Companies are always trying to sell things to our clients. Much of this is useless spam, but occasionally it’s merely an expensive waste of your money.

Many of our customers are approached by companies offering lead generation services, promising to tell you exactly who is looking at your website right now so you can call them directly. The problem is, it might find a usable lead from 0.2% of your traffic. There are certainly more effective ways to spend your money to get more business online.

There’s another important question to ask before you pick up the phone to call someone who had just been viewing your website;

Aside from the feeling of invasion of privacy, how would feel about the digital equivalent of a shop keeper chasing you down the street just because you happened to browse their shop window?

Below you’ll find a more complete explanation of how this works and how we came to our conclusion, which you can read if you’re interested. Alternatively, you can get in touch with John, who will be more than happy to give you the exact responses some MDs have given after having thrown thousands of pounds down these particular black holes.

There are a number of lead generation services like this, which charge varying amounts. If you’ve not received a phone call from one yet, then you’re simply not on their radar yet. They seem to target websites that score well in the search results already. However, they seem to want to promote their less effective method of increasing the work you get from your website compared to investing in improving the conversion rate of your site itself.

The company which has the most aggressive salespeople seems to also charge the most, and tries to lock you in to a two year contract. They tend to ignore some of the key drawbacks of the system, such as this system is entirely useless for tracking members of the general public. We’ve heard horror stories of people who bought into this, only to find themselves locked into a contract that would cost them thousands of pounds for information that was all but useless to them.

Lead generation software will not help you unless you are targeting large companies, and if those large companies visit your website.

Here we’re going to look into how they do this, and what the drawbacks are.

How it works

When you visit a website, you leave a digital fingerprint on the server that the website is on. This is sent by your browser, and it’s the same information we use for our on-server statistics, Google uses some of this information for Analytics as well.

This information is stored on the server, like this:

I’ve highlighted the four elements which are pertinent.

• Unique ID of connection
  This is the IP address of the user. An IP address is the unique identifying address of your connection to the internet. This doesn’t identify each individual computer or phone, just the connection.
• Date and Time of visit
• Page visited
  This is the particular page within the website that the visit was looking at. For each visit to your website, there can be dozens, or even hundreds of lines like the one above showing each file accessed on the server.
• Identifying string
  Each device will identify itself with a unique string saying the operating system and the web browser being used. In this example the connection was made by Google’s own software which spiders the internet.

This lead generation software uses this information to try to work out who was visiting. The first step is a reverse lookup of the IP address.

Here’s a reverse lookup of one of our servers. If you know the IP address, you may be able to work out something about who it is. In this case you would know that the computer in question had some connection with vector7.co.uk, which you can lookup.

From that IP address, I’d get a postal address just from the WHOIS information (which records the ownership of domain names). Of course, I could just try going to http://vector7.co.uk/ and this will bring up our website — which not only has our full contact information, but shows what we do.

What that means

This is essentially what the lead generation services do, they perform a reverse lookup of every visitor to your website. The problem with this is that is going to recover anything useful for a very small percentage of your website’s visitors. Any visitor on a home internet connection isn’t traceable, and it should be pointed out that a large number of small to medium companies aren’t either.

This particular percentage does vary depending on your target sector and geographic location, although for most of our clients it averages between 0.3 and 0.6 per cent of traffic, and only one in three of that those identifiable visitors are a potential sale (you’ll find a lot of these visitors are from universities and the NHS; usually students researching their papers or patients using the free wi-fi).

That works out as between one and three useable leads for every one thousand visitors to your website.

So, for your outlay for several hundred pounds a month, you get maybe three leads. Right? Well, no. You have the names of three companies. And someone at each of these companies spent some time on your website. It doesn’t mean someone at the company was interested, someone might have been looking at your company during their lunch break. Even if someone at that company was interested, what’s the odds you’d be able to find out who was looking at your website?

And if you did get in touch with the person who was interested in your website, how are they going to react to you calling them when they just looked at your website, and they didn’t send you any of their contact details. Aside from the feeling of invasion of privacy, how would feel with a shopkeeper chasing you down the street just because you happened to browse their shop window?

What would your response to a cold call from a company whose website you just happened to have been checking out?

If your target audience is made up of large companies, and your sales team is full of charming and persistent people who can follow up on this incomplete data, then you might find this data is very useful. But to be honest, there are more successful ways of bringing in more business.

Conclusion

While it might help track down a potential lead, you’re looking at only a couple of possible leads per thousand visitors to your website. You could invest in improving your website. For customers who value and pay attention to their website, we’ve been able to get conversion rates up to over 12%, which is a far better investment than chasing people who looked at your website.

If your website isn’t getting the traffic you want, then you need to revise that. Even these lead generation systems won’t help if you’re not getting enough visitors to your website anyway.