B2B website visitor tracking: What can Leadinfo and Albacross do?

Setup and ease of use

The initial setup is both for Leadinfo as well as with Albacross extremely simple. As with comparable solutions, the tracking code is simply copied and integrated into your own website. For WordPress-based websites, Leadinfo also offers a plugin.

However, the browser-based user interface of both tools could be improved. Albacross in particular is very confusing because it only allows you to display a list of recognized companies, but not one of the sessions. The companies are listed chronologically after their last visit, but only aggregated information is listed. If you want more detailed information about individual sessions, you first have to cumbersome access the full profile of the company and click and scroll to a very confusing list of the pages visited. This makes it much more difficult to determine the actual interest of a recent website visit.

Functionality and sales integration

Leadinfo offers the option of defining so-called triggers. A wide variety of criteria relating to the recognized company and metadata or even session-related information can be used to trigger specific actions. This can be either adding a keyword (tag) to structure leads and sort them by sales topics, or sending an email notification. It is also possible to have daily, weekly or monthly reports sent to you with all companies identified in the reporting period through settings in the user profile.

One feature that Leadinfo does not offer and that we sorely miss is sending automated visitor reports based on certain filter criteria. For example, depending on the zip code of the identified lead, it would be desirable to send an email to the sales representative responsible for the region. The fact that this is not possible can be a serious disadvantage, because if a visitor recognition tool cannot be seamlessly integrated into sales processes, this makes work significantly more difficult and worsens the cost-benefit ratio in the central area of lead generation.

Manual exports are also difficult with Leadinfo: Although the identified companies can be filtered and downloaded as an Excel list, the resulting lists only provide aggregated information about when the first and last website visit took place, and not what activities took place in the last sessions.

Leadinfo, on the other hand, relies heavily on a special feature: integrations with more than a dozen CRM and pipeline management solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, HubSpot, SugarCRM and Pipedrive. The integration with HubSpot and Salesforce Sales Cloud, which we tested, was quick and easy. Each recognized company can then be manually synchronized into the CRM system at the push of a button; this makes it possible to decide whether to create a new data set or link the company information to an existing account. With Hubspot, we were also able to export the individual website sessions that took place as an activity; Salesforce did not transfer this information. Anyone using one of the supported systems can probably compensate for the lack of email-based functions at Leadinfo, at least in part, via CRM integration.

Leadinfo also offers an integrated chat-style feedback function for integration on the website at no additional charge. Anyone who finds installing such a function interesting can save themselves the purchase of a separate tool. Chats can be played out and personalized for recognized and unrecognized visitors. However, we would advise against personalizing the chat window with the recognized company name or location, as Leadinfo does on its own website (see screenshot): It seems too great to us that a visitor will feel monitored and react negatively.

Albacross also provides CRM connectors to HubSpot and Salesforce Sales Cloud. These come with a much more granular set of configuration options than Leadinfo. For example, it is possible to determine whether a company data set is transferred together with tags and keywords. Field mapping is just as possible as working with personalized fields and inserting specific values into any field in CRM via “picklists.”

For sales integration, Albacross works with so-called workflows, which in turn access configurable visitor segments and trigger automated email notifications or CRM synchronization processes for them. In this way, differentiated CRM follow-up actions can be initiated for website visitors with different interests or locations, for example.

In addition, Albacross is the only provider known to us in the field of “visitor recognition” with an advertising module to display ads to specific companies. Target groups can be selected from a database of companies using filters based on size, location, industry, etc. The advertising campaign is created directly within Albacross and played out through cooperation with various media that act as an advertising network. Since this module is generally chargeable, we have not tested it and do not take it into account in our overall rating.

Data quality and privacy

The data quality — the be-all and end-all of a website visitor recognition tool — is unfortunately anything but optimal with Leadinfo and Albacross. In our test, we tested both candidates for two weeks against the reference from our comparison last year: SalesViewer.

Leadinfo and SalesViewer issued almost the same number of detections in the same period (SalesViewer: 124, Leadinfo: 128). However, we found 20 false detections (15.6%) with Leadinfo during this period, and only one (0.8%) with SalesViewer.

Albacross showed a total of 31 false detections (27%) for 115 identified companies — SalesViewer, which we let run in parallel, only recognized 103 companies in the same period of time, but only one of them was incorrect.

We regard displayed visitors as false recognition, who are in fact only Internet access service providers or website crawlers, or who have demonstrably provided the wrong company. One of our employees, who used dynamic IPs from her Internet provider to visit hidden sub-pages of our website while working from home, was “recognized” by Albacross as an employee of two completely different companies, for example.

In order to compare the results, we played out the Leadinfo and Albacross tracking script for all visitors during the test period, although this is legally problematic — more about this below.

Leadinfo generally displays a comprehensive set of metadata (legal form, sales tax ID, age of managing directors, sales and profit information) for each identified company. This looks impressive at first glance, but is significantly reduced by two factors: On the one hand, the database is incomplete — around a quarter of the companies did not provide any metadata at all, i.e. not even address information. On the other hand, some of the information is misleading, as it is often outdated or not meaningful due to the limited disclosure requirements of the recognized companies. For Publicare, for example, a size of 3 employees was shown — 30 would have been more correct. If you want to work with lead selections that rely on this information, this quickly leads to irregular results. A reduction in metadata, but in return greater accuracy and completeness, would be desirable here.

The same applies to Albacross, where company names are usually not displayed correctly or not completely. In addition, many locations are identified incorrectly and a not inconsiderable number of companies are displayed completely without the required additional information.

When the corresponding function is activated, Leadinfo also displays individual email addresses for contacts within a company obtained from Hunter.io. This can be questionable under data protection law, because as soon as personal data is involved, the GDPR applies. Although Leadinfo only shows a central, not personal email address for many companies, this in turn significantly reduces the benefit. Thorough manual contact research remains essential in any case, as Leadinfo does not display the job titles or departments of the people listed. On the other hand, we found it useful to display a sample email address, which — if you know the name of the relevant contact person — can be used to reconstruct the email address. Keep in mind that, however, even in this case, consent is required for advertising by e-mail.

Unlike competitors such as SalesViewer, which work without cookies, both Leadinfo and Albacross place first-party cookies on the website visitor's computer for their analyses. They are therefore bound to additional legal requirements, as the active consent of website visitors is absolutely necessary for the use of marketing cookies. Leadinfo informs its users in the online help that the Leadinfo cookie can be played without consent on the basis of “legitimate economic interest.” We think this statement is grossly erroneous. Leadinfo customers who follow her expose themselves to a not insignificant legal risk.

If you correctly represent the legal requirements and only play Leadinfo or Albacross behind the “cookie wall” after active consent, this has serious consequences for the recognition rate — because 30 to 70 percent of visitors to B2B websites typically reject marketing cookies. This means that Leadinfo and Albacross, when used in accordance with the law, on average, only around half of visitors are available as potential for recognition! This puts both solutions even more significantly behind in terms of effective detection rate.

Fees

In terms of pricing, Leadinfo and Albacross are currently taking an offensive approach. When billed annually, up to 500 recognized companies with Leadinfo cost just €109 per month. With the help of a slider, the fees can be adjusted well in 50 recognition steps to the actual quota required due to website traffic and the recognition rate. By way of comparison, SalesViewer charges around 270 euros per month (with an annual payment method) for the same conditions.

June 2021 update: New prices at Leadinfo. The “Scale” package for 500 detections now costs 129 euros/month when billed annually, and fees are now also charged for additional users (19 euros per user) and for video recording of sessions (99 euros). The current rates can be found here.

Albacross is dividing its offer into three packages. Between the small and medium-sized package, there is a big jump from 100 included company IDs per month (“Starter”, 40 euros — around 90 euros with SalesViewer) to 2,500 included identifications per month (“Pro”, 400 euros). It is important to remember that HubSpot integration is only possible from the middle package (Pro), and Salesforce integration even from the “Enterprise” package for 1,000 euros a month. In addition, the displayable history for all packages is limited to 90 days, which can be extremely tight during longer sales cycles. Only aggregated data is available for export.

Conclusion

Both Leadinfo and Albacross stand out with the option to integrate CRM systems via “plug and play.” In this regard, Albacross is superior to Leadinfo due to comprehensive configurability, but creates a significant financial hurdle for this use of CRM integrations. In terms of current fees, both solutions are in some cases significantly below the competition from our test last year and therefore appear attractive for smaller budgets at first glance. As in many other areas of business life, however, the same applies here: You get what you pay for. The data quality currently leaves a lot to be desired — Albacross in particular still needs to do a lot here to really keep up. Leadinfo scores better than Albacross in terms of usability, but it certainly has room for improvement for both solutions. Seemingly small gaps in functionality that we've discovered can become a major shortcoming in terms of lead routing efficiency. We therefore continue to recommend the higher-priced but definitely more reliable and useful reference platform SalesViewer.