A simple test

You may have been led to believe that you can identify most companies that visit your website.

Fact: that’s just not possible.

While many companies (particularly medium to large sized) are more easily identifiable (typically, via their IP address), millions of companies aren’t.  They may be:

Not identifiable by IP address

This means that they’re not set up so that there’s a known link between their business name and their domain details.

For example, the screenshot below doesn’t appear to be related to a company.  In reality, it was a company, but there was nothing identifiable about them.

Working within a general location

Some businesses work within a more general area but are covered under a bigger IP umbrella.  For example, serviced offices, or within a science park.

The example screenshot below shows the visitor was from within an office from the serviced office business Regus, but that could be any one of numerous businesses within that one serviced office, all using the same IP address/range …

There’s a simple test you can do, using the A1WebStats system to prove that the concept of tracking companies is not as amazing as how some suppliers would have you believe:

1. Contact a few people that you know within smaller businesses.
2. Ask them to go to your website and navigate to a couple of pages, letting you know the date and time that they did that.
3. Log into your A1WebStats account and navigate to the data from that date and time.
4. See how they were seen within the data.

You may be able to identify some of those you contacted but others won’t be easy to identify from their IP address, even though you know they visited your website.

So, although you can then edit the company names (so that you recognise them if they come back to the website in the future), beyond this simple test, you won’t know when many other companies have been to your website.

That’s the truth of it – it’s useful to be able to identify many of the companies that visit your website, but you simply will not be able to identify many others.

Armed with that knowledge, and being aware that many of those unidentifiable companies may not make contact with you (and you have no way of knowing who they were), we recommend a deeper focus on digging into your strengths and weaknesses within website product/service pages and the time/budget spent on driving visitors to your website.

If you get the website/marketing strength to be as effective as it can be, then many of those unidentifiable company visitors will have plenty more reason to make contact with you.