Entrepreneur: ‘Caller ID’ for Your Website
Entrepreneur magazine’s John Arnold shows how you can use tools such as those from Netfactor to glean information about the identities of anonymous visitors to your site, and why that is both a good thing, and a risky thing.
“If you think you need online forms to collect contact information from your website visitors, think again. Some website analytics technologies enable you to attach phone numbers, e-mail addresses and other company information to anonymous visitor information like IP addresses, log files and exchanges of JavaScript code. Combine that with behavioral information such as page views, repeat visits and keyword analysis, and website visitor identification becomes a powerful tool for engaging prospects and customers during the buying cycle.
Collecting company information from everyone who shows enough interest to browse around your website is obviously a useful strategy, but as you dig for more insight into visitors identities, the potential to make people uncomfortable about their privacy increases.”