Effective B2B marketing today is all about personalization. Clients want to be acknowledged — and they want their needs to be acknowledged, too. That means personalized recommendations, personalized promotions, and personalized outreach.
And while it may seem like you need a magical crystal ball to fulfill all of this, there’s actually a much easier (and more realistic) way to do it: webpage tracking.
It’s incredibly common for B2B businesses to track the activity on their site. Getting inside knowledge about customer behaviors — including how they navigate to a page, what they click on when they get there, and what they read — is invaluable, both in terms of personalized marketing and for collecting data that helps guide future marketing decisions.
How Webpage Tracking Works
Whenever we use the web we leave a digital footprint behind. Webpage tracking simply helps businesses uncover these footprints through a few different methods.
Cookies are probably the most commonly known web tracking tools. While cookies aren’t just about webpage tracking, they are often used that way. That’s because cookies serve as unique user identifiers that are stored in web servers for future use. Tracking a lead’s cookies gives you a lot of data into what they’re doing online and what they’re interested in, and because cookies are opt-in, there is no need to worry about permissions.
Another tool that B2B businesses use is web beacons, also called pixel trackers or page tags. These beacons, which are invisible on a page unless you’re diving into the HTML, are embedded on web pages and emails. When an action is taken, such as opening an email, clicking on a link, etc., the beacon is notified and so is the company that put it there.
Finally there is browser fingerprinting, which is less about personal data and more about browser data. This includes the geographic location of a lead, their browser type, their operating system, and so on. And you don’t need to be selling software to find value in this info. People tend to have pretty unique browser and system-related data points — at least when they’re taken altogether. So browser fingerprinting, while not super specific, can help you narrow in on repeat visitors to your page.
What Can You Track on Your Website?
Our own webpage tracking tool makes it super simple to show you the online behavior of contacts in your CRM, like:
- Who clicks on the links in your BenchmarkONE-hosted emails
- Who engages with BenchmarkONE-hosted forms on your site
- Who is visiting which pages on your website.
What’s even more powerful is that you can use webpage tracking to fuel your marketing automation efforts, such as:
- Dynamically segmenting the contacts in your CRM based on the webpages they visit
- Triggering a specific email or campaign when users visit a page on your website
- Increase a contact’s lead score when they view a specific webpage
- Creating a task for a sales rep when a lead fills out an online form
With personalized webpage tracking data informing your CRM and marketing automation, you have a robust data platform that can serve as an all-knowing crystal ball – allowing you to provide a more optimized customer experience.
BenchmarkONE’s built-in webpage tracking is excellent for telling you what the contacts in your CRM are doing across your website. But what about visitors on your website who you haven’t identified yet?
These webpage tracking tools provide data that uncovers patterns that signify where your B2B website – and your overall marketing strategy – is succeeding and where it might need some work:
Website Analytics
Google Analytics tracks aggregate data around who is visiting your website and what they do once they get there. Your site analytics are key to monitoring and improving the health of your website over time, providing data like:
- What search queries and/or websites are driving leads to your site
- How many site visits you have each month
- How many new users and returning users you have
- How long visitors typically stay on your site
- Which channels are converting on your site
There is a lot to dig into with your website analytics, but even these basic metrics can give you a baseline for improvement.
Heatmaps and Recordings
Heatmap software tracks and records movement on specific pages of your website. Gathering this type of data is super useful if you want to optimize the user experience on your website. You can see which buttons are getting the most clicks, and how far users typically scroll down a webpage. Session recording can even show you the paths visitors take on your website.
With heatmap data, you can assess whether or not users are taking the expected action on your webpage, and optimize accordingly.
Looking for a heatmap tool to optimize your website? Take a look at Crazy Egg and Hotjar.
Attribution Software
B2B leads typically have a longer sales cycle and connect with your business in several different places, both online and offline, before becoming a customer. For instance, a lead may hear about your business from a colleague, find your website through an organic search, see an ad on social media, and then convert through a paid search.
Each of these separate channels have a hand in the conversion. The problem is, each platform you invest in only reports on its own performance and doesn’t provide insight into other channels that may have helped the conversion along the way.
That’s where attribution software comes in. It can help you make sense of the customer journey through the sales and marketing funnel by tracking a user’s source each time they visit your website. With cross-channel data, you can make sense of how your individual channels are working together to produce conversions, giving you more insight into where you should be spending your marketing budget.
Interested in attribution? Attribution and LeadsRx are two solutions to look into to kick off your search.
Knowing where your traffic is coming from and what leads do on your site can be a major boon to your ability to market successfully. This is especially true when it comes to personalizing content and messaging.
Making the Best Use of Webpage Tracking
Data is only as valuable as what you do with it. In the highly competitive B2B marketplace, companies can use webpage tracking to identify both individual and general markers of behavior, in turn using that information to guide best practices. For example:
- Use it to see which sources are generating the most customers for your business
- Use it to personalize messages based on search history and interests
- Use it to create comprehensive customer profiles, complete with demographic data and predicted behaviors
- Use it to qualify leads for sales
- Use it to better target (and thus better perform with) your emails and other forms of engagement
- Use it to get a more accurate idea of how users are engaging with your site, what features and functions are pulling their weight, and what digital barriers you might have in place
Could your B2B business use a crystal ball? Consider adding one or more webpage tracking tools to your site and start collecting data that you can use to drive more conversions and sales. And don’t miss our easy step-by-step guide to setting up BenchmarkONE’s Webpage Tracking.