Website tracking with B2B marketing automation tools

Tested: How well do B2B marketing automation platforms identify anonymous website visitors with sales potential?

For around a year, we have been working intensively on the market for B2B tools for website visitor analysis. The basic idea behind these applications is: Instead of just measuring quantitative traffic on individual pages, page views are presented bundled by visitor. And above all, visitors are identified — mind you, only organizations and companies, not natural persons, which would be problematic under data protection law without explicit consent. This effectively converts anonymized visitor tracking into a list of potential leads with which marketing and sales can continue to work efficiently.

In our test a few months ago In particular, the providers were able to convince, who ensure the quality of the automated process of recoding static IP addresses to the “owning” organizations via reverse DNS lookup using a complex manual process. Machine tools based on Google Analytics alone, on the other hand, performed significantly worse. But why additional paid software at all when providers such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Adobe or Oracle offer holistic solutions that keep an eye on all lead sources? It's time for a new test!

Chaff vs. wheat

Our question was whether the popular “big” B2B marketing automation platforms Salesforce Pardot, Hubspot and Adobe Marketo integrated B2B website visitor tracking techniques are practicable and have comparable results as the standalone tool SalesViewer deliver that in our had achieved the best results last test. For this purpose, we subjected the recognition technology of the three above providers to a direct comparison with SalesViewer in a two-week practical test.

In the test: Hubspot

Even at first glance, Hubspot is missing an important element of SalesViewer: There is hardly any information about the origin of a visit. This means that the lead cannot be attributed to any source, such as a Google Ads campaign or the original referring link. This is surprising, as complete lead routes are at the center of content and inbound marketing. And while SalesViewer shows exactly how long a specific visitor (or company) stayed on which page, Hubspot is completely missing this information. What remains is a general list of visitors and the total number of pages visited by these. Even these few details cannot be transferred to sales by assigning tasks — the activity and history of the lead are simply lost.

And what about actual lead identification — how well does Hubspot recognize anonymous website visitors? In our tests, Hubspot only identified around a third of the companies that SalesViewer identifies. Conversely, there isn't a single company that is only recognized by Hubspot. The marketing platform is thus significantly beaten off: Not only are HubSpot users completely lost many valuable leads, the inadequate sorting out of Internet service providers (ISPs) also causes unnecessary additional work.

In the test: Salesforce Pardot

Pardot, Salesforce's B2B marketing automation solution, is the only one of the three tested solutions that gives users a granular view of the individual lead. For example, it is easy to see which pages have been visited for how long — this makes it easy for sales people to follow up on identified companies. If it wasn't for a special feature: While Hubspot allows you to further process the company data set, this is not possible with Pardot, as a company lead can only be synchronized with the Salesforce CRM solution Sales Cloud if at least one contact is assigned to him. As a result, the information obtained can only be passed on to sales in practice via detours.

The idea (or hope) behind this may be that visitors voluntarily “de-anonymize” themselves, for example by filling out a form at the end of their user journey and then immediately being created as a contact. However, this would contradict a basic idea of website visitor recognition, namely to tap into the large number of anonymous visitors who are certainly interested and therefore relevant for sales, but leave the website without a form request.

But what's even more problematic is that Salesforce Pardot scores even slightly worse than Hubspot in terms of recognition rate and doesn't even find a fifth of the companies that SalesViewer can identify. Similarly, Pardot won't find any company that SalesViewer doesn't recognize. Detailed information is of no use if it is limited to a fraction of relevant visitors.

In the test: Adobe Marketo

Marketo from Adobe initially gives a similar image to Hubspot and can't hold a candle to SalesViewer when it comes to the depth of information. Details about individual website visitors are not collected or displayed in bundled form across all visits, meaning that the actual activity of potential leads cannot really be traced. But that would be essential for lead qualification: What was the visitor interested in? Which product pages were visited, which videos watched, which blog posts read? There is little to start with an expression such as “3 visitors visited a total of 4 pages”.

A bit more pleasing: When it comes to actual lead identification, Marketo delivers the best results from the three major platforms. Marketo also recognizes around two thirds of SalesViewer hits and occasionally companies that SalesViewer does not know appear. In any case, the difference on this point is not a categorical one. However, the poor ISP filtering is annoying: The Internet service providers, which are worthless for lead acquisition, are only very inadequately sorted out.

What do the test results mean?

Although each of the three major marketing automation solutions has strengths and weaknesses in an “internal comparison”, in our opinion, none of the solutions is suitable for meaningful identification of anonymous website visitors. Your big advantage would be that all leads and activities are integrated in one platform, meaning that continuous lead qualification and further processing by marketing and sales are seamlessly possible. But that is exactly what none of the three platforms does satisfactorily.

• 1. Identify website visitors:
  No provider solves the core task as well as SalesViewer. Conversely, if not even half of the hits are recognized, this means that over 50% of potential leads are lost from the outset.
• 2. Detection quality:
  There are many analysis tools that generate tons of information, which is “nice-to-have” at best. However, details about the specific interest of a visit are essential when identifying leads, because they are the basis for further sales work. Only Salesforce Pardot can even begin to keep up with SalesViewer here.
• 3. Handling/process:
  Surprisingly, the tested B2B platforms sometimes really get in the way of sales. The (often small) collected information cannot be completely or only laboriously processed further in a procedural manner — an astonishing shortcoming for solutions with holistic requirements.

Conclusion: Recognition rate and quality are the icing on the cake when it comes to B2B website visitor recognition. The major marketing automation platforms in this discipline are currently showing fundamental deficiencies, as a result of which a large part of the theoretical benefit is lost again, especially for sales in practice. This is all the more regrettable as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has imposed tighter limits than ever on their classic domain of acquiring “opt-in” leads. If these platforms were to reliably address the large field of identifying website-based “non-opt-in” leads, they could unlock far more sales potential for their users than ever comes in via lead generation forms. Anyone who thinks they can do without specialized solutions such as SalesViewer, WiredMinds Leadlab or Leadforensics when identifying website leads is therefore saving at the wrong end.

Also read the Test of the standalone tools LeadForensics, SalesViewer and Wiredminds: How well do they recognize B2B website visitors?