See Which Companies Are Visiting Your Web Site

— -- Ever wonder which companies are looking at your Web site? A free download from Demandbase offers traffic analysis tools that can provide at least part of the answer.

It's called Demandbase Stream and it's a small application that allows you to view a screen crawl display of the names of the companies that have recently visited your site. Click on a company name and you can see more about the company itself. All that information is free. Here's the download location.

Pay money and you not only get information about the company, but also see the names and contact information for people at that company. Unfortunately, it's not possible to say which, if any, of these people actually visited your site.

Demandbase Professional, which is being introduced today, works by matching the IP addresses that visit its customers' websites with company information for the IP address. This works great if the company has a dedicated pool of IP addresses and not at all if it doesn't. Therefore, Demandbase doesn't "know about" most businesses with annual revenue of less than $5 million.

Once it has generated a company name and probable physical location, based on the IP address,

Demandbase matches those to a directory of business information gleaned from multiple sources. That's where the business profile you can see for free comes from.

Demandbase then takes the company and location information and matches it to contact information, again gleaned from a variety of courses, for people at that company and location.

While this type of lead isn't as valuable as when the prospect fills out a "request for information" page on your Web site, it sure beats letting the prospect get away unnoticed. And that's what usually happens, since only a tiny proportion of site visitors actually request information.

Demandbase CEO Chris Golec admits his system isn't without limitations, but there are also some significant wins. Here are some examples:

Demandbase Professional is being used to see what businesses are viewing the restaurant's corporate events pages. The online tool automatically identifies businesses and can route opportunities to a sales person or outside telemarketing firm, to follow up with the office manager or events person.  

Ad sales people use Demandbase Professional to see what businesses are viewing the pages on their site that detail circulation and ad pricing. When a company visits these pages, the ad sales person is sent the corporate marketing or the person responsible for advertising at the company.   Filters can be set up by industry, company size, location, to help support territory assignments.

Bloggers are starting to adopt the free Demandbase Stream widget so that they can see who is reading their posts. Corporate bloggers are looking to upgrade to the subscription service so they can demonstrate the industries and market segments of the readership they are generating. This information can be used to help sell advertising space if an individual blogger has sufficient traffic.

Small staffing businesses spend countless hours trying to find businesses that are hiring--especially today. Using Demandbase, they can find the businesses that are looking for staffing services and immediately call into the HR team to uncover a new opportunity.

Golec told me the Demandbase Professional service sells for between "hundreds and thousands" of dollars-per-month. That is rich for many small businesses, but for those who often sell to much larger companies it may be an excellent deal. And the free service, while limited, does produce interesting information for everyone and the price is certainly right.

A free trial of DemandBase Professional service is also available