B2B visitor identification
How to identify companies visiting your website
The short answer
Install a visitor identification tool such as Leadfeeder. It matches each visit's IP address to a database of company networks and shows the companies, pages viewed and return visits. It names organisations, not individuals. Use it to prioritise accounts already researching you, and connect it to your CRM so sales sees the activity.
Key takeaways
- Visitor identification matches IP addresses to company networks and names organisations, not people.
- Match rates are best for office traffic and weaker for home and mobile visitors.
- Prioritise accounts reading high-intent pages, and check GDPR rules before enriching contacts.
On this page 5 sections
How the matching works
Businesses on office networks browse from IP addresses registered to them or known to belong to them. Identification vendors maintain databases mapping IP ranges to companies. When a visit comes from a known range, the tool names the company and logs the pages. Visits from home broadband, mobile networks and VPNs mostly cannot be matched to a company, which is why match rates vary a lot by audience.
What you get
- A feed of identified companies with industry, size and location.
- The pages each company viewed and how often it returned.
- Filters and alerts, such as "companies in our target industry that viewed pricing this week".
- CRM sync so account owners see website activity on the account record.
Turning it into pipeline
- Filter out noise first: ISPs, universities, your own company, existing customers you do not want to prospect.
- Score by intent pages: pricing, case studies, integrations and comparison pages beat blog posts.
- Route high-intent accounts to the account owner the same day, with the pages they read.
- Reach out about the problem, not the visit. "I saw you on our pricing page" tends to land badly.
Privacy
Company-level identification generally does not identify a person. Adding contact data and emailing those people does, and in the EU and UK that is covered by GDPR and electronic marketing rules. Update your privacy policy to mention the tool, and check how your vendor handles personal data. In the US, state privacy laws such as the CCPA give residents rights over personal information collected about them. None of this is legal advice; ask a lawyer if you are unsure. Person-level identification tools that claim to name individual visitors raise much bigger questions outside the US.
Compare the two main approaches in Leadfeeder vs Apollo.
Questions
- Can I see the names of people who visit my website?
- Company-level tools show organisations, not people. Some US tools claim person-level identification; they rely on third-party data matching and carry privacy and legal risk, particularly in the EU and UK.
- Does GA4 show which companies visit my site?
- No. GA4 removed network domain data and does not identify organisations.
Next step
Compare the tools for this job
Related guides
What is data enrichment? A plain guide for B2B teams
Data enrichment explained: what it fills in, how waterfall enrichment works, accuracy and decay, privacy rules, and when to enrich at the form or in the CRM.
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First-click, last-click, linear, time-decay, position-based and data-driven attribution, explained with one worked example and how to pick one.