Research1 by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute says the 60:40 marketing rule businesses have been practicing for decades is outdated. It introduces a new marketing rule, 95:5, which observes that only 5% of your ideal customers are now in the market to buy your offerings. The rest won’t have any need to make a purchase in the coming months or years.

  • This makes it critical for businesses to plan their targeting strategies, because if not executed well, they have the potential to burn out the marketing budget without producing anything substantial.
  • This also highlights the importance of identifying your 5%—ideal customers who are ready to buy.

Website visitor tracking software can help you identify your purchase-ready prospects, thus making your job easier.

What is website visitor tracking?

Website visitor tracking involves monitoring visitors' behavior and interaction with your webpages and analyzing the data to provide insights into their interests and engagement patterns.

By tracking website visitors, businesses will be able to get information such as:

  • Name and email
  • Traffic source
  • Visitor type (returning or new)
  • Location
  • Time on site
  • Viewed pages and more

Website visitor tracking software is ideal for your business if getting this additional information can help you fast-forward your conversion funnel.

How does website visitor tracking work?

Based on the software provider, how they're tracking website visitors will vary. Let's look at some of the standard methods that are used.

Code snippet: A small piece of code is added to the website's codebase. When the website is active (i.e., visitors engage with it), the code will actively listen for user activities, capture all the information, and store it in a database.

Cookies: The tracking software installs browser cookies to monitor the user's activity and record their behavior. The providers use several types of cookies.

  • First-party cookie: This cookie tracks your activity only when you're on the site that generated it. It won't monitor your activity once you move to a different website.
  • Third-party cookie: Until deleted, these cookies can track you across websites.
  • Session cookie: When you're active in a single session, these cookies will track you across websites. But once the session is closed, it will stop and won't continue the next time you start a new session.
  • Persistent cookie: These are permanent cookies that track your activities across websites and sessions until they're deleted.

IP address: Every device that connects to the Internet has a unique IP address, which is associated with a country and approximate location. The IP address helps identify where visitors are from. And in some cases, if they're related to certain companies, more information about the visitor can be obtained.

Types of website visitor tracking

Though website visitor tracking is used as an umbrella term, certain types of website visitor tracking exist based on the business use case and what needs to be tracked.

Mapping visitor behavior

Mapping visitor behavior includes heat mapping, scroll mapping, click mapping, and other techniques to consolidate what the users do and how they behave on a single page of the website. It'll give information about:

  • The content where users are spending more time on your page
  • The part of the page that garners their attention the most
  • Elements that they interact with

By identifying these, businesses can refine their webpages to nudge visitors to take whatever action they want.

Ideal for: A/B experiments, refining content, and increasing page conversion.

Recording visitor activity

In contrast to behavior mapping, activity recording will completely record how visitors navigate your website. Instead of stopping at individual pages, the recording follows the visitor throughout their interaction journey, which will help businesses understand where visitors go and what they're looking for.

Ideal for: Finding out the best customer journey to increase website conversion.

Hybrid tracking

Hybrid tracking will combine the benefits of behavior mapping and activity recording, giving a comprehensive outlook on individual pages and the website. By combining both, businesses can gain more insights into visitor behavior, what they do, how they navigate, and what nudges them to convert. They can also remove roadblocks to increase the rate.

Benefits of website visitor tracking software

Know your visitors

As discussed earlier, monitoring and tracking website visitors can help businesses learn about their behavior and how they interact with the site. Aggregating all this information will give businesses actionable insights into what's working and what's not.

Engagement insights

Marketers can use these insights to tweak their content, flow, and direction to increase engagement. The insights will help them remove the roadblock for the prospects, which will speed up the buying cycle.

Customer segmentation

Since visitor tracking gives information on what the visitors are doing, how they interact, navigate, and engage with your site, and where they spend most of their time, it's easy to classify visitors into hot, warm, and cold leads based on their actions.

Combining visitor tracking with a scoring model will allow businesses to set how they want to score visitors to identify and classify their intent. Those identified leads can be moved to the next stage of the funnel for conversion. It helps the team identify their ideal prospects and those who are not.

Personalized sales pitch

Instead of making a generic pitch, sales teams can use the tracked information to personalize their pitch specific to the prospects based on their interaction and engagement history, increasing the chances of conversion.

Increased conversion

This will be a blessing to the sales team, as they'll want as much information about the visitors as possible. This will help them personalize their pitch based on how the visitor interacts and converts faster.

Even if they're facing warm or cold leads, they can use the insights collected to nudge them along the buying cycle and educate them more about the offerings.

Website optimization and refined customer journey

Marketing teams can use website visitor tracking to identify where visitors engage most and where they drop off.

By identifying this, the team can double down on the content their visitors are looking for and refine the content where the drop is happening. By refining the flow, they'll increase the user experience, gain better insights about the visitors, and refine the customer journey.

Improved UX

When the observed insights are implemented to simplify the prospect's journey, it ultimately leads to an improved user experience (UX). Of course, any business will have multiple personas, and it's impossible to cater a personalized experience to all the available personas. But using visitor tracking to optimize the journey will enhance the overall user experience of your ideal customer personas who convert the most.

Do you need website visitor tracking software to achieve all these benefits? Of course. What would we suggest?

Zoho SalesIQ, the best website visitor tracking software

Our own Zoho SalesIQ, the 360o customer engagement platform, offers website visitor tracking and lead scoring modules as part of the platform.

With SalesIQ's visitor tracking, businesses can get real-time insights into visitor behavior. By combining it with lead scoring, they can segregate the intended leads from casual visitors for better and more focused conversion.

Since tracking is a major privacy concern among businesses, SalesIQ doesn't use third-party cookies and complies with all the major global regulations, including GDPR. If you'd like to know more about how safe and secure SalesIQ is, you can check out this article on privacy and security.

Want to see how it works? Book a demo to speak with our experts, who can explain how it'll benefit your business. Alternatively, sign up for the product (it comes with a credit-card-free 15-day trial) and see it yourself.

References:

1. https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/resources/pdfs/advertising-effectiveness-and-the-95-5-rule.pdf

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FAQs on website visitor tracking

How does visitor tracking help increase sales or ROI?

Visitor tracking helps identify buyers' behavior and shares insights on what they want. It helps the sales team create personalized pitches to connect with the buyers instantly and hook them for a sale, leading to an increased ROI. It also helps the sales team remove the intent-less leads from their pipeline, saving their time and effort.

How does tracking help reduce my bounce rate?

Along with visitor behavior, tracking also sheds light on how they interact with your website, such as the pages where visitors bounce immediately and drop off even before completing their intent of visiting the pages. By identifying them, the pages can be refined to include relevant and additional content that could help them stay on the page, reducing the bounce rate.

How can visitor tracking help me identify high-intent leads?

Since visitor tracking gives information on the pages prospects visited, the time they spent, actions they took, and their overall journey with the website, the intent touchpoints can be compared with your ideal customer journey to identify whether they're a high-intent lead.

Can visitor tracking help me improve my website content?

Yes, visitor tracking can help you improve your website content. By mapping visitors' interaction and engagement activities, you can gain insights into their behavior, which can be used to improve the content and make it more engaging.