Over the past month I have noticed that some web analytics companies are claiming that they can tell you who exactly has visited your website using some “secret” technology. I am going to keep this blog post short and sweet. You don’t have to pay gazillions of dollars to get this type of visitor data. You can use Google Analytics or pretty much any other reputable (free) analytics tool to view detailed visitor information.
It should be noted that you can not view “company names” for all your visitors. You can only see a company name if the visitor is coming from a network that uses a branded alias for their network. So here is how you can view which companies have visited your website.
- Log in to Google Analytics
- Under Audience click on Technology
- Under Technology click on Network
By default the primary dimension would be set to Service Provider, if a company uses a branded alias or if they are connecting through their own network then you will see them in the list. You can always choose City as a secondary dimension and have something like below:
Or you can select Medium as secondary dimension and you will get the following:
Look around Google Analytics, you won’t have to pay money to other vendors who claim all sort of things. Implementing this with PHP is extremely straight forward, you just need to do a reverse DNS lookup for each visitor.
Yousef, it’s great that you point this out as I too have come across companies charging top dollar for this info and it annoys me because it is available on GA. However, I think it’s worth also warning people that you can’t use this info to directly target potential customers. Google says so in Ts & Cs. To be honest, I’ve often thought that if GOogle suppressed this info then the whole privacy issue might have taken on a new light.
Thank for you comment Janis. You are right about Ts & Cs.
Hello Yousef, while agreeing that there is no ‘secret’ to identifying companies who visit websites, those of us other analytics providers would say that Google doesn’t make it easy to find such information and even when it can be found, it’s really limited.
You show us how in your blog but where does it go from there (within Google)? You can’t easily drill down to the actual paths those people took through the website. You can’t easily see what source they came from, or what they searched for. And a lot more weaknesses besides.
People like us and others provide analytics solutions to help companies get fully useful information related to their website visitors. Google Analytics, while powerful in many ways, is way behind in others.
In our experience, what companies want to know (for relatively little cost) is one key thing:
What companies have been looking at their websites, and which pages did they look at?
If it’s information they can act upon then they’re happy. If they see that companies are visiting various pages but aren’t making contact then they are at least aware and in a position to then make website/online marketing improvements.
Would Google offer such help to companies? Of course not – a sceptic would say that it’s in Google’s interest for websites to be weak because that means people have to spend more on PPC in order to get what levels of business their websites can achieve.
We live in world where business is tough – businesses will use whatever methods they need to in order to make their websites perform better for them. And that includes analytics that gives them what is actually useful to them (for which there are numerous providers).
I hope this alternative viewpoint is considered constructive and useful.
Hi Andy,
Thanks for your comment.
I am not pro or anti Google. For me the key thing is to help my clients make better technical and commercial decisions, decisions that deliver the same or better outcome but at a lower cost.
I know there are some great web analytics tools out there and I am a big fan of a few of them.
I guess what frustrates me is the fact that some of my clients come to me and say “Hey Yousaf, Mr. J Bloggs who runs XYZ Analytics Co told me about his top secret analytics kit which does this and that. There is nothing like it.” So when I look at the whole thing and I know it is not rocket science, innovative or top-secret and my client can get the same data for free then I have to help my client.
So yes I do find your alternative viewpoint constructive, but I hope you understand where I am coming from as well – I am confident you do.
I should also answer the questions you have posed:
You can do a lot.
Yes, you can.
Yes, you can. Simply change the Secondary Dimension to “Source”, “Medium” or “Search Term” depending on which one you are after.
Google Analytics can do this at no cost. Change Secondary Dimension to “Landing Page” or create a custom report to add multiple dimensions. Now you might argue that it is a custom report and perhaps not ready made? Is it cheaper to pay a one-off fee to create a custom report or pay on monthly basis? If you look at GA’s documentation you won’t even need to pay someone else to create custom reports for you.
True, there is no official support, but that is freemium model. Furthermore, “not provided” is awful.
Thanks for sharing Yousef, I’ve not come across this before, very interesting and may be useful to see if competitors have been visitng recently and just shows I need to update myself a little with GA.
You are welcome Alan. You can do a lot with Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, just depends on what you are after.
Hi Yousaf,
I don’t think anyone is saying they have secret technology to deliver this information, but as a service provider we deliver the Company name, Contact details, credit rating, Director name and details as well as alerts if people are visiting your website frequently.
With all this valuable information our technology is offering a high quality service.
On top of that we are comparing 43 different databases to ensure more accurate information is delivered to the end user.
Basically we are converting analytics into a sales tool.
Many thanks for this interesting blog and I actually learned something new from this post as well.
Cheers
Adam
Hey Yousaf, great article…thanks.
Do you know any other way of refining the lists….It’s very hard to tell which are companies and which are ip’s.
Cheers
ANdrew
Would setting the second dimension as Keyword, indicate that they HAD to have used that keyword and as such are a company?
WHat does (not set) imply though?