A complete guide to website visitor tracking

Offline visitor tracking

For a long time, business owners have been collecting information about their visitors through observations of user behavior. For example, a skilled shop vendor in a neighborhood might keep track of their visitors using metrics such as:

• The number of times they visited the shop

• The time they visited the shop

• The kinds of products they frequently bought

• The kind of feedback they have about the products, and their overall customer experience (CX)

• Their demographic details

More significantly, business owners interact with their buyers personally, enabling them to follow up with them at different stages and give them a more individualized experience. They keep track of buyers at various stages using various media (notebooks, files, Excel spreadsheets, and so on).

Online visitor tracking

Fast-forward to now. How much do online businesses know about their visitors today? Online businesses have zero physical interaction with their website visitors, but to get a transparent view of how their visitors interact with their business site, they've adopted website visitor tracking tools. These help them track visitors in real time, amp up their sales and marketing efforts, increase conversions, and provide proactive customer engagement and CX.

Particularly after the pandemic, the entire CX journey has elevated to the next level. Business owners now face challenges such as on-demand personalization and instant support availability—especially the sales, marketing, and support teams.

 What is website visitor tracking?   

Website visitor tracking helps businesses identify website visitors, their demographics, what devices and apps they use to access the site, and preferences. It also tracks visitor activity, including the pages they visit, the content they demonstrate interest in, time spent on each page, and how many times they visit a particular site. 

How has website visitor tracking impacted businesses? 

With the implementation of a website visitor tracking tool to analyze website visitors' behavioral patterns, companies have acquired insights into identifying things that previously seemed impossible.

Businesses can now see the entire digital footprint of individuals browsing their sites, including information like the following:

 Website traffic

 Rate of engagement/bounce

 Demographics

 Behavioral analysis

 New or returning visitors

 Path discovery

 Real-time reporting

All these behavioral analytics yield insights that help improve marketing, sales, and other business areas with more focused targeting strategies.

Investing in a website visitor tracking tool is essential for businesses for the following reasons: 

1. Improves lead generation   

Website visitor tracking helps you understand your target audience better so you can refine your lead generation strategies. Knowing details such as preferences, geography, and interests helps set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) lead generation goals.

By improving buyers' journeys to becoming potential customers, website visitor tracking assists businesses in increasing conversion rates.

2. Improves your understanding of buyers  

Understanding buyers and their journeys becomes easier with the help of website visitor tracking software, as businesses can connect the dots to understand visitor behavior on their websites.

For example, say a user lands on the website of a company called Zylker and starts browsing through their brochures and services. Let's also say the user's session duration increases and their bounce rate decreases—meaning they've found what they're looking for. Zylker gives the user precisely what they want from the product. This browsing pattern continues with the user checking out their pricing—a sign of increasing intent to buy.

From the above example, it's clear that tracking potential buyers' browsing behavior patterns helps businesses predict users' personalities and preferences. Businesses can thereby devise better marketing strategies and more immersive customer experiences.

3. Enables personalized customer experiences (CX) and customer engagement (CE)

Continuing with the previous example, how can Zylker amp up the CX of that particular user? With a website visitor tracking tool, Zylker can see that the visitor is from a Fortune 500 company based in the U.S. Moreover, the visitor's activities indicate that they have a high buyer intent (time spent on the site, number of pages visited, and actions taken on the site), and are the "right" account for Zylker.

Zylker can start a proactive live chat with that user and instantly connect with them. A live chat enables Zylker to speed up the sales cycle. Furthermore, they can send the user personalized emails with products of interest, complementary products, and special discounts. This results in an enhanced and timely CE. Isn't that all that matters when it comes to delighting potential customers?

All business owners want to provide the best customer experience and service possible, but how many are committed enough to take action? Going that extra mile is how businesses can gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Offering personalized approaches can create unique experiences tailored to specific individuals and build long-lasting customer relationships.

4. Improves ROI

Data is everywhere. Using data from website visitor tracking software can yield actionable insights to improve ROI. Businesses can drill down to track the progress of the sales, marketing, and support teams to understand the effectiveness of their strategies.

What is website visitor tracking software?

Website visitor tracking software enables online businesses to track visitors who end up on the website from various sources. It gathers web traffic data on each user and provides insights to businesses to improve lead generation activities.

What features does website visitor tracking software include?

1. Real-time visitor tracking

A good website visitor tracking software provides businesses with real-time website visitor details. This is done anonymously so as to avoid identifying individuals and violating their privacy. However, website visitor tracking tools can de-anonymize the tracking if the visitor voluntarily provides details such as their name, email address, and phone number.

The tool can gather general details, such as:

• Organization name

• Number of employees

• Country

• Region

• Website

• Contact details

Most importantly, the website visitor tracking software shows visitors' on-site behavior and provides a solid understanding of each individual user.

2. Customized views

Another significant feature to look for in a website visitor tracking tool is that it should enable business users to create customized views based on a specific set of criteria.

For example, say you're running a campaign targeting financial service organizations in the UK and Ireland region, and you want to track the companies visiting from that region. It's tedious and inefficient to filter your views manually all the time. Setting up a customized view is much easier and more effective.

3. Lead prioritization

Website visitor tracking software should help with automatic lead scoring. With behavioral data, businesses can assign lead scores to visitors by setting up rules that add lead scores to visitors automatically. Depending on the business's requirements, it can be positive lead scoring or even negative lead scoring.

Accordingly, businesses can prioritize leads with the highest lead scores and target them to convert them into potential customers. Lead prioritization helps the sales team focus on the most important leads.

4. App integration

Having scattered data makes it challenging for businesses to make informed decisions. Ensure that the website visitor tracking software is flexible enough to integrate with your business's existing tools, such as web analytics tools, email campaign software, data visualization tools, and more.

Integrating with CRM software also helps businesses easily sync potential leads identified via the website visitor tracking software and add them to the CRM pipeline to expand outreach strategies.

Is website visitor tracking software GDPR-compliant?   

Yes. Due to the strict compliance rules and regulations on privacy and security, website visitor tracking software is, by default, GDPR-compliant. Failure to adhere to GDPR results in hefty fines for vendors, so they have strict rules for collecting data. A website visitor tracking tool will not identify the user if the visitor does not consent to tracking on their web browsers.

 What's next?

It's essential to choose the right tool by understanding the current requirements while anticipating future needs.

The journey continues even after a visitor becomes a customer. Businesses need to think about how they can boost customer engagement. Before finalizing a tool, revisit your goals and objectives, and then make a decision. Also, think about what's next. What else can you do to improve the customer experience?

There are many tools available, such as a customer engagement platform with a built-in visitor tracking feature. This kind of tool helps businesses start proactive live chats with visitors, set up chatbots to have conversations 24/7, and provide instant customer support. It can also help streamline communications from different channels like email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others.

How does Zoho SalesIQ track visitor engagement?

To collect a visitor's name and email address (identification) and to create leads, Zoho SalesIQ employs four different techniques. Upon completion, it stores this data for all upcoming visits and updates visitors' SalesIQ records.

Zoho SalesIQ identifies visitors using these methods:

i) Via live chats

ii) Via CRM webforms for online inquiries or newsletters

iii) Via website visits driven through email campaigns you've sent (campaign emails delivered to CRM contacts or leads)

iv) Via a JS API configuration.

Note: Visitor details are collected only if they consent.

Understand more about Zoho SalesIQ's visitor tracking feature >>
 

Leading the way in user privacy: Cookies and SalesIQ

'PRIVACY FIRST' is Zoho's way, and SalesIQ has been implementing it since day 1. In this video, watch our Senior Technical Support Engineer, Manikandan, talk about how Google's policy to revoke support to third-party cookies doesn't affect our SalesIQ users.

Also, check out our data privacy and security deck to get detailed information about our commitment to privacy.

Try out Zoho SalesIQ! Built for small and mid-sized businesses, Zoho SalesIQ offers a digital customer engagement platform to communicate with visitors at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Initiate the right conversation at precisely the right time.