Reason 2 – Why a limited access Lead Forensics trial loses you business.
Reason 3 – Avoiding wasting time chasing ‘leads’.
Reason 4 – Retaining your budget for activities that will strengthen your business.
Reason 5 – Taking your time to make the right decision.
Reason 6 – The truth about the 5-20% of companies you’ll be able to identify.
Reason 7 – Avoiding becoming a notch on the bedpost of the Lead Forensics sales rep.
Reason 8 – How geolocation identifies website visitors that Lead Forensics can’t.
Reason 9 – Avoiding a costly expense that’s a mismatch for your business culture.
Reason 10 – What really matters: selling MORE of your products or services.
Reason 11 – Tracking email marketing clicks page by page after the click.
Reason 12 – Personalised support that generates you more business.
Reason 13 – Tracking return on investment from all your marketing activity.
Reason 14 – Waking up and going home happy.
Reason 15 – Deluxe vs Enough – why people choose A1WebStats.
Reason 16 – Identifying referring pages.
And here’s a summary of a scenario where someone WOULD buy Lead Forensics …
For the rest of you (the majority), read on …
We’ve spoken to thousands of businesses over the years and there have been some common ‘Lead Forensics’ themes coming out of those conversations. The most dominant themes have been:
We’ve heard it all.
The most concerning comments are from those people who got sold something that’s costing them too much (compared to benefits) and their businesses have less budget to spend on other activities that will benefit them.
Our view is that every business has a right to ‘sell’ whenever they see an opportunity, but that it’s the ethical businesses that will sell only to those who will fully benefit from the service or product.At A1WebStats we count ourselves as an ethical business that doesn’t attempt to ‘sell’.Our objective is to educate businesses in what really matters about website visitors.
Lead Forensics is of course beneficial to many of their customers. However, the product encourages a blinkered approach to what really matters, ultimately leading to losing more business opportunities than those that can be gained from chasing companies that have visited your website.
Here we offer reasons for you to consider us and not Lead Forensics.
Out of every 100 visitors to your website, only a relatively small percentage will be identifiable as companies. That percentage varies depending on the website, but the range is typically 5-20%
What about the value in knowledge about the other 80-95% of website visitors? Even though they’re not identifiable as companies, their website movements should be of interest to you.
For example, if 100 people visit a service or product page, and 10 of them can be identified as companies, that could be useful (to follow up on). But what about the other 90?
Out of those 100 visitors, what could have been improved (within your website or your marketing) that would get:
Lead Forensics does not give you this depth of insight – they focus primarily on showing you just a small element of data related to your website visitors, which are the identifiable companies.
You may think that Google Analytics gives you such insights but it only allows a limited depth of analysis, which ultimately loses you potential business if not digging deeper.
The A1WebStats system provides details of visiting companies but very much encourages you to use the full functionality of the system in order to get huge return on investment.
To summarise this most important reason of all, there’s an experiment you could do:
Always remember that Lead Forensics are asking you to commit to a long contract.
If they had confidence that their product would gain you as much business as products such as A1WebStats can, then they would allow you to pay month to month and cancel whenever you wanted to.
This leads onto Reason 2 …
Full access during an A1WebStats 30 day free trial means that you can log in to see all data related to your website visitors whenever you want to. Lead Forensics either deny access or sporadically allow you to log into your trial account, which makes it hard to compare to other products (such as A1WebStats).
When you have full access to A1WebStats it will be clear during the trial how you can use the system in a much more beneficial way (to get more business) than the Lead Forensics system can provide, which helps you to avoid committing to a Lead Forensics paid contract too early (and losing out on the additional benefits that A1WebStats provide).We have seen numerous examples of companies that trialled Lead Forensics alone, committed to the 12 month contract, and then realised that it wasn’t making enough of a difference to their revenues. Having found us, they became aware that they needed to dig deeper into their overall website visitors data so that they could fix website and marketing problems. Unfortunately, that discovery was usually months later, by which time they had lost so much potential business from their website visitors.
A1WebStats also provides you with information about companies visiting your website, so it may seem strange for us to say:
STOP CHASING COMPANIES – START FIXING PROBLEMS
Let’s say that you’ve identified companies that have visited your website (whether you use Lead Forensics, A1WebStats, or something else). You may even have access to some features that hopefully get you closer to speaking to the right person from the visiting company.
More often than not, you’ll be piling a lot of time into chasing ‘leads’ that bear little fruit.
At A1WebStats we believe that such time could be better spent in strengthening the website and the methods used to drive traffic to the website. The A1WebStats system has been specifically designed to help you focus on what matters: people visiting the website but not making contact, meaning that there’s opportunity to make the website stronger.Lead Forensics doesn’t offer such functionality, preferring instead to put a sticking plaster over the problem, which is chasing companies who ideally would have made contact in the first place (if the website was strong enough).
Most A1WebStats customers consider our pricing to be low enough to be worth identifying companies to follow up on. We don’t have a problem with that, but do encourage our customers to think deeper about the bigger picture.
94% of A1WebStats customers pay £50 per month (or less if choosing to get the discount by pre-paying for 12 months). Lead Forensics pricing varies depending on what their sales people think they can get. The range tends to be between £300-500 per month (but can be much higher).
With A1WebStats you can cancel at any time, having spent only multiples of £50 for each month as a subscriber. With Lead Forensics you are automatically committed to a bare minimum of 12 x the monthly fee over a year contract. At £300 per month, that’s a £3,600 commitment.
Even if you paid month to month with A1WebStats, that would normally cost you £600 for a year, compared to at least 6 times that amount (£3,600) with Lead Forensics.It’s worth considering how you could utilise the difference of £3,000 (upwards) to strengthen your business. That gives you more flexibility to spend on paid advertising, SEO, copywriting, social media, and a lot more.
For every product or service you buy for your business, there will be a reduction in budget available for other spending that could benefit your business.
A1WebStats provides a 30 day free trial. Lead Forensics tends to offer 1-2 weeks (sometimes extended).
If you’re only ever going to be interested in the identifiable companies that visit your website, then the Lead Forensics trial length may be enough for you.
However, if you utilise the guidance and functionality within the A1WebStats system, taking your time over the 30 days, then you will discover a lot more about your website visitors than could be possible within the short time of a Lead Forensics trial.How does Reason 5 get you more business than Lead Forensics? A short Lead Forensics trial, during which you don’t fully appreciate the alternative options, can lead to 52 weeks of limited website success. A 30 day trial of A1WebStats will make you realise how much potential business you’re losing (and what to do about it).
It’s easy to be seduced by Lead Forensics sales people painting a picture that you can track so many companies that visit your website.
The reality is quite different.
A1WebStats are always honest about what you can realistically expect from the companies tracking part of our (or any) system.
At best, such systems will be able to identify a percentage (typically 5-20%) of all visitors as being from identifiable companies. All the other visitors aren’t shown in the Lead Forensics system but they do appear within A1WebStats data. Although unidentifiable as companies, many of them will have been people from companies.
You can experiment for yourself – use Lead Forensics, us, or any other similar solution and ask a few friends from small businesses to go to your website. Then see how many of them were identifiable on the dates and times they visited. For further details on this please see our page a simple test.
How does this get you more business than Lead Forensics? With A1WebStats you can discover more about seemingly anonymous visitors …
A1WebStats shows you details of all website visitors, whether or not they’re identifiable as companies. Many of those will have static IP addresses but just aren’t easy to identify as companies.
With A1WebStats there are methods that make it possible for you to identify more of those companies and tag them within your account. Here are four useful guides that focus specifically on identifying companies from data that A1WebStats provides, but Lead Forensics doesn’t:
How to identify all your current customers visiting your websiteHow to get the best out of your incoming calls and outbound sales calls
Lead Forensics doesn’t provide you with the ability to link seemingly anonymous visitors to company names, meaning that you have no way to record valuable information about companies that you know have visited your website.
A1WebStats does.
Many people who contact us have likened the Lead Forensics culture to the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Lead Forensics even seem to revel in the comparison, as you can see within the comments as part of the video below.
If you’ve seen the film, then you’ll understand. If you haven’t seen the film, then it’d be time well spent to appreciate the need to be wary of bright shiny things that look wonderful.
In the film (The Wolf of Wall Street), the sales pitches are slick and the only true beneficiaries are those who do the selling. They get rich by selling what appears to be wonderful, relying heavily on sales technique. This makes it easy to get sucked into what can become buyers remorse.
A1WebStats has no hype or wild promises about what our system can do. If anything, we understate the power of what’s actually available. Sometimes we even poke fun at ourselves.
The most hype/sales you will see from A1WebStats is a simple promise:
If used in the way it’s intended, analytical insights provided by the A1WebStats system are guaranteed to lead to substantial business success.
And, to back that up, we give you access to everything within the 30 day free trial so that you can experience it for yourself. And you can leave us at any time – instantly.
Also, A1WebStats have never thrown any midgets around the office.
And we certainly don’t have the Lead Forensics cringe-inducing bell that is rung when a sale is made …
A1WebStats records information about ALL website visitors.
Some are identifiable as companies (by their IP address).
The majority aren’t.
Of those that aren’t, A1WebStats has a feature called geolocation, which can identify many of them.
No other provider (including Lead Forensics) is offering this functionality.We have customers that want to identify farmers, camp sites, wedding venues, and other locations that aren’t easy to identify by IP address.
Geolocation unveils so many of those who are otherwise unidentifiable.
You can find out a lot more about this unique benefit of A1WebStats on our geolocation page.
We often hear that people have committed to Lead Forensics and then realised that their own company culture/structure can’t fully capitalise on the information provided. That’s not the fault of Lead Forensics, except from the perspective that a longer and full access Lead Forensics trial would allow the buyer to identify that their internal culture/structure would be a barrier.
At A1WebStats we encourage a longer (30 day) free trial so that businesses have the opportunity to decide whether what the system provides is going to be a match for culture and structure.
We would rather a potential subscriber doesn’t buy (and possibly comes back at a later stage) than pays (even just one or two months) and then realises that they hadn’t got value because they didn’t have the structure/culture to best-capitalise on the information.
We oppose the fact that Lead Forensics will allow any company to buy their system, tie themselves into a 12 month contract, and they then realise that they’ve wasted budget because their business culture/structure is not ready.At A1WebStats we actively discourage some triallers from paying – particularly if we identify that there are failings within the sales culture of the business. Some triallers still decide to pay and then cancel a few months later when they realise their culture/structure isn’t able to capitalise on the data. The good news is that they always have that option to cancel whenever they want to and so haven’t committed too much budget.
What’s preferable to you – 1 or 2 below?
If you think the answer is number 2 then A1WebStats wins over Lead Forensics and this page gives you the detail of how to focus on that second point: how to sell more of any product or service on your website.That page is not a short read, nor does it give you a five minute quick fix. But, for the 1 out of 10 of you that follow the recommendations, your business will boom as a result.
Your email marketing activities will result in recipients opening their emails from a wide range of locations. If those locations are not clearly identifiable as ‘companies’ (e.g. the person has opened the email at home or while travelling, or from a location that’s not easily identifiable as a company), then Lead Forensics will not be able to help.
With A1WebStats there is a way that you can link email marketing clicks back to their paths through your website, which allows you to tag those visitors within A1WebStats, plus give you useful insights into which people showed more interest in your website beyond the landing page.
Lead Forensics will give you personalised support on anything related to identifying and following up on companies that visited your website.
A1WebStats gives you personalised support on everything related to converting more website visitors to enquiries.
There’s a big difference – Lead Forensics focus on 10-20% of your website visitors (identifiable companies) vs A1WebStats focusing on 100% of your website visitors (everyone).
That’s why our customers stay with us for years, even though they have the option to instantly cancel at any point.
A1WebStats records the movements of ALL your website visitors.
This means that you can closely link all marketing activity back to the outcome.
This includes:
We firmly believe that no-one should enter or leave their working day unhappy.
Most A1WebStats subscribers have these roles within their businesses:
There is an expectation that business revenues continue to rise and if that expectation is not achieved, someone becomes responsible.
There’s no need for anyone to experience the stress linked to lack of new enquiries and sales.
The Lead Forensics approach to this challenge is: “follow up on companies that visited your website and everything will be OK”.That’s flawed because it focuses on the relatively small percentage of website visitors that can be identified.
The Lead Forensics system has some nice features that may be attractive to you (and that other providers, including A1WebStats, don’t have). If the higher cost to get those features is worth it for you then Lead Forensics would be a clear choice. Otherwise, systems like A1WebStats being ‘enough’ will give you functionality that is sufficient for your needs and so saves you budget.
Much of the time those ‘extra’ features are of limited value.
For example, Lead Forensics allow you to buy details (email etc.) of people from the company that has visited your website.
That’s not the same as knowing exactly WHO went to your website from that company – no-one would know the precise person that went to your website from that company.
In this scenario, what happens is that you contact people, thinking they were the person who went to your website, but they weren’t.
We often get trial subscribers who go on to buy from us, who say that although they liked some of the extras that Lead Forensics provide, the big cost difference didn’t justify the benefits of those features.A1WebStats customers, when focusing on identifiable companies that have been to their websites, take a view of: “I can see the name of company that visited us, and what they looked at on our website. Now we’ll use our resources internally to find out who to reach out to”.The more proactive of our customers also think: “what could we have done to make our website strong enough so that the company made contact with us, instead of us having to try and reach out to them?”.
If you have external websites linking into your website and people from companies click on those links, Lead Forensics will show you the companies that clicked.
What Lead Forensics won’t be able to show you (but A1WebStats does) are all the visitors who came in from those external website links.
How does this get you more business than Lead Forensics?
Rather than chasing those few companies (that Lead Forensics can show you) that you know visited via those external links, A1WebStats lets you dig into the overall picture of all those visitors who clicked, and how they navigated through your website. This allows you to consider ways that you can refine the website visitor experience and possibly the external website page that gains you the clicks, so that more of those clickers become enquiries for you.
An example of a referring page could be an article you’ve posted on LinkedIn (paid or organic). If someone clicks from that article to your website then A1WebStats will see that as a referring page. Also, you will be able to see how far those people went into your website after landing.
Why is this useful? We’ve seen websites that get lots of people click in from external websites, but those people mostly don’t click off to other parts of the website. When you see that information within A1WebStats then it becomes clear that the landing page needs modifications to encourage people to keep clicking on to other parts of your website.
Obviously, we’re biased towards our A1WebStats product but we think it’s important to raise the subject of the lost opportunities if you buy Lead Forensics.
We have many current subscribers who originally trialled us side by side with Lead Forensics, decided to buy Lead Forensics, then realised that it wasn’t the best decision to make, then came back to us after ending their Lead Forensics contract. In many cases they didn’t have the budget to subscribe to us earlier than the end of their Lead Forensics contract, which is such a shame because the A1WebStats system could have gained them more success from their websites a lot earlier.
Because Lead Forensics are so proactive in contacting businesses, most of which previously had little idea that it was possible to identify companies visiting a website, there is a golden opportunity to sell something that is ‘shiny and new’. To the person in the business it’s tempting because on the surface it appears to be as easy as:
But it’s not that easy for any businesses except for those that have the budget, resources, and culture to get the best out of it. And with such a short trial period offered by Lead Forensics, it’s tempting to buy so as not to miss the opportunity.
It’s often (sadly) only after purchase and when digging into the subject in more depth, that businesses realise that there are cheaper options available and that those other options have their own extra focus. In the case of A1WebStats, that focus is on using analytics to identify website weak points so that those can be fixed, which ultimately generates more enquiries in the first place.
Our mission is the same as it’s always been:
For our software to help small to medium sized businesses to grow through finding opportunities to increase conversions from website visitors to enquiries/sales.
If companies can be identified as part of the functionality of the A1WebStats system then that’s useful, but it’s only part of the more important uses for analytics software.
If you would like to trial A1WebStatsWebStats free for 30 days, please do visit our trial sign up page.
If you’d like to see more about the many ways in which A1WebStats can help you gain more business from your website visitors (than Lead Forensics can) then we have three options for you:
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