Maximize Your Reach by Tracking and Identifying Anonymous Website Visitors

Studies report that 98% of all website traffic comes from anonymous visitors. Sure, you can use tools like cookies, but their usefulness is limited and on borrowed time.

Thanks to remote work and smart devices, identifying who is visiting your company website is only becoming more confusing. The same user visits your site from different devices, locations, and web browsers.

Every anonymous visitor represents a lost opportunity. Read this article to learn how to track and identify anonymous website visitors.

Who Are Anonymous Website Visitors?

Anonymous website visitors are the unidentified users of your site. They arrive from various marketing channels, including organic search and social media campaigns. Visitors then exit your site without providing any identifying information.

Typically, all website visitors are anonymous, except those who log into or sign up for a user account. In most cases, these will be the only unique visitors that you can easily track. However, there are other ways to track unique visitors, such as browser cookies and tracking pixels.

Why Are Anonymous Visitors Significant?

Internet users are on the rise, having reached 5.4 billion users in 2023. Every anonymous visitor is a lost opportunity. Hundreds or thousands of anonymous visitors interact with your website daily. 

Image sourced from statista.com

Can you afford to miss out on hundreds or thousands of potential customers? Even at conversion rates of 1-3%, that still represents significant revenue. 

Anonymous visitor tracking helps you better understand and meet visitor expectations. 

What Are the Benefits of Tracking Anonymous Visitors?

Website visitor identification is rewarding for those who put in the time and effort. We list some of its benefits below.

Better Audience Segmentation

Odds are that nearly all of your current website traffic is anonymous. Tracking anonymous user data helps paint a more vivid picture of your audience. The more information you collect, the better you can segment marketing.

Identify High-Value Prospects

Some users visit your home page, scroll down, and exit your site. Others may add a product to their shopping cart and abandon the purchase at the last second. Prospects who are ready to buy are more valuable than those who are only browsing.

You can send high-value prospects straight to the bottom of the funnel. For example, you can reach out with closing offers and marketing content that addresses the most common objections.

Personalize the User Experience

Customers don’t just want personalized experiences, they expect them. A McKinsey report found that 76% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t find personalization. Two-thirds of respondents want relevant product recommendations and tailored messaging.

Image sourced from mckinsey.com

Create Relevant Content

Identifying who visits your website lets you focus on your marketing strategy. For instance, let’s say you discover much more healthcare than financial organizations are visiting your website. You then feature more case studies and white papers that cater to a healthcare audience.

What Are Challenges to Website User Tracking?

Tracking anonymous users has its benefits. However, there are plenty of obstacles you must overcome to implement anonymous visitor tracking

Inaccurate or Low-Quality Data

A study from Segment found that 43% of businesses found getting accurate, real-time customer data to be the biggest challenge to personalization. Not all data is created equal. 

Tracking cookies may not be able to store data long enough for slower sales cycles. 

Image sourced from gopages.segment.com

Third-party enrichment data may not be up to date. With some services for B2B, you may get the company name but not any other information such as contact emails for decision-makers at the company. 

You want the most accurate data for tailored experiences with higher conversion rates.

Selecting the Right Tools and Techniques

There isn’t one way to monitor and identify anonymous users. You have a range of methods and solutions to choose from when deciding how best to track website visitors. Swimming in a sea of options leads you to drown from information overload and indecision.

Start by creating a plan and defining the objectives of your website visitor tracking strategy. Then, research and prioritize what capabilities and user information are vital for your business.

Data Protection and Privacy

When tracking user data, you must stay compliant with legal requirements. Laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) stipulate how data can be collected, stored, and used. 

Under regulations like the EU’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you need user consent to use basic tracking tools like browser cookies.

How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors?

Alright, so now you’re convinced that tracking unique visitors is worth the payoff. How do you identify anonymous users?

Customer Accounts and Form Fills

We’ll start with the obvious, customer account creation. Use landing pages and banners to entice users to sign up. Make sure you sell the benefits, such as a one-time discount code or customer loyalty program.

You can track website activity as long as visitors are logged into their accounts. Use that information to personalize their experience. Integrate with your CRM or website personalization platforms to curate the user experience.

You can even cut right to the chase and ask anonymous users questions with website form builders such as Jotform. Offer value to users with promo codes, whitepapers, or ebooks in exchange for filling out a form. 

Use CTA buttons, sidebars, and popup ads to engage visitors with forms. Form fills streamline the process of identifying visitors and give your team some data about who they are or what company they represent. 

Image sourced from ruleranalytics.com

Unfortunately, the average form fill rate across all industries is only 1.7% (meaning you’d miss out on more than 98% of anonymous website visitors). Online form conversion rates vary from 0.6% to 2.8% across 14 industries. 

Cookies

Tracking cookies is a proven method for user tracking. Visitors arrive at your site, and their browser downloads a simple file. Your web servers recognize the cookie file and use it to identify and monitor the visitor each time they come to your site.

There are two main types of cookies:

Session cookies: they track a single session and remember anonymous visitors when they return.

Persistent cookies: these stay in the browser cache and remember preferences and user behavior.

Cookies add a layer of personalization and prevent and enable you to identify return visitors. However, cookies are vulnerable to cyberattacks, leaking user information. Also, many regulations require user consent to download and install browser cookies. 

There is also the issue of cookie deprecation. Many platforms such as Google Chrome are phasing out third-party cookies soon.

Tracking Pixel

Tracking pixels is an alternative to the browser cookie. The most well-known is the Facebook Pixel. How it works is that the pixel contains a small code. You can place this pixel on your website, ads, and emails. They are commonly used in B2B display advertising software for marketing attribution. 

The tracking pixel identifies information and tracks user behavior such as page views and clicks. It's a simple but effective way to monitor users and speed up your pipeline velocity. 

For example, a user clicks on a demo but leaves the landing page. Your sales team is notified of this prospect's interest. They can now either reach out to the potential customer or tailor a demo CTA specifically for the user when they return.

IP Address

Every device connected to the internet has a unique IP address. So why not use this information to catalog and identify every unique visitor? 

An IP address alone will not tell you much about the person or company visiting your website. Tracking tools can identify other user characteristics, such as geographical location.

Some IP lookup solutions cater to B2B, cross-referencing data against an IP address database. They tell you what company is visiting your site. You can then look them up to learn more about their needs and challenges. 

Browser Fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting provides a cookieless method to identify and track anonymous users. A fingerprinting tool gathers information and signals from a website visitor. Browser fingerprinting pieces unique information together to identify anonymous website visitors.

User data collected may include:

• Operating system
• Browser type and version
• Screen resolution and aspect ratio 
• User-agent string
• Timezone
• Installed plugins
• CPU 
• GPU
• IP address and network type

Since digital fingerprinting doesn’t require cookies, it doesn’t necessarily need user consent. However, for ethical reasons, it’s best to let every website user know what data is being recorded and how it’s used. 

Third-party enrichment

Third-party enrichment tools further identify anonymous users and provide more detailed information. Some services append tracking solutions like cookies and IP trackers by recording user behavioral and technical data. These services can be integrated with other marketing and website tools.

Others come as visitor identification platforms that gather unique visitor information and cross-reference connected databases.

Third-party enrichment is especially useful in B2B. Besides identifying the company, you also get relevant information such as budget, market position, infrastructure, and what individuals to contact. Third-party enrichment solutions empower your team to tailor marketing campaigns and better nurture interested buyers.

Website Analytics Tools

You’re probably already using website analytics tools to monitor website performance. Services such as Google Analytics use tracking pixels to record user behavior. You can monitor traffic sources and metrics such as dwell time, bounce rate, and conversions.

Tools like Hotjar let you record user actions during a session and create activity heat maps.

On their own, website analytics can provide data such as location or operation systems. 

However, you can integrate data to enrich website visitor identification tools.

Identify Anonymous Website Users and Grow Your Business

Anonymous web browsers aren’t going anywhere. More users work remotely and from multiple devices, making traditional tracking methods less fruitful. 

It takes more than having faith for your website visitors to convert to user accounts. The vast majority of anonymous visitors won’t create an account or fill out forms before exiting your ecommerce store. 

Start identifying anonymous visitors today. You’ll learn more about your prospects and be able to give them the content and experiences they desire.

Featured Image by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash