B2B visitor tracking with Leadfeeder and LeadRebel put to the test

B2B website visitor recognition: What can Leadfeeder and LeadRebel do?

In an evaluation of different tracking methods of website lead identification tools in 2019 We came to the conclusion that software solutions whose visitor identification is based on IP and domain information provided by Google Analytics provide less accurate and error-prone recognition results. One of the solutions listed at that time came from the provider Leadfeeder from Helsinki. However, Leadfeeder has since changed its tracking technology: It no longer uses Google Analytics, but implements its own tracking script (just like other tools that we've already tested, e.g. LeadForensics, SalesViewer and WiredMinds LeadLab). This change is reason enough for us to take a closer look at this solution. What is the recognition quality and functionality of Leadfeeder? In direct comparison with Leadfeeder Do we have LeadRebel from Switzerland and again SalesViewer tested, which has delivered the best recognition quality in our previous tests.

One significant difference to SalesViewer is immediately noticeable with Leadfeeder and LeadRebel: Both tools not only provide information about organizations from whose Internet access the tracked website was visited, but also the names and email addresses of employees of this organization. Which Contacts the two tools aggregate, but is not based on the buying center layout of the respective customer and their industry or products, but simply on who via web crawling and LinkedIn or tapping into email address tools such as hunter.io can be found. However, the findability does not allow conclusions to be drawn as to whether one or more this Contacts based on their role, responsibility and position really fit the company-specific sales approach. This can only be determined through manual research. As convenient as displaying employee data may seem, it also poses two risks: On the one hand, Leadfeeder and LeadRebel take them into a grey area under data protection law. This is because they may only identify organizations with their tracking snippet without visitor consent if no personal data is collected in the process. However, this is the case, at least indirectly, with the addition of employee data. LeadRebel goes a bit less far than Leadfeeder here: It only shows contacts after an active request and allows you to filter for the desired function (e.g. marketing, sales). On the other hand, personal business email addresses give the impression that you can email these people for sales purposes. However, this is by no means the case under formal law, as promotional contact by e-mail is not covered by the GDPR without the prior consent of the addressee.

Unlike SalesViewer, both newly tested solutions can use cookies to recognize whether the visitor is the same when a company visits the website again. Unfortunately, this function has one major snag: In order to track in accordance with GDPR, the playback of cookies in the Cookie Consent Management System must be subject to the consent of the website visitor. And in the B2B segment, experience shows that only 30 to 50 percent of visitors give this consent. As a result, the indication of returning visitors remains very incomplete — and has hardly any added value in practice. This limited use is offset by a significant legal risk, because in the standard account setup, both Leadfeeder and LeadRebel simply play out their cookies. In order to completely deactivate the display of cookies or to achieve GDPR compliance by making them subject to consent via a cookie wall, you must contact the respective manufacturer support. This is the only way to ensure that the tracking snippet works properly even without cookies. This means that in standard mode, both solutions are not GDPR-compliant. We do not find that transparent.

What is the situation with Leadfeeder and LeadRebel in terms of usability, recognition quality and quantity, functions and pricing model?

Lead feeders tested in practice

User interface and design

Leadfeeder offers a compact, streamlined dashboard with information on the top countries, industries, and the number of companies identified. Website visits are presented in a list view of recognized companies in the selected period of time. Each company is shown once in the list, sorted by the time of the company's last session. As a result, as a user, you always have an eye on the recently active companies, but you do not immediately recognize multiple visits from a company. By clicking on the company, the detailed overview shows which pages have been viewed and for how long. It therefore takes several clicks to evaluate which company visits are interesting and relevant to sales. This multi-click principle is significantly inferior to SalesViewer's lean single-line view, which displays all important data about the visitor and the pages visited directly or via mouse-over without a single click.

If the optional cookies have been approved, the company's sessions are displayed broken down by visitor 1, visitor 2, etc. However, the presentation is not very compact and therefore seems somewhat confusing. The locations of the identified people were also not correctly stated during our own visits.

Detection quality and quantity

In our test, Leadfeeder recognized 123 companies, while SalesViewer identified 97 companies over the same period. Leadfeeder and Salesviewer recognized only 35% of companies consistently. The logics for company recognition obviously differ greatly between software platforms.

With SalesViewer, despite the absolutely smaller number, we see more “real” sales-relevant companies on our website at the same time, while the Leadfeeder recognitions also include entries such as “RIPE NCC” and Internet service providers, universities and other institutions whose Internet access can be used publicly and whose visit is therefore not relevant to us for sales purposes.

In direct comparison, the overall data quality of the detections with Leadfeeder is not as good as with SalesViewer. In our sample, for example, Leadfeeder identified companies that no longer exist in three cases. SalesViewer, on the other hand, identified current companies during these visits.

In addition, for 71% of the companies found by Leadfeeder, the actual company name (as stated in the company's legal notice) did not match the given company name. It is true that the visiting companies can be identified despite a certain vagueness: For a sales or marketing professional who knows his target market and evaluates the visits, it makes no significant difference whether employees from “Clever Reach” (recognition of lead feeder) or “CleverReach GmbH & Co. KG” (recognition from SalesViewer) have visited the website. But for the correct matching of leads with the data from your own CRM system, a correct company name is essential.

Functionality and sales integration

Leadfeeder offers extensive, flexible segmentation functions to create individual list views. For example, the pages visited, sources of origin, company master data or a CRM connection can be used as filter criteria. Based on these views, various automations can be set up or notifications about visits can be set up. The automations range from automatic tagging of companies to identifying companies based on an imported Excel list.

Leadfeeder comes with numerous integration wizards, e.g. for Google Analytics to enrich leads with analytics data or with various CRM systems. As an example, we looked at CRM integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud. The Leadfeeder-Salesforce Sales Cloud integration has a self-explanatory configuration assistant, a good presentation of the data in Leadfeeder and options for further processing the data within the CRM system. Nevertheless, we noticed some limitations during integration, for example in terms of the consistency and duration of synchronizing both systems.

Leadfeeder offers another integration with the Google Analytics Connector, but at an additional cost. This can be used to compensate for missing statistical options within the tool. The connector offers the option to access leadfeeder data in Analytics and thus view statistics on visits from a specific target group, for example. According to Leadfeeder Help, you can also use the connector to optimize your own Google Ad campaigns by defining re-targeting campaigns for recognized companies by industry or company size. As part of our test, we were unable to take a closer look at the connector and therefore not evaluate the cost-benefit ratio, as it can only be purchased after activating a paid license.

The option to restrict tracking to company visits from specific countries or for specific website URLs is a positive feature. For example, your own career website could be excluded from tracking. In this way, it is possible to “save” recognitions so that the acquired recognition volume is used specifically for visitors to sales-relevant landing pages. We miss such a function in SalesViewer, for example.

With both SalesViewer and Leadfeeder, we like the event tracking, i.e. the recognition of downloaded content and website interactions such as filling out or submitting a form or watching a video. With Leadfeeder, however, the presentation of events in a company's meetings is somewhat hidden. They are only highlighted by an icon and are therefore unfortunately lost due to the confusing session presentation. However, the type of form tracking is much more important to us. While SalesViewer anonymizes the entered form content with “xxx” characters, Leadfeeder records them completely in plain text by default — regardless of whether the form was sent! It is true that you can completely deactivate form tracking in the settings and are therefore legally on the safe side. However, the fact that Leadfeeder's default settings are also not covered by the GDPR requirements (the storage of personal session data — that is form content — must be approved in advance) is a poor solution.

How much does Leadfeeder cost?

The fee structure of Leadfeeder is quite confusing compared to other providers on the market. Pricing is based on a basic price for the purchased monthly recognition volume, which can be supplemented with paid add-ons. For example, the “Google Analytics Connector” add-on requires an additional 25% of the basic price. Similar additional contributions are required for premium support or for a dedicated customer success manager. For example, the actual monthly price of Leadfeeder can quickly increase as a result of add-ons, up to doubling the basic price.

For the direct comparison with SalesViewer, we use the lead feeder fees with Premium Support and Customer Success Manager, as these are included with SalesViewer starting with the premium license. An annual license with up to 1,000 detections per month causes Leadfeeder fees of 4,680€. With SalesViewer, the comparable license costs 5,389€ per year, which means a price difference of 13%. In June 2022, Leadfeeder merged with the B2B prospecting solution from Germany Echobot — It remains to be seen whether and how this merger backed by venture capital will have a long-term effect on license fees.

LeadRebel in practice

LeadRebel is part of Pulserio AG based in Switzerland. The solution appeals with a tidy and user-friendly design that is intuitive to use. It also offers a comprehensive dashboard with information about company sizes, companies' industries, locations, sources and the most visited pages by visitors. In addition, the dashboard can be flexibly adapted, for example by means of an adjustable time period or the selective selection of specific company websites. A reduced dashboard with the most important KPIs is always displayed in the sidebar, filtered to the selected list view.

As with Leadfeeder, the list view of discovered companies aggregates all sessions of a company, so that the last active session is always decisive for the order of the companies listed. If you want to see which pages have been visited for how long, you have to open the visit history separately. Unfortunately, the detailed view there appears to be very confusing due to data redundancy: At every session, cross-session company data such as industry or location is displayed repeatedly.

Detection quality and quantity

During our test period, LeadRebel only recognized 41 companies, SalesViewer recognized 97 companies in the same period. The quantity of identified companies therefore leaves much to be desired. Only 31% of the companies identified by LeadRebel were also recognized by SalesViewer. 20% of the companies recognized by LeadRebel are Internet service providers or bots. SalesViewer also occasionally sees “false positives” in the visitor list, but this rate was only 2.5% during the test period.

The companies correctly identified by LeadRebel have a good quality of the company information displayed. In the end, however, this only appears to be of limited use to us if so many relevant visits from interested parties are not even recognized.

Functionality and sales integration

LeadRebel allows companies to be categorized by marking companies as favorites or assigning them to specific categories using tags (e.g. interested party, existing customer, competitor, etc.). Interesting companies that have already been identified can be marked so that they can be prioritized during their next visits. The views can be filtered based on the tags.

In addition, LeadRebel (like SalesViewer) records sessions as a video so that the actual visitor interaction with the website can be viewed in detail if required. The filter function with LeadRebel is not as extensive as with SalesViewer and Leadfeeder. In our test, we were only able to set up simple filters based on company size, pages visited, number of pages visited and length of visit. The filters in our tests were only session-based and not saved long-term. (Update: See manufacturer's note below) LeadRebel offers the option to email visitors from the previous day — but not based on selected filters. The only option for individualization is to specify postal code areas in accordance with an Excel sheet provided as the basis for daily reports.

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Update August 18, 2023: LeadRebel points out that filters consist of 12 fields + two additional fields and can be saved long-term depending on the user/browser. This allows every employee to create filters for their own area of responsibility.
However, this does not allow you to rely on the filters/preparatory work of colleagues, which would be beneficial for our handling of visitor recognition in the sales and marketing team.

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As mentioned above, LeadRebel shows employees from the recognized companies. The contact persons can be tagged with keywords such as “Purchasing” or “Sales” and exported in a list.

LeadRebel also offers integrations with CRM systems such as Salesforce Sales Cloud and Hubspot as well as with Google Ads. Although we were able to easily connect our Salesforce Sales Cloud instance to LeadRebel, we had no success in synchronizing the data afterwards — despite an indication that the synchronization was successful. LeadRebel Support confirmed to us upon request that the integration was not functional during the test phase, so unfortunately we are unable to further evaluate its functionality. Unfortunately, during the test phase, we were unable to successfully test the Google Ads integration, which should have been possible, with our GoogleAds account. It should make it possible to assign the Google Ads campaigns that bring visitors to the website. Unfortunately, LeadRebel does not offer event tracking.

An interesting feature of LeadRebel is the limitation of tracking to visits from specific countries or to specific website URLs. In addition, certain companies and sources or, for example, visits with a very short length of stay can be completely excluded.

What does LeadRebel cost?

LeadRebel offers various fee models based on a maximum recognition number per day and not per month. For example, up to 5 different companies per day can be identified in the cheapest licenses at a monthly price of 29€ per month, and with 299€ per month, up to 90 companies per day. For a direct comparison with Leadfeeder and SalesViewer, we calculate the daily recognition quota to the month, because LeadRebel would count leads several times a month if recognized multiple times. This means that competitors would pay around ten times as much for 150 detections per month.

Although LeadRebel also allows companies with smaller budgets to recognize visitors with this very low fee model, we are critical of the maximum limit of leads per day. B2B companies usually have very little traffic on their website over the weekend — meaning that two days of recognition is wasted every week, which customers would be entitled to with a maximum monthly number. If a company carries out marketing activities that temporarily generate significantly more traffic on the website, this traffic could exceed the maximum limit due to the daily limit and cause detection gaps.

Conclusion:

LeadRebel wants to score points with a low price and good data quality. However, the range of functions is noticeably lagging behind Leadfeeder and Salesviewer in some respects and the recognition rate also did not convince us in a direct comparison. The maximum limit of recognized leads per day is also a shortcoming for us. Therefore, from our point of view, LeadRebel cannot keep up with Leadfeeder or SalesViewer.

Leadfeeder offers individual application options with comprehensive functions, automations and integrations that we really like. In terms of price, Leadfeeder and SalesViewer play in the same league. And even though Leadfeeder was able to nominally identify more companies in our test than SalesViewer, we were at SalesViewer happier. Leadfeeder's non-GDPR-compliant standard setup and the problematic storage of unsubmitted form content must also be considered when deciding to use it in Germany.