Website analysis tools for B2B companies: Who tracks better?
When identifying B2B website visitors, the IP dial-in address of the visiting organization is tracked via a script and broken down to the specific organization via reverse DNS lookup and matching with a company database. This gives marketing and sales a precise overview of which company individual contacts visited their own website. Younger providers for company identification obtain their tracking data via the Google Analytics API and automatically compare it with freely available data sources such as LinkedIn. Although this is inexpensive, it is also prone to errors. In our comparative tests of various solutions, we are therefore particularly interested in tools that rely on their own tracking snippet to provide their customers with the best possible results (read more in our article “From anonymous tracking to real leads”). The three providers LeadForensics, SalesViewer and Wiredminds, which we take a closer look at in this test, rely on large teams in addition to our own tracking to ensure that the technical visitor domain is correctly matched with the metadata of professional company databases.
LeadForensics
With LeadForensics We tested the solution from a software company from Great Britain, which is active worldwide in sales and is also one of the most common providers in Germany. In a direct one-week comparison with SalesViewer in April 2019, LeadForensics identified significantly fewer companies, particularly from Germany. Even when it came to the rate of recognized companies in the UK and outside Europe, LeadForensics was unable to make up for this backlog. We missed the clear interface for both SalesViewer and LeadLab at LeadForensics. For example, on the lead overview page, it is not intuitive to see which pages the employees of individual companies have been on. This complicates the sales review of company visits. LeadForensics has a stronger focus than LeadLab and SalesViewer on providing CRM-like functions. With granular lead routing and assignment options, this should ensure a smooth workflow when processing leads. If companies continue to process the relevant leads in their traditional CRM system anyway, we find this functionality superfluous, at least in parts. LeadForensics calculates the monthly costs based on the total number of daily website visits — regardless of how many of the visitors are recognized and displayed as companies. For example, the monthly list price at the lowest level, 25 visits per day, is around 500 euros (if the contract is fixed for one year). Assuming a recognition ratio of 5:1, this only covers around 5 leads per day or around 100 leads per month. This makes LeadForensics significantly more expensive than SalesViewer and is likely to be above Wiredminds' price point.
SalesViewer
The provider from Bochum SalesViewer GmbH The platform's user interface, which is functionally very tidy but not completely fresh in appearance, has recently undergone a fundamental facelift — since then, it has also been visually “state-of-the-art” while maintaining excellent ergonomics. On the performance level, SalesViewer identified significantly more sales-relevant companies than wiredminds in a two-week direct comparison in August 2018 — and sometimes proved to be more selective when assigning the “right” legal entity. The web platform has a streamlined design and is already informatively structured in the main overview. Marketers get a quick overview of new website visitors and can switch to a series of informative list displays with a mouse click, which allows a quick view of the pages visited via mouse over. Automated employee assignment proved to be particularly practical: Once defined, “interest” tags, which bundle specific website areas and pages, for example in a product or language specific way, can be assigned to employees or teams. They are then notified by the system about new leads. In addition to a detailed visit history for companies, SalesViewer also offers video analysis, which enables a vivid view of visitor engagement. The solution can be booked as a monthly and annual subscription. In the smallest package, up to 100 leads are recognized for 99 euros per month. With this low-threshold offer, SalesViewer also seems interesting for smaller companies and self-employed people. During our test, we missed documentation or help areas that would have supplemented the existing mouse-over explanatory texts with more detailed explanations or FAQs.
Wiredminds LeadLab
LeadLab is the name of the Stuttgart-based service Wiredminds GmbH, which offers a modern user interface and good usability. The solution is also sold by Leadlogic in a functionally identical way. Leadlab's appealing look conceals a wide range of functions and information for marketers. For example, each individual web page can be given a positive or negative score in accordance with its sales relevance. Pages without significance for sales potential, such as the homepage or job offers, receive a neutral or negative score, and service pages and special offer landing pages receive positive scores. LeadLab sums up the scores of all pages visited to a lead score and thus makes it possible to recognize visitors with lead potential more quickly. In addition, LeadLab offers a flexible filter system to group recognized companies according to all available address, industry, size and engagement criteria. In our test, LeadLab showed good recognition quality regardless of the visitor country, which clearly stood out from the accuracy of Google API-based providers. LeadLab's pricing model starts at 400 to 500 euros per month. This seems rather unfavorable to us, especially for smaller companies that only have a few hundred recognized leads per month. In addition, Wiredminds provides setup, training and consulting services of approximately two consulting days at the start, which should be included in the calculation.
Development with potential
The provider comparison shows us in particular that the most locally rooted providers, SalesViewer and Wiredminds, deliver the best recognition results — at least for B2B companies for which the German-speaking region is the most important sales market. Among these two providers, SalesViewer came out on top in our test in terms of the number and accuracy of identified companies. The lively competition in this market segment and the easy ability to switch between tracking tools are forcing providers to continuously improve the recognition quality and ease of use of their solutions. Google Analytics-based tools, on the other hand, are unable to match the established top dogs in the decisive criterion, the completeness and accuracy of visitor identification, primarily due to the IP address quality provided by Google.
