Hi,
It's quite interesting to read all of the comments on here about lead Forensics and the other similar systems and peoples take on the usefulness and position in the market place.
I had never heard of Lead Forensics until we were asked to build something similar for a company who had used Lead Forensics as a white label version, their main concern was how much it cost and wanted to develop a cheaper alternative.
Initially I wasn't sure of the whole thing, like many I thought, I could just use Google Analytics, I also found trailing some of these systems they were very awkward and confusing to use. However once I had invested some time and played with the idea, I could see the potential.
Today we have an alternate product that we will be releasing at some point in the near future and so finding this tread has been quite useful.
Realistically, all our systems along with others like Lead Forensic, Leads Explorer, etc. are just reverse IP look up tools, which in a basic form are quite simple to build and with a little bit of JavaScript we can collect different pieces of information about a company visiting a website. Of course the first step is to instantly bin any visitor from a residential broadband supplier, as the information is useless. But many companies and not necessarily big corporate entities will identify themselves.
So getting this information isn't too difficult, but it's what you do with the data and how you use it, that makes the system either a valuable business asset or a waste of money.
You will always get somebody sat at work looking through the internet on their lunch hour or browsing during a 10 minute tea break, but the information you really want is the information that shows regular, multiple visits and the data on the pages they visit, how long they spend on that page etc.
For example you might be a company that provides computer equipment and you notice that customer A, in the last two days has visited your website and looked at a specific page which is selling a HP Printer, that same customer looks again ten minutes later and then throughout the afternoon it looks a couple more times, the customer then looks at the printer ink for that model, then looks at your delivery charges etc., but then stops. You might also find that that visitor came from a competitors website and from a page which sells the same product.
These kinds of systems can collect an abundance of information, which can be used to create a sequential and time related trail through a website to show how long a visitor spent on a page, how many times they viewed that page etc. It might be that they look at a particular product frequently throughout a week, but you never get an email enquiry or a sales call.
In the right hands this information could be valuable, whether it is passed to a sales team or email marketer, suddenly you have a target audience that you didn't have before.
The reality is that these systems will not be useful for everybody, but to some with strong sales teams who are always looking for new ways to build data to which they can market their company and services to they can be invaluable.
At the end of the day, they collect and provide the same data. Some do it better than others, and some give more facilities than the others. But thats all they do is provide data. Data which isn't particularly hard to collect, but takes a lot of managing to provide it in a way that s easily useable and friendly and in a format which sales teams can work from to achieve the desired results.
