People visit your website, but you don’t know who they are. Analytics shows you sessions, sources and page views, not a single organisation. And 98% of website visitors leave without converting. No form, no phone call, no trace.
Anyone looking into how to identify website visitors soon ends up at the IP address. Rightly so, because that is where it starts. For the wider picture, our guide explains how to see who is visiting your website. The route from IP address to usable lead is longer than most explanations suggest, though, and it has limits you want to know before you rely on it.
This article explains how an IP address becomes a company name, where that match stops, and why a company name is not yet a lead. Leadinfo shows you which companies visit your site. What you do with those names afterwards decides what they are worth.
Why you see traffic, but no companies
Web analytics is built to measure behaviour, not to recognise organisations. You can see that someone arrived through Google, viewed three pages and left after two minutes. You can’t see that it was a buyer at a company that fits your target audience perfectly.
For marketing, that is frustrating. You invest in campaigns, content and ads to bring the right audience to your site, and the result is a graph. The only visitors you actually know are the handful who fill in a form. Everyone else remains traffic you can’t place.
For sales, it is even harder. A sales rep calling a prospect has no idea that the same company looked at your pricing page three times last week. The call goes out cold, when it could have been a warm conversation.
Company identification fills exactly that gap. Not by guessing who was there, but by tracing the network the visit came from.
From IP address to company name in four steps
Every visit to your website arrives through an IP address. What happens next follows four steps. If you want to understand the underlying mechanism first, read what IP tracking is and how it identifies website visitors.
- The visit. If the visitor works from the office or through their employer’s VPN, the IP address belongs to the company network.
- The network owner. IP addresses are issued and registered in blocks. That registration, together with the network number (ASN), shows which organisation a block belongs to: a company, or an internet provider.
- The company profile. The network owner is matched against a company database. This adds a company name, industry, size and location.
- The filter. If an internet provider or data centre sits behind the address, the visit is dropped. There is no identifiable company behind it.
Because all of this happens at network level, no cookie is needed. Leadinfo delivers 100% company identification without cookies. Whether a company is identified does not depend on the choice a visitor makes in your cookie banner.
The result, per visit, is a company, together with the pages it viewed, how long it stayed and how often it came back. You can see what that looks like in practice on our page about IP tracking.
Where the match stops
This is the part most explanations skip. Company identification has three limits, and you need to know them before drawing conclusions.
You don’t identify people. An IP address from a company network tells you which company came in, not who. Leadinfo identifies companies, never individuals. If you read somewhere that IP addresses let you point to individual visitors, be sceptical.
Remote workers without a VPN usually stay out of view. Someone working from home on their own connection uses an IP address from a consumer provider. That address leads to the provider, not to the employer.
Mobile traffic usually stays out of view. A phone on a mobile network browses through the carrier. There is no company to derive from that either.
Being upfront about these limits matters, because they shape how you read the data. A company missing from your list may still have visited your site. For a closer look at accuracy, read how reliable IP tracking is for identifying website visitors.
It also helps to know the alternatives. Tools that rely on cookies miss every visitor who declines them. With most tools, 40-60% of visibility is lost to consent banners. Identification at network level avoids that loss, but gives you less detail per session.
The limit around people, by the way, is not a shortcoming to engineer away. It is also the limit of what you are entitled to know.
A company name is not yet a lead
As soon as you can see companies, a new problem appears: plenty of traffic, but no conversations coming out of it. A list of a hundred company names is not a pipeline. What you want is not a click report but a short list of companies showing real interest right now.
You build that list with three filters.
- Does the company fit your target audience? Industry, size and region decide whether a visit matters commercially. Leadinfo shows for each company whether it falls within your ideal customer profile, so you don’t have to check every name by hand.
- Which pages did it view? A visit to your pricing page, a demo page or a specific product page says more than a visit to your careers page or knowledge base. Those tend to attract employees or job seekers, not decision makers.
- How intensive was the visit? Weigh duration and depth, not just frequency. A single long visit to one product page usually tells you more than a string of visits that bounce within seconds.
Which combinations point to buying intent? Our article on the top 5 signals that a website visitor is ready to buy lists the strongest ones.
Once a company passes all three filters, you want to know who to approach. Leadinfo links business contacts to the identified company, with a 93% contact match. These are decision makers from the company database, not the person who happened to be on your site.
Identifying companies and the GDPR
Is this actually allowed? The question comes up in almost every conversation about company identification. The short answer depends on what you identify and what you store. These are the facts on how Leadinfo handles it:
- Companies, not people. Leadinfo processes business data only and stores no personal data about who visits your site.
- Legal basis. Processing rests on Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest, not on consent.
- Hosting. All data is EU-hosted, in Ireland and Frankfurt. There are no US data transfers.
- Security. Leadinfo is ISO 27001 certified and independently audited every year.
- Opt-out. Any company can opt out via the opt-out page. Requests are applied within 48 hours.
For your own organisation, it is still sensible to discuss company identification with whoever handles data protection, and to check your privacy notice against it. For a fuller explanation, see website visitor identification and GDPR: what’s allowed and what’s not.
Getting started
You don’t need to know who was on your site. You want to know which company it was, and whether that visit counts. Start tomorrow, before any tool is involved. Open your web analytics and list the three or four pages that signal buying intent, such as your pricing page, your demo page and your most important product page. Agree with sales that a visit to those pages deserves a heads-up. Leadinfo then shows you which companies are viewing exactly those pages, filtered on your target audience. After that, read how to convert identified website visitors into leads.
Frequently asked questions
Can you see who visits your website?
You can see which company visited, not which person. If a visitor comes in through a company network, that network can be traced back to an organisation. You see which company visited your site and which pages it viewed, but not which employee was behind the screen. Leadinfo identifies companies only and stores no personal data.
Does company identification work when visitors decline cookies?
Yes. Identification through the IP address happens at network level and does not need a cookie. Leadinfo delivers 100% company identification without cookies, so the choice in your cookie banner does not decide whether a company becomes visible. The legal basis is legitimate interest under the GDPR, and the data stays on EU servers in Ireland and Frankfurt.
Which visitors can’t be traced back to a company?
Mainly remote workers without a VPN and visitors on a mobile network. They browse through an internet provider’s IP address, which leads to the provider rather than the employer. Visits through data centres are dropped as well. A company missing from your overview may still have visited your site.
