Identifying Anonymous Leads

[Carrie_Lawson]

Hello Marketo Nation!

Our company has been using Marketo for almost 3 years and we are still a bit behind on the times.  We are just now looking into how we can make our anonymous leads a little less Anonymous so we can start including them in some of our early stage campaigns.

Recently we were approached by VisiStat and wanted to know if anybody out there has any successes with them.  A few other companies that we are found that are similar is Visual Visitor, Lead Forensics, Netfactor, & InsideView.

Any insight to any of these companies or possibly any that you may use that you find successful would be most appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

Carrie

[Josh_Hill13]

Carrie,

Most of those tools do what the Company Web Activity report does. I suggest that you modify your site with content to attract leads and to display a subscription form whenever it makes sense and convert those people to Known. You want opt ins, not scraped data.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Josh,

By default, the company web activity provides information that comes from the Reverse IP lookups. Fine when you have only very large companies visiting your website, but almost useless when they are SMBs.

There are some service all around the world that build and maintain databases of SMB's with their IP address. Some of them can even provide for each company that are identified through this IP a list of targetable contacts (to be considered as purchased contacts, not as hot leads though). Marketo RTP maintains such a database for instance.

A few points one needs to pay attention to when purchasing these services :

• Not all of them are integrated to Marketo and therefore it may lead to import / export burden or custom API developments
• The quality of these databases is very disparate and the cost of maintaining these databases is high, so there is a strong advantage to larger players, but be cautious and test the service before contracting
• To my knowledge, these services are yet very local and country based, no player can offer it globally. So if your are an international company, be prepared to do the work vendor selection and implementation) many times
• I have been observing that after a while, you end up exhausting the database of these vendors (because of the previous points). So do not contract for a too long duration.

-Greg

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

By default, the company web activity provides information that comes from the Reverse IP lookups. Fine when you have only very large companies visiting your website, but almost useless when they are SMBs.

This is exactly what happens with us, rendering any third-party provider useless. I found one that looked promising because it was based on email addresses associated with a company, but it only worked if said email address used the company's domain (which doesn't work when your SMB uses gmail). It's good to know I'm not alone in my thoughts

[Anonymous]

Carrie,

Greg is spot on here. It's all going to depend on the size of the companies that are on your site. SMBs are going to be very difficult. My company deals with large enterprise companies, so this is a little easier on us. We recently investigated RainKing and were very satisfied with their offerings, and it integrates with Marketo & SFDC, but we still held back for two reasons:

1. It was expensive (even more expensive than our overall Marketo purchase).

2. We saw more value in their data for finding out more information about a "known" person/company; not so much for the anonymous visitors.

Hopefully this was helpful.

Thanks, Alex

[Carrie_Lawson]

Thank you all for your valuable input! All are very good points to consider.