Visitor tracking for website: Identify and convert better

Visitor tracking for website, the privacy perspective

Is visitor tracking for website illegal? No. But that doesn't give businesses a free pass to do whatever they want, however they want.

Tracking visitor interaction with a business is a symbiotic relationship.

• By learning how people interact with their websites, businesses can fine-tune their website's structure, copy, design, and product/service offerings to move visitors along the purchasing funnel.
• By letting the brands know what they're looking for, visitors can see what they want to see and buy what they want to buy without having to go on a search quest.

However, there should be a threshold. Privacy concerns and data protection laws come into the picture when that threshold is crossed. That line is drawn when businesses exploit data to boost their revenue through targeted marketing and advertisements.

Also, businesses are required to comply with the laws of the land in which they've set up shop, and they should also follow the laws of the nations their visitors belong to.

Laws that regulate visitor tracking for website

Contradicting the popular belief that people are aware of their privacy rights, most of us are not. That's why laws were implemented to protect the exploited.

Let's look at what's expected of businesses to keep privacy concerns in check.

• Sites that require you to opt out: Businesses can track visitor behavior till the visitors ask them to stop tracking and processing their data.
• Sites that require you to opt in: Businesses can only track visitor behavior once visitors explicitly consent to data tracking and processing.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA)

That's why General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the crown jewel of privacy regulation from the European Union (EU), made opt-in mandatory for businesses. If you want to oblige GDPR and run a business in the EU and have visitors from the Union tracked and processed, you'd have to give them an opt-in. Only then can you track and process them.

It's a complicated issue, which is why we at Zoho decided to make sure our website visitor identification, Zoho SalesIQ, embraced GDPR to the core—this prevents our users from being overwhelmed by the regulations, instead allowing them to focus on running their business.

Not just in visitor tracking for website but for the overall visitor management, SalesIQ, the live chat intelligence platform, is standing apart from its market competitors as it stores its tracking cookies in users' sites as first-party cookies and not as third-party cookies. So even if Google revokes support for third-party cookies, you wouldn't face any issues.

In fact, we're proud to say that Zoho and SalesIQ is committed to extending data rights of GDPR to every person irrespective of the nation they're in and whether the nation asks for it or not. We also comply with South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), which requires sites to opt-in before tracking and processing. To learn more about compliance, check out this article on Zoho's POPIA compliance statement.

If you'd like to learn more about this, check out our SalesIQ and cookies video. Here you can also learn more about our GDPR compliance and cookie policy.

Now that we've addressed the privacy concerns, let's look at some visitor tracking use cases.

Leveraging visitor tracking for website: Business use cases

Irrespective of your domain, visitor tracking for website has its purpose for every industry. Learning how your prospects interact with your website is the key that helps you move them along the purchasing funnel and makes visitor tracking for website, a domain-agnostic feature. So we'll discuss visitor tracking use cases for the teams that require this feature in every industry—marketing and sales.

Visitor tracking for website: Marketing use cases

1. Learn how your prospects interact with you and refine your content

When you own a physical store, you can see which part of the store gets the most footfall and analyze why to come to a logical conclusion. With that, you can cut down the aisles that get minimum attention and focus on the sections that excite your prospects.

As we've evolved from physical to digital stores, visitor tracking for website software like Zoho SalesIQ does the same for you. You'll get visitor data such as their location, performed actions, time spent on your site, pages they visited, and more.

Let's take a real story. One of our Zoho SalesIQ customers, Swaminathan Balasubramanian, Founder & Publisher at Chef Bharath, installed SalesIQ on their site. Instantly he realized they were getting a good number of views across the globe. Using that data, they re-strategized and focused on the locations where their content is consumed the most. With these insights, they scaled up and launched another international portal, Kitchen Herald. If you'd like to learn more, you can read Chef Bharath's startup to scale-up journey with SalesIQ.

2. Increase conversion with content experimentation

You can analyze how visitors interact with your site using the tracked data. Running A/B testing on your site's content or structure can also help determine which versions assist visitors better and boost your conversion. These features let you experiment and learn what increases the likelihood of prospects interacting with you so you can refine your website accordingly.

3. Refine your ideal customer persona

Most businesses will have a customer persona planned out before they start their marketing activities. That doesn't guarantee it translates to reality. With information like geographic location, visitor demographics, and more, you can refine your customer persona and turn your attention to the audience who's interested in you rather than wasting your resources targeting everyone.

4. Follow your customers' journeys to conversion

Tracked data like visited pages and time spent on them are a goldmine for your marketing team. Having the data handy would help you understand how your prospects navigate your website before becoming a customer. With the information, you can help them get there faster.

For instance: If more of your customers are navigating to the features page after landing on your home page, you can create a proactive trigger that nudges them to look at the features page instead of waiting for them to search for it. It helps them get there quicker and results in faster conversions.

Is the proactive trigger a critical feature here? No. Some may find the features page without your nudge, but many might not. They might lose interest and leave before making a decision. Instead of leaving it up to the visitors, control the narrative about how you want your ideal customers to navigate and help them get there faster.

5. Prepare better for account-based marketing

Suppose you do account-based marketing. In that case, you can improve results with the visitor information as it breaks down what the individuals are looking for in your product/service. With data in hand, arousing the interest of the target account about your product would be a cakewalk for your marketers.

Visitor tracking for website: Sales use cases

Identity high-intent prospects with lead scoring

With the abundant data visitor tracking tools give you, you can use them to set up lead scores.

What is lead scoring?

With visitor tracking set up, you can analyze how the converted customers have behaved with your site. The results from the analysis would be your website's ideal interaction journey. Learn where they've come from, the pages they linger on, how many pages they visit, how much time on average, they spent on those pages, and more.

You can set up scores for each of these criteria. If they get high lead scores, it means the prospects have followed the exact interaction journey your converted customers have gone through. Filter those high scores as they're your high-intent prospects. Your sales team can then target only those prospects instead of everyone, which would help increase the likelihood of conversion. Learn more about how to set up lead scoring here.

Increase conversions by learning what prospects want

Data on where the high-intent prospects have spent their maximum time would help your sales team prepare better. Instead of setting up a call with no information about the prospect's needs, they can use information on which aspect of your products/services the prospects are interested in and prepare accordingly.

They can brush up on their knowledge of those elements, give their best, and help convert prospects quicker. It also allows your sales team to upsell or cross-sell your other products/services on the call as they talk to the prospects based on their tracking data. It'll help the prospects realize why they visited those pages and help the sales team to sell more.

Zoho SalesIQ, the best visitor tracking for website software

If you want to reap the benefits mentioned above for your business, we think Zoho SalesIQ is the best visitor tracking for website software.

In addition to the above benefits, SalesIQ offers a few more, as it's also a live chat intelligence platform with a chatbot and analytics module. With these additional features, businesses can take their engagement and growth to the next level.

• Integration with Zoho CRM: You can push high-intent prospects that score better in your lead scoring to CRM. When they revisit your site, you'll get notified. When that happens, you can set up a proactive trigger to nudge them to take action.
• The CRM integration also offers the additional benefit of increasing the level of personalization we can have with the prospects. You can check out our CRM-live chat software domain insight for understanding the general aspects of CRM-SalesIQ integration and what it can do for your business.

Want to see the best visitor tracking software that abides by all the data regulations in action? Book a demo with us.