Uncover anonymous website visitors

Frequently asked questions

• What is Clearbit?

  Hunches only go so far. Clearbit fills in the knowledge gaps with real-time context on companies and employees. We help marketers create more personalized experiences — data for customizing high-traffic websites, precise lead scoring and routing, that sort of thing. And we help sales teams with an enriched Salesforce, custom sales alerts, and more.

• Why is this free?

  We want everyone to be able to experience the benefits of uncovering who is visiting their website, and this is how we are doing it. Naturally, we run a business too and expect some opportunities to arise from this, for example when companies require additional tracking above the report, or want additional functionality such as the ability to alert their sales team when a target account visits, advertise to specific companies within their Ideal Customer Profile or personalize to a specific segment.

• What is website visitor tracking?

  Every day, there are visitors visiting your website who do not fill in a form or identify themselves. Many of these visitors are interested in your product, but for whatever reason are not ready to commit. Visitor tracking allows you to de-anonymize this traffic and take action, for example, to proactively reach out or start advertising to this group.

• How does this report work?

  Once you install the script on your website, it works by injecting a pixel (a GIF file) to every page. Anytime it loads we'll record the IP address and use Clearbit to match it to a company (needed to deliver the report). This will have no effect on your website performance.

• What are the benefits of website visitor tracking?

  1) Understanding what works: visitor tracking helps you understand what efforts are driving the type of traffic you want. For example, what blog posts or campaigns are attracting the highest volume of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

  2) Optimize retargeting: instead of wasting ad budget retargeting everyone visiting your site, visitor tracking allows you to just target the companies you want - reducing spend and increasing conversion.

  3) Provide a personalized experience: No two people are the same, and your visitors are no different. When you know who is visiting your site, you can personalize for them and provide a better experience and improve the chances they convert. For example, you could change the copy and imagery of your homepage based on the visitor's industry.

  4) Take action promptly: Visitor tracking allows you to take action as soon as a key account visits your site, for example, Clearbit can alert your sales rep when their Opportunity visits your pricing page, or alert the Support team when a key customer visits a help center article.

• How does website visitor tracking work?

  Public data sources provide information on what IPs are for mobile networks, cloud providers, internet service providers (ISPs), and large companies — this is the baseline for any successful reverse-IP product.

  Traditional reverse-IP lookup tools rely on the fact that large companies own IP address blocks, so it’s straightforward to recognize when an employee from Microsoft is on your website, for example. But this limits your match pool to large companies. Companies that don’t have their own IP blocks are usually hidden behind ISPs, like Comcast, and these IP addresses often change.

  Clearbit goes beyond this traditional model, resulting in a proprietary mapping of a wide range of company domains to IP address. Our algorithm continues working to identify and validate matches, based on Clearbit's processing and application of machine learning to hundreds of millions of new data points each month, along with multiple signals from traffic patterns, geolocation, manual QA and more.

• Will this report track visitors that are working from home?

  Yes. One of consequences of the unfortunate onset of COVID-19 was many employees around the world transitioning to working from home. This meant that they were no longer “associated” with their offices’ IP addresses. To ensure that we adapted to the new work-from-home-era, we:

  1) Fine-tuned our algorithms, retrained our machine learning models to teach them about "work from home" behaviors, and made adjustments for geography, as different cities and states announced lockdown or plans to reopen.

  2) Created new proprietary approaches to matching domains to IP addresses.

  3) Allowed our IP intelligence technology to continue to do what it was built to — automatically learn and improve based on the flood of signals from new IP addresses and identify the employer of visitors who used a VPN when working from home.

  These measures resulted in us returning to, and now exceeding, our pre-pandemic ability to generate visitor reports that can track employees that work remotely.

• Are there any limits?

  Yes, we only process the first 25,000 unique IP addresses that visit your website every week. Furthermore, the report will only be sent to email addresses with the same domain as the website the script is added for security reasons. This means we can only accept business email addresses – no personal emails such as Gmail, Outlook, etc.

• Do I need to add anything to my privacy policy?

  Your privacy policy should include a disclosure that you use pixel tags to collect IP addresses, which may then be used to analyze web traffic and derive insights. Note, this does not constitute legal advice, and you should seek advice from an attorney licensed in the relevant jurisdiction(s) before using this tool.

• What does the report look like?

  View a sample report here.

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