Why Adenty is superior? 3× broader warm audiences and 2× richer profiles compared to rivals

Many insights on conversion optimization are typical and well-known. I’d like to shed light on a less evident, more complicated, but truly rewarding tip. 

On the one hand — it expands the interested, warm audience on your website. On the other hand — improves identity resolution and unlocks more informed personalization, targeting, and engagement. 

The tip is applicable for businesses that use websites or web apps to sell — for example, Media and Publishers, MarTech and AdTech solutions, eCommerce shops, EdTech platforms, Booking Services, Agencies, SaaS, Gaming, and many more. 

Let’s unpack this step by step. 

Section 1: Website visitor tracking systems miss a large share of your engaged audience 

Coming up in Section 2: What’s one conversion factor is unobvious yet fundamental — and how do widely-used tracking tools perform on it? 

It’s evidently faster to sell to someone who already knows your brand and is interested in your offerings. If visitors interact with your website repeatedly and by choice, they are much closer to conversion than first-time visitors, who rather explore than decide. 

Another point is better personalization and targeting, as your systems hold more data on those visiting your website several times. Looks smooth theoretically. In practice, even major website visitor tracking systems fail to recognize up to two-thirds of returning, warm visitors (later in the article, you’ll see more detailed calculations and methodology we used to reveal this).

Let’s explore the problem and how it turns data-driven engagement into a data-missing one. 

Key takeaway: New website visitors are rather explorers; returning ones carry the intention. Yet major analytics tools miss up to 67% of them due to limited returning visitor recognition, reducing the pool of “low-hanging-fruit” visitors who are easier and faster to convert.  

Section 2: Returning visitor recognition: a shadow metric that can make or break marketing ROI 

Coming up in Section 3: What vulnerabilities make tracking systems lose up to 2/3 of returning visitors? 

Returning visitor recognition (which may even sound clumsy) is a true dark horse among well-known, clear traffic metrics like unique visitors or session duration. It’s more of a back-office metric – reflecting not how your traffic behaves, but how much of this your analytics systems can see. 

The majority of those exploring your website won’t make a purchase during first visits – the decision may take days, weeks, or even months. To gradually convert, each time they return to your website should strengthen their willingness to interact with your brand. Content, offerings, ads, and incentives – all should be relevant. And what makes this relevance possible is the depth of data you collect per visitor. 

What defines data depth? It’s the longevity of its collection. While most popular tracking platforms have no problem collecting visitor data over a short period, they struggle to stay in the loop over a longer time. How this works in practice: 

• A new visitor comes to the site. The tracking system creates a new visitor profile and starts collecting data.
• After a short period (few website sessions), the tracking system “forgets” this visitor was on the site before, treating them as a completely new visitor. It creates a new visitor profile and loses connection with the previously collected data.

Figuratively speaking, tracking systems get amnesia after a short acquaintance with a new visitor. The result – fragmented visitor profiles with short-term, non-representative data – not enough for precise segmentation, targeting, personalization, retention, or any other audience actioning you need data for. 

Key takeaway: Returning visitor recognition defines how long your tracking system can collect data on visitors. Without longevity, visitor profiles become poor and siloed — preventing a great share of conversions from happening. 

Section 3: Top 5 reasons returning visitor recognition is the Achilles’ heel of tracking systems 

Coming up in Section 4: Which recognition method uncovers up to three times more returning visitors — compared across four rivals 

Google Analytics is an undoubted leader among tracking tools. Other major solutions are predominantly based either on cookies or on IP + User Agent (widespread in the advertising industry).  

Here’s why these solutions often miss returning visitors: 

1. Cookie dependence. Cookies are vulnerable from both sides: browsers can delete them after short periods or completely block them for privacy reasons, and users can clear them at any time.
2. Device and Browser fragmentation. People can visit websites switching devices and browsers. Traditional tracking methods fail to assemble these sessions into a single visitor identity.
3. Dynamic IPs and Shared networks. Visitors can use dynamic IP addresses that change frequently. Companies, mobile networks, and households often share IPs among many visitors.
4. Anonymization and Privacy techniques. VPNs and incognito mode are increasingly popular among visitors. Add to them ad blockers, private browsers such as Tor or Brave, and tools like Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention, Firefox ETP, and others.
5. Session-based architecture. Google Analytics is built for short-term tracking, with no setup for prolonged tracking.

Reasons are different – the result is the same: systems “forget” visitors after several sessions, days of inactivity, or browser/device/IP changes.  

Key takeaway: Widely used tracking tools and methods like Google Analytics, cookies, and IP + User Agent tend to collect short-term visitor data, which makes engagement short-sighted. Loss of marketing ROI and revenue generation may be much greater than it seems. 

Section 4: Who delivers better visitor recognition? Comparing Adenty, Cookies, Google Analytics, IP + User Agent

You’ve seen that impressive revenue boost above. We’ve seen lots of such cases through the years. That’s why we’ve built Adenty — to help businesses uncover hidden warm audiences as well as provide toolset to strengthen interactions and grow revenue. 

To define how much better Adenty recognizes returning visitors, we’ve agreed with four of our clients on a test: for a month, they used Adenty alongside three rival tracking methods (Google Analytics, cookies, IP + User Agent). To compare their performance, we analyzed the following metrics: 

• Returning Visitors Volume – how many more returning visitors Adenty recognizes compared to rival methods. The less this volume is, the fewer warm visitors your systems see, the fewer chances to convert fast are.
• Visitor Recognition Duration – how much longer Adenty keeps visitors recognized compared to rival methods. The longer you recognize the same visitor, the more data you attribute to one’s identity, the richer profile you build, the more effectively you engage.
• Tracking Volume (Pageviews) – how many more page views Adenty detects compared to Google Analytics. Missing page views makes it harder to understand which content and offerings drive more interest on your website.

Users participating in the test are from four different domains: Media and Publishing, AdTech, SaaS, and Software Services. Below are Adenty’s results relative to rivals across the four users tested. 

1. Media and Publishing Client

2. AdTech Client

3. Software Services User 

4. SaaS User 

Key takeaway: Compared to rival website visitor tracking methods like Google Analytics, cookies, and IP + User Agent, Adenty: 

• Uncovers up to 3× more returning, high-intent audiences (Adenty is also resistant to anonymous VPNs, incognito mode, private browsers, and cookie blocks — maintaining 99% recognition accuracy) 
• Recognizes visitors and collects their data up to twice as long 
• Detects 30% more page views

Final Remarks 

Engaging visitors without proper recognition makes wasted effort more likely than conversions. It’s like trying to see a reflection in a broken piece — all you get are out-of-context fragments, not the full picture you can be confident in. 

A brief FAQ to navigate key insights: 

• What is returning visitor recognition? It is an ability of your tracking system to recognize those who return to your site over time. Without this, it’s impossible to collect detailed data profiles, as the visitor data will be attributed to a new profile every time instead of complementing the existing one. 
• Why is it a challenge? Even leading tracking systems like Google Analytics struggle to reveal returning visitors on the long run — missing up to 2/3 of the potentially convertible audience. Reasons include visitor privacy, cookie fragility, architecture specifics, and more. 
• Is returning visitor recognition worth it? Practice shows that it has some impact on marketing ROI and revenue. One of our clients got up to 15% more monthly revenue after the recognition fix. 
• Then recognition is all I need to convert? It’s not all you need, but it’s the first you need to convert. For personalization, targeting, and engagement to hit the target, you need extensive data per each visitor — which visitor recognition enables.

If you feel your recognition could be better and engagement more data-driven — let’s talk! Book a personalized demo or write to contact@adentypro.com — we’ll get back to you ASAP.