How anonymous website visitor tracking prevents data-misdriven marketing
Anonymous visitors create blind spots in web analytics, decreasing the accuracy of insights and decisions based on them. Anonymity is a broad spectrum ranging from new or unauthorized visitors to those using VPN, secure browsers, and other data-concealing tools. For marketing, this poses a significant challenge, as it relies heavily on insights for effective personalization, targeting, and engagement. However, each challenge may be reverted into opportunity.
Who qualifies as an anonymous visitor? How can they be captured and correctly attributed in web analytics? How to implement anonymous website visitor tracking? These are questions we will cover in the article.
Anonymous Visitors Definition and Techniques
Anonymous website visitors mask their data, preventing web analytics from collecting and attributing it. Seeming a simple concept, visitor anonymity includes three major types:
- First-time visitors who haven’t appeared and interacted with your website before
- Users employing anonymization techniques such as incognito mode, private browsers, ad blockers, or disable browser storage to block activity tracking
- Cross-browser and cross-device users who don’t log in and appear as new visitors each time
The first type of anonymity resolves naturally over time, while the latter ones hinder two crucial web analytics processes – data collection (i.e.gathering a representative data track for informed decision making) and data attribution (i.e. associating visitor activity with the right visitor profile).
Let’s explore how these issues impact marketing efforts.
Consequences for Marketing
Missing or misattributed data means incomplete, fragmented visitor data profiles. This results in “data-misdriven” marketing initiatives, in particular:
- Skewed attribution and analytics. Incomplete insights, duplicated visitor profiles, and incorrectly attributed data makes it difficult to measure the performance of marketing campaigns and channels, adjust the strategies effectively, and allocate budgets wisely.
- Limited targeting and personalization. Messed up visitor data profiles undermine audience segmentation and tailoring of the offerings, recommendations, ads, and experiences. The result is decreased engagement and lower conversion rates.
- Inaccurate remarketing. VIsitor anonymity conceals parts of visitor browsing history, reducing the quality of and outcomes of remarketing efforts.
Summing up, visitor anonymity deprives marketing of valuable pieces of data, which primarily affects offering relevance and informed decision making. Next, let’s explore core methods for anonymous website visitor tracking: how to capture them and attribute their data with precision.
Key Techniques for Anonymous Website Visitor Recognition and Tracking
It should be noted that none of the existing anonymous visitor recognition strategies guarantee 100% accuracy. Typically, they are combined to ensure the most accurate outcomes. We will focus on the two most advanced technique employed by the majority of solution providers.
The first one is Fingerprint technology. It collects device, browser, and network data to generate a unique identity key for each user. The collected data includes device and OS types, GPU, mouse patterns, typing patterns, installed plugins, language settings, time zone, and more. Fingerprint-based tracking doesn’t rely on browser storage, making it resistant to third-party cookie deprecation, session and local storage unavailability, as well as VPN, incognito mode, and secure browser usage. As a result, fingerprint-based tools can recognize visitors across multiple browser sessions and websites. Nevertheless, fingerprinting is not reliable over time: if one of the device parameters changes, the visitor will be recognized as new — meaning their previous activity history will be lost.
Another technique is Stable Server Fingerprint. In this case, the visitor ID is calculated on the server using a more extensive algorithm and is based on more resilient parameters than the fingerprint ID. Similar to fingerprint technology, Stable Server Fingerprint eliminates reliance on browser storage, preventing visitor data loss and misattribution. However, unlike fingerprint technology, Server Fingerprint includes additional algorithmic logic – such as the combination of various IDs, ID expiration, and refresh mechanisms – which makes the visitor ID more stable over time.
Adenty employs the latter approach, ensuring anonymous website visitor tracking across multiple websites with up to 99% accuracy. Moreover, Adenty tracks pageviews up to 26% more efficiently than Google Analytics.
Implementation Options
Anonymous visitor recognition and tracking can be implemented in two major ways:
- Custom solution development. This involves hiring an outsourcing team that builds website visitor tracking software per your unique demands. However, custom development requires a high initial investment and prolonged time to market (usually al least several months)
- Picking an out-of-the-box tool. This means a relatively quick installation of a pre-built website visitor tracking solution, choosing a pricing plan per your capacity. This is a good fit if you need to enrich your current tech stack with specific features such as capturing anonymous visitors.
Summing Up
Anonymous visitor recognition and accurate attribution of their activity ensure that your visitor data profiles are correct and comprehensive, which is a must-have foundation for effective segmentation, targeting, personalization, and conversion growth.
Anonymous visitor recognition and tracking can be implemented using custom technology or out-of-the-box tools. However, the combination of advanced techniques is one of the major accuracy indicators for both options.
Adenty delivers up to 99% accurate visitor recognition across multiple sites, even when VPNs, incognito mode, secure browsers, or browser storage unavailability are in play. Book a demo to explore its visitor tracking capabilities in action.
