Your website gets visitors. You can see that in your stats: sessions, page views, channels. What you cannot see there is which company was behind the visit. And that is exactly what you want to know, because 98% of your website visitors leave without converting. They read your product page, check your pricing, and go. No name attached.
This page explains how to find that out. What sits underneath it technically, what is and is not possible, what GDPR says about it, and what you do with the information once you have it. No theory: every step below is something you can set up this week.
What your analytics does and does not show
Ask a marketer how their website is performing and you get a tidy answer: visitor numbers, traffic sources, bounce rate, maybe a conversion rate. Ask which companies were on the pricing page yesterday, and the room goes quiet.
That is not a flaw in your measurement setup. It is the design of it. Web analytics was built to measure behaviour in aggregate, not to trace a visit back to an organisation. You can see that fifteen people looked at your pricing. You cannot see that twelve of them work at three companies where your quote has been sitting for months.
There are ways to squeeze a bit more out of it, for instance by combining network and location data in your reporting. If you want to know how far that gets you, work through the how-to guide: see who visits your website in Google Analytics. Short answer: it gives you direction, not a list of names your sales team can call.
For marketing, the consequence is mostly frustrating. You know the campaign drives traffic, but you cannot show which companies came in through it. Marketers describe it as flying blindfolded: you can feel something is happening, you just cannot point at it. For sales, the consequence is expensive. A company that comes back to your product page three times is warm. If you do not call them, somebody else will.
Three ways to see which companies visit your website
There are roughly three routes from website traffic to a company name. They are not mutually exclusive, and most teams end up running them side by side.
1. Forms, downloads and sign-ups
The classic route. Someone fills in a form, leaves a work email address, and that tells you which company they are from. This is the most reliable route there is, because the visitor tells you themselves.
The problem is reach. It only works for the small group that actually converts. The rest of your traffic stays out of view, and that is by far the larger part. UK sales teams have a name for that group: window shoppers. They look around, they never fill anything in.
2. Company identification from network data
The route that closes the gap. The moment a visitor opens your site, network information comes with it, including the IP address of the network they are on. In many cases that address can be matched to an organisation, because companies hold their internet connection in their own name. A company database then turns that into a company name, sector, size and location. How that works technically is set out step by step in what is IP tracking and how you can identify website visitors with it.
What you get is a list of companies that visited your site, which pages they looked at, how long they stayed and whether they had been there before. What you do not get is a person. That is not a limitation you work around, it is the core of how it works, and the reason it can stay compliant.
One important distinction inside this route is whether cookies are involved. If identification runs cookieless, your measurement does not disappear the moment someone dismisses the consent banner. With most tools, 40 to 60% of visibility is lost exactly there. Cookieless gives you full company coverage, but you get less granular session data in return. That trade-off is laid out in identifying website visitors without cookies, here is how it works.
3. Feeding campaign data back
The third route works the other way round. You already know who you targeted or contacted, and you measure which of them land on your website. An email campaign with tagged links, an ad set with its own UTMs, a QR code on trade show material: all of them give you a group you knew in advance.
This route says little about new traffic, but a lot about return. It is the only way to prove which campaign brought which companies to your site.
The three routes side by side
| Forms | Company identification | Campaign data | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get back | Person and company | Company | Company or person, depending on the source |
| Share of your traffic | Only those who convert | The business traffic that is identifiable | Only those you targeted or contacted |
| Consent needed | Yes, the visitor gives it | No, with cookieless identification | Depends on the channel |
| Strong at | Reliability | Reach and timing | Provable return |
| Weak at | Volume | Tracing back to a person | New, unknown traffic |
Most teams start with route two, because it closes the biggest gap, and then add the other two alongside it.
What company identification can and cannot do
Being straight about the limits saves you a disappointment later. Five things are worth knowing up front.
You identify organisations, not people. You can see that an engineering firm was on your product page. You cannot see whether that was the buyer or an intern. Working out who the right contact is happens afterwards, by job title, not in the visit data.
Home workers often are not identifiable. Someone working from a private connection is on a consumer network. That network is not tied to their employer, so that visitor falls outside your list. That is the honest outcome, and also the reason you never see a hundred percent of your traffic.
Large organisations come in coarse. Chains, groups and public bodies share their network across many sites. You then see the parent organisation, not the location your contact sits in. With multinationals that can mean head office shows up while the visit came from a subsidiary.
VPNs and corporate proxies can shift the location. If someone works through a company VPN, they come in on the head office network even if they are three countries away. For the company name that makes no difference, for your country segmentation it does. If you suddenly see a lot of traffic from one city where you run no campaigns, that is usually not a new market but an outbound network point.
Not all traffic is human. Bots, scrapers and crawlers pull pages too. A good setup filters them out, but it is a reason to read your list critically rather than hand it to sales unchecked.
And then there is the traffic arriving through an AI assistant. More and more B2B orientation starts in ChatGPT or Gemini rather than Google, and those visitors still land on your site afterwards. That traffic is perfectly identifiable, but in your reporting it often disappears into referral or direct. If you want to know how much of your pipeline starts there, you need to label that source separately.
This is not small print. It is the difference between a team that trusts the data and a team that drops off after three weeks because something in it did not add up.
Is this allowed under GDPR?
This is almost always the second question. The short answer: yes, as long as you stay at company level.
Why it is allowed. Company identification processes business data, not personal data. You do not store names, email addresses or behavioural profiles of individuals. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest: as an organisation you have a legitimate commercial interest in knowing which companies show interest, and the impact on the data subject is minimal because no data subject is identified.
What you need to arrange yourself. Three things. State in your privacy policy that you identify website visits at company level and why. Check that your supplier offers a data processing agreement. And check where the data sits: if it stays inside the EU, an entire discussion about third-country transfers falls away. Leadinfo is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR by design, and hosts exclusively in the EU.
Where it goes wrong. Two scenarios. First: a tool that says it identifies companies but in practice tracks individuals. Always ask explicitly at which level processing happens. Second: cookies dropped before consent is given. If your identification runs cookieless, that does not arise, which is a practical advantage as much as a legal one.
If you want to hold this against your own setup point by point, use the checklist: fully GDPR-proof website visitor identification. One caveat no tool can remove for you: how your specific situation lands legally is a judgement for your own legal counsel or DPO.
From company name to a conversation worth having
A list of company names is not a result. It is raw material. Teams that do nothing with it look at it enthusiastically for two weeks and then never again. Teams that do something with it set up three things.
A filter. Not every visit is interesting. Filter on what your customer profile actually is: sector, company size, region. And filter on behaviour, because the intensity of a visit says more than the frequency. Someone spending a quarter of an hour on one solution page matters more than someone dropping in twenty times for four seconds.
An alert. The moment a company inside your profile hits a page with buying intent, the right colleague should get a nudge. Not a weekly report nobody opens, but an alert at the moment itself. Timing is the whole difference here: interest today is not warm a week from now.
A follow-up step. This is where it usually stalls. A salesperson who gets a company name but no contact person does nothing with it. So make sure the company name gets enriched along the way with the right job titles and contact details. At Leadinfo that contact match sits at 93%. How to set up the whole chain from identification to follow-up is covered in how to convert identified website visitors into leads.
Those three steps are roughly an afternoon of work together, and they decide whether the rest pays off. Skip them and sales gets a list without context while marketing gets a dashboard with no audience. That is exactly the pattern where teams drop out: the insight was right, nobody acted on it.
Not every visit deserves a phone call, either. Part of your identified companies are still orienting, and calling them is too early. That group is better kept inside your campaigns until there is more signal, for instance by including them in your ad targeting. The approach in B2B retargeting: the ads you need for each stage of the sales funnel works that out further.
What to do with identified companies outside sales
Company identification usually gets positioned as a sales tool, and that leaves half the value on the table. Far from every identified company belongs on a call list. Marketing can often do something with it sooner than sales can.
Ad audiences. The companies that visited your website can be used as an audience in your ad platform. Your ads then land at organisations that already know you, rather than at a broad audience you invented yourself. That lowers your cost per relevant impression, and it keeps companies warm that are not ready for a conversation yet.
Feeding back what they became. Once you know which companies became customers, you can send that signal back to your ad platform. Offline conversions teach Google Ads which companies convert, and that changes your optimisation fundamentally: you stop steering on clicks or form fills and start steering on the type of company that actually buys. After a few cycles your keyword report looks different, because terms that drove plenty of clicks but no customers sink.
Adapting your website to who is looking. If you know a visitor comes from construction, you can adapt the content, the examples or the call to action accordingly. This is technically the heaviest application and you need development capacity for it, but it is also the only one that works without anyone having to pick up the phone.
Reporting that goes beyond sessions. “Twenty-eight companies from our target group were on the pricing page last month” is a sentence that beats any visitor number in a board meeting. Same data, different level of abstraction.
Which of these four you pick up depends on where you are leaving the most on the table right now. If you run a lot of ad budget, start with the first two. If your traffic is mostly organic, personalisation and reporting return more.
The five mistakes that decide your first month
Company identification rarely fails on the technology. It fails on the setup, and usually on one of these five points.
- The code sits on the wrong domain. If you run several sites, country versions or a separate shop, the code needs to be everywhere commercially relevant. If it only sits on your main site while your buyers are on the product site, your first report looks disappointing without anything being wrong.
- Your homepage pollutes the list. The homepage pulls in everything: applicants, suppliers, students, your own colleagues. Exclude it as a signal page and steer on pages that mean something, such as pricing, a specific solution or a contact page.
- Nobody owns it. In most teams there is exactly one person who opens the tool, and they sit in marketing. If that person leaves or changes role, usage stops. Put ownership with a role rather than a name, and make sure at least two people understand how the filters are built.
- Sales gets a list instead of a signal. A weekly export of two hundred rows does not get read. One alert about one company that was on the pricing page this morning does. The difference is not in the data, it is in the packaging.
- Judgement comes too early. The first fortnight always looks messy, because your filters are not set yet. Teams concluding after fourteen days that it delivers nothing usually have not configured a single trigger. Give yourself a full month before you take stock.
How you know it is working
Company identification has an awkward property: it feels valuable immediately, and it is hard to evidence. Three things are measurable.
First: the share of your traffic you can attach to a company. That is your starting point, and it shows straight away how much of your website currently stays out of view.
Second: how many of those identified companies fall inside your customer profile. This number says something about your marketing, not about the tool. If you are mainly pulling traffic outside your target group, that is a campaign insight you would otherwise never have had.
Third: what sales does with it. Signals followed up, conversations held, meetings booked. This is the number that counts, and the only one you can defend a budget with internally.
A workable sequence across the first three months: in month one you look only at identification and filters, and judge nothing on results. In month two you switch the alerts on and measure whether they get picked up, because an alert nobody opens is a setup problem and not a data question. Only in month three do you look at conversations and meetings, and hold them against what you normally pulled out of the same traffic. That last comparison is the one that counts: not what the tool shows, but what would not have happened without it.
What you also get in this phase is an honest picture of your own marketing. If your best-read blogs mainly attract traffic outside your target group, that is painful and useful at the same time. It is insight no other report gives you, because no other report knows who sits behind the traffic.
Getting started
Back to where we began: most of your website traffic leaves without a name, while the interest was real. That does not change by itself.
The first step takes half an hour and does not strictly need a tool. Pick three pages with buying intent, for instance your pricing, your main solution page and your contact page. Agree with sales what happens when a company inside your profile lands there: who calls, within how many hours, with what opening line. Put that on paper before you install anything. More often than not it is that agreement that is missing, not the technology.
Once that is in place, the technology is a matter of placing a tracking code. Leadinfo identifies the companies behind your traffic, matches them to your customer profile and sends the alert to the right colleague. Book a demo and see in twenty minutes which companies were on your site last week.
Frequently asked questions
Can I see who visits my website in Google Analytics? Not at company level. Google Analytics measures sessions, sources and behaviour, but does not tie a visit to an organisation. You can combine network and location data for a bit more direction, but for company names you need a separate identification solution.
Can you identify anonymous website visitors? You can identify the organisation behind a visit, not the person. The term for that is company identification. Identifying individual visitors would mean processing personal data, and Leadinfo deliberately does not do that.
Is identifying website visitors allowed under GDPR? Yes, as long as you stay at company level. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, legitimate interest. State it in your privacy policy, put a data processing agreement in place, and check that the data stays inside the EU.
Does company identification work without cookies? Yes. Cookieless identification uses network data instead of cookies, so your measurement does not disappear when someone declines the consent banner. You do get less granular session data than with cookies switched on.
How many of my visitors will I identify? Never all of them. Home workers on a private connection and consumer traffic fall outside the picture. How many you do identify depends on your traffic mix: a business-to-business site scores considerably higher than one with a lot of private visitors.
