Which companies are visiting your website?

January 12th, 2009

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic. Orfollow me on Twitter if you find me interesting.

If you have a website, you are more than likely quite interested in who is visiting that site. If you have a sales team, they are probably even more interested in which companies are visiting. It can help determine a prospects level of interest, whether they have responded to marketing collateral, and which products or services they are most interested in.

Problem

Unless you can get your visitors to identify themselves (fill out a form, sign up for a service, etc.), their visit is going to go completely undetected; however, it doesn’t have to.

Solution

Within Google Analytics, there is a report called “Network Location”. It reports on which internet service providers your visitors are using. This report allows you to track the internet service provider (ISP) domains to which the user resolves. The domain is determined by the internet service that owns the user’s internet protocol (IP) identifier. At first this doesn’t sound like it will be of much use in determining which companies are visiting your website except for the fact that most businesses own their IP address. So, what you see in this report is both generic ISP traffic (AT&T networks, Verizon internet services inc., road runner holdco llc, etc.) along with schools, businesses, and government agencies.

If you using Google Analytics then you already have “Network Location” reports, but like most reports you should probably create an automated processes for reviewing the results.

Setting up daily Network Location reports

When it comes to tracking corporate activity on your website, you should try to look at the results on a daily basis. Knowing Apple came to your website a month ago isn’t going to do anything to help your sales team today.

Log into your Google Analytics
Click on the button
Click on Network Properties and then on the Network Location link.
Change the date range to yesterday only and click “apply”.
Click the “Ave. Time on Site” column so that the results are sorted by the visitors who spent the most time first. (I choose “Ave. Time on Site” because it is the easiest to indicate interest level in these kind of reports.)
Click the email icon just above the “Network Location” title.
Click the Schedule tab and fill out the information. Make sure to change the Date range to “Daily(sent each morning)” and make sure that “Include date comparison” is not checked.
Click the “Schedule” button and you are done!