I co-founded Contaktly, so read this knowing I sell the thing. I’ll keep it to how it works and what it’s good for, and I’ll say where it falls short.
What It Does
A visitor identification tool puts a small script on your website. When someone visits, it looks at the network the visit came from and matches it to a company. You get a list of companies that were on your site, the pages they looked at, how long they stayed and whether they came back.
Some tools, Contaktly included, go a step further and try to match the visit to a person, or a shortlist of likely people at that company, so you have someone to contact rather than a logo.
What It Doesn’t Do
It doesn’t identify everyone. Visits from home broadband, mobile networks and VPNs mostly resolve to the internet provider, not an employer, and hybrid work made that worse. So the number that matters is the identification rate: the share of real visits that resolve to a named company. It varies a lot by audience, and ours goes on the benchmark page from November 2026 as a range, not a single flattering average.
It doesn’t tell you intent on its own. A company on your homepage for eight seconds is noise. The same company on your pricing page twice in a week is a signal. The tool gives you the visits; you decide the rules.
The Three Plays That Work for Us
1. Call the hot ones now. When a company we’d want as a customer lands on a pricing, case study or demo page, someone on the team gets a card within minutes: the company, the pages, the likely person and their number. The aim is a call the same day. The gap between a hot visit and a call is the whole game.
2. Email the warm ones. Identified companies that fit the profile but didn’t hit a high-intent page go into a short email sequence. The message talks about the problem we solve for companies like theirs. It never mentions the visit. “I saw you on our website” is the fastest way to creep someone out, and it’s unnecessary; you already know they’re interested. The two campaigns we ran that did mention the visit got one positive reply from 2,166 people.
3. Close the loop on outbound. If a company you cold-emailed last week shows up on your site this week, that’s the warmest lead you have. We feed identified visitors from live campaigns straight into a book-a-meeting sequence, and the reply handling treats them as warm.
What to Measure
- Identification rate: identified visits divided by all non-bot visits
- Hot and warm share of identified companies
- Identified companies contacted, replies, meetings
- Which pages most often came before a reply or a meeting
If you only track one, track the last one. It tells you which pages to send outbound traffic to.
Privacy
Company-level identification works off the visiting network and is widely used in B2B. Person-level matching needs more care: use a provider that works with properly sourced data, be clear in your privacy policy about what you collect, and honour a removal request the same day without arguing. Someone asking where you got their details gets removed, with no pitch.
When Not to Bother
If your site gets very little traffic, you’ll identify very little. Fix traffic first, then add identification. And if you have no process to act on a visit within a day, the list will sit there like every other dashboard.