Visitor identification sounds magical until you try it on the wrong website. Here is the honest boundary: it works for business visitors, not consumers, and even on B2B sites it doesn’t catch everybody. Read this before you buy anything — including our own product.
How it works, in one paragraph
A business person visits your site from their office. Their internet connection carries a technical address (the IP address). That address is usually registered to their company. Reference databases turn it back into a company name. That’s the entire mechanism.
Why this works for B2B and not B2C
Consumers browse from home connections, mobile networks, and coffee shops. Those addresses are registered to internet providers, not to a person or a company. There is no ‘company’ hiding behind a private mobile connection — so there is nothing to look up. The tool politely returns nothing.
Business visitors, in contrast, mostly browse from office networks or from company VPNs (a way of routing home internet through the company connection). Both are registered to identifiable organisations. That’s the segment we can name.
| Visitor type | Identified as a company? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Person at office desk, corporate network | Yes — usually | The classic case |
| Person working from home on VPN | Yes — often | Depends on VPN routing |
| Person on personal home Wi-Fi | No | Home connections are anonymous |
| Person on mobile network | Mostly no | Rare exceptions for corporate fleets |
| Person at a public café | No | Provider address, not company |
| A robot / crawler | Excluded | Filtered before you see it |
So what identification rate should I expect?
For a genuinely B2B website with mostly office-hours traffic, a realistic honest range is 20–40% of unique business visits being resolved to a named company. For a mixed site, lower. For a pure consumer site, close to zero. Anybody who promises higher without qualifying the traffic type is selling you a fantasy.
Plain word
‘Identification rate’ is the share of business visits where a company name is returned. Not the share of all visits.
Where the tool clearly fits
- You sell to companies, not individuals.
- Your buyers evaluate you during office hours or on VPN.
- Your average deal is worth at least a few hundred euros — otherwise the manual follow-up doesn’t pay off.
Where it clearly doesn’t
- Consumer e-commerce (sneakers, groceries, cosmetics).
- Content sites monetised only by advertising — you don’t need to talk to visitors.
- Purely mobile audiences (news apps, gaming).
The B2B/B2C hybrid case
Some businesses sell to both — a design tool used by freelancers and by procurement at large agencies, say. In that case, treat visitor identification as your ‘enterprise line’ only. Ignore it for the freelance signup funnel. Two audiences, two workflows, one website.
- Related: [Identify website visitors: the complete guide](/blog/identify-website-visitors-complete-guide)
- Related: [The 97% gap: why most website visitors stay anonymous](/blog/the-97-percent-gap-anonymous-website-visitors)
- Related: [Multi-domain B2B setups](/blog/multi-domain-b2b-tracking-workspaces-consolidated-view)
Published by
lead.box Team
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