as our ability to provide services for that line of business. VisitorTrack consistently generates 15-20 leads per month and opens many doors for our sales team. VisitorTrack has been instrumental in Plexis' invitation to submit several proposals to a variety of prospects, including very large organizations. For us, one sale can account for between $150,000 and $2 million in revenue."

The VisitorTrack service sends a report of the companies whose employees have visited your site, what key words they were searching on, and other data about the company, including names and contact information about key employees at the company.