Lead Forensics

rob316

This company contacted me in work. They give you detailed visitor info on our site traffic including business name, address and phone number, what pages they visited etc.

Now I trialled the software and its quite impressive and would be very useful the only thing is the price £250 per month is a lot on a 12 month contract.

Surely there is a much cheaper alternative out there someone could recommend??

Mrs OBumble

Ahh, how do you know that the information they give you is correct vs scraped from a business directory and made to look realistic?

How do they get my address etc when I'm using a mobile BB provider with dynamic IP addressing?

Or my work address when even Google seems to think I'm sitting in either the UK or Germany, depending on how my network connect is working that day. (I'm sitting in Ireland).

Just sayin ....

rob316

Well they have given me data over the last few days and some are companies who currently order from us so the data is legit, plus the businesses I don't deal with would be relevant to our sector.

They were even able to spot a couple of our competitors sneaking about too.

bdo

FWIW, we use Lead Forensics in work and it is good.

It is useful for global B2B certainly, for USA/Uk/Ire. Our sales team find it useful.

We find there are about 30% unidentified prospects and 70% identified

DrFloppy

They have their own proprietary database of corporate IP addresses/ranges which allows them to tell you what companies specifically are visiting your website. Although it only tracks, what, maybe 20% of companies or thereabouts I'm guessing?

I've used A1WebStats for the same purposes - it's much cheaper: http://www.a1webstats.com/ £250 per month is horrendously expensive for Lead Forensics.

PaulPinnacle

They're known to have a really weird pricing policy there, where they chance their arm with cringeworthy initial quotes and then reduce dramatically when hit with pushback. A model I personally hate, though I can imagine it could cause some users to view it as a "bargain" if they get it for a fraction of the initial quote so it might convert well for them.

One of the common techniques to bargain the quote down is to install the A1WebStats code on the same site at the same time. When they see a site considering other options apparently it frequently drops the quote prices dramatically. (Personally I'd just go and install A1 instead to avoid the nonsense, but that's subjective and no quality/UX/quantitative reasoning for it other than disliking the pricing model employed)

utmbuilder

I have also used lead forensics they have a very agressive selling practice.

A1webstats works very well and the hidden secret is after your trial runs out on the gold package, if you dont renew you are allowed use the silver package for free which still shows you the visitor names and gives you some sort of link through to their linked in.

My A1webstats account is setup about a year and a half now and didnt cost a cent. The only reason I did'nt buy it was I thought the monthly was crazy even though it was still a lot cheaper than lead forensics.

I guess it comes down to the value of your leads.

Figment

I trialled Lead Forensics last year and their product is very good and works.
However our website was heavily optimised for lead capture so Lead Forensics were not able to provide much more visitor names than we were already capturing.

Worth the investment for large value sales if you are not already capturing leads.

utmbuilder

read up on UTM links if you are not already using them.

Dustin Foe Prince

I've established pretty conclusively that Lead Forensics miss a lot of business visits. Serviced offices like Regus, we can overlook - they way they're configured means no visitor-tracking service can give you the detail on those.

However, a side by side with a part-bespoke service called IPFingerprint that does live-lookups on top of the database automation showed about 25% extra business visits that Lead Forensics missed completely.

Also, they allowed me two-weeks of unrestricted access for free so I could actually log in and see the data dropping in from businesses visiting my site. Much cheaper too - bespoke pricing and no cheap sales tricks! Worth a look.

Ronan_wals

I want to say they are overpriced but really this depends on the value they are giving to your business.

I found the information to be somewhat inaccurate but above all its pretty much useless, there is no actionable data from it. Its great if you have a contact in those companies etc but if someone from a large company comes onto you site it's impossible to know who in that company visited your site and therefore the information is worthless.

timmy880

We had them in my company and I don't think I would recommend too highly. Constantly being harassed by their sales team to renew and they ended up sending a renewal invoice to our accounts department (without copying anybody else in) in a hope to get some more money.

With regards to the product itself, they have their own database of IP addresses that they use to report on customer visits so if businesses aren't in their database, they won't show up as visiting the site. But if you do use the information well and sales follow up correctly then it can be worthwhile and other companies I know do see it as an important part of their lead generation. But I personally didn't like it.

Dustin Foe Prince

I've had a fair bit of joy using IPFingerprint and working with prospects toward the bluechip end of the scale - The assumption (sometimes correctly so) is that it becomes impossible to find the right individual behind the visit. For me that's not a limitation as I look for CEOs and high-level directors of which there are few. Sales Navigator in LinkedIn lets me filter down a company of 3000 employees to just the 4 or 5 that I'm looking for and were likely behind the visit.

IPFingerprint give a great live demo on how to do the lead-research to ID the individual behind the visit.

SurveyUCD

They have quite aggressive selling practices. Also, even if they do track the companies that are coming to your website, it could be any person in this company that just browsed your website. Therefore, you wouldn't know who it was exactly and if he really was interested in your product.