Triggering off anonymous inferred companies

[Matt_Stone2]

I know there were significant changes to anonymous lead tracking several months ago, but I was wondering if it's still possible to trigger a smart campaign based off anonymous inferred companies. So essentially if an anonymous lead whose IP is inferred as ACME Co hits our website, we can trigger a smart campaign. Is this possible?

[Anonymous]

No, it is not possible.  If they are anonymous where would you send the communication?  If they are known you could use the inferred company to trigger emails

What you can do is use our web personalization module to modify the website based off of what company they come in from, a la Account Based Marketing.  You can also retarget them, as well as use predictive intelligence to suggest content they would be interested in on the website, hopefully driving them to gated content.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

In addition to Jamie's point, anonymous are even no longer stored in your Marketo database. So it's impossible to trigger anything from an anonymous lead.

-Greg

[SydneyMulligan]

You could still do a web page activity report subscription if you are just interested in seeing who these people are.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

As noted by Jamie, if an anonymous lead has not been promoted to known, it will not run through SCs.

However, if you insisted that certain "interesting" leads run through SCs for some reason, you can create what I call pending leads. These are leads that are identified only by their Munchkin cookie (i.e. their email = their cookie).  You would not want to sync such leads to CRM, of course. Nor would you want to create a pending lead all the time because -- and this is important -- pending leads count against your Marketo lead limit. But if you used a client-side geolocation service to infer company (which won't be any less accurate than what Marketo does on the server, and probably more so) then you could strategically create pending leads when appropriate.

This wouldn't be too hard to build, but not exactly easy, either (if you're not a developer).

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Interesting idea, however I can see the DB size blowing it's top very easily as Sanford Whiteman​ mentioned.

Most sites easily have a 35%+ bounce rate (1 page and done).  That being said I think you may want to carefully consider the relevant IPs and how you are matching them.

Larger companies will have dedicated IPs with their ISPs (and sometimes multiples or ranges), while smaller companies may still be running off the local cable/DSL company.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Ab-so-lutely, Geoff!  Still get vaporware vendors claiming to be able to to identify individual human leads behind NAT IPs -- or at least letting themselves be conveniently misheard.

When you're dealing with a very small group of key companies, pending leads can be of some use. Of course, you don't really have to go through Marketo if what you really want is a generic alert like Someone probably from somewhere is on your site but if the infrastructure is in place, maybe it's easier....

[Anonymous]

The question here is what you would like the smart campaign to do on someone from these companies visits your website.

Obviously you can't trigger email sent steps since you don't have the anonymous visitor's email, so I assume you're thinking about alerting your sales teams about that.

You can do that very simply with Web Personalization (RTP).

The named accounts (Account Based Marketing) module allows you to upload a CSV file of all your target accounts and set flows that will be triggered once you have visitors from these companies - anonymous and known.

Btw, companies might appear in multiple forms in the IP - for example:

Microsoft, Microsoft Corp, Microsoft International, Network of Microsoft etc. so it might be difficult to cover all options manually.

In Web Personalization it's done automatically.

You can then send daily reports or configure email alerts to be sent automatically to your sales teams.

[Matt_Stone2]

This is exactly the use case -- simply alerting our sales team to anonymous web activity by their accounts. Thanks!