When someone visits your website, they will be identifiable by an IP address related to where they accessed your website. This is a sequence of numbers. For example, 195.89.180.146.
Many IP addresses can be linked to the name of an organisation/business. For example, that 195.89.180.146 is an IP address used by Colorlord.
When someone from an IP address visits your website, the A1WebStats system will track the movements through your website page by page so that you can gain a greater understanding of how well (or not so well!) people reacted to your pages.
At A1WebStats, we refine the original IP data (which is typically raw before it is processed) so that it’s easier to see the organisation/company name, their website url, and a phone number. Here’s an example:
So, this means that there are millions of businesses worldwide that can be identified (by their IP address) when they visit your website.
However, there are also millions of businesses that can’t be identified by information from their IP address, because they are not set up in a way that can be easily tracked.
Unfortunately, some of our competitors create the impression that it’s possible to identify all (or at least, the majority) of website visitors by organisation/company name.
That’s a complete fallacy and is easily proven by this experiment you can do …
Think of some people that you know, typically from smaller businesses, and ask them to go to your website and click through to a few pages, with you taking note of the date and time that they said they visited.
Look at your data within the A1WebStats system and you may see data that gives away nothing about the identity of many of those businesses. For example, one visiting business may look something like this:
As you can see above, there’s nothing mentioning the name of the company (just their telecom provider), but they have looked at several pages of the website.
You can also see (highlighted in yellow) that they made a Bing search that was relevant to the focus of that company, so they are clearly a ‘company person’.
This means that there could be visitors from companies visiting your website, but no system (not us, nor others) will be able to identify them from the IP data available. There are other ways to identify them but it goes beyond pure IP data and into specific tactics. One of those tactics is geolocation, which you can find out more about here.
In conclusion, no system can identify all companies visiting your website and therefore you should always assume that many of the non-identifiable visitors were from companies, but you have no way of knowing who.
All you can constructively do is to focus on making your website stronger so that such visitors have more reason to make contact with you. This is covered by the guidance within our section gaining more sales of products or services.