IP Address Intelligence

IP address intelligence is the process of extracting valuable company data (called firmographics) from a website visitor’s IP address. By leveraging IP address intelligence technologies, B2B marketers can identify the real companies behind anonymous website traffic and gain a much better understanding of exactly which accounts are visiting and engaging with their digital content.

The process of gathering intelligence from an IP address involves two distinct steps. First, an IP address vendor uses proprietary technology (like KickFire’s TWIN Caching™) to systematically analyze every IP address in existence. These IPs are then associated with firmographic data (company name, industry, location, employee count, etc.) and stored in a database for later use.

Next, an IP address intelligence tag is placed on a website to detect the IP address of every website visitor. These IP addresses are then used to query the vendor database of IPs and firmographics and return a list of the companies visiting and engaging with the website. This intelligence can be used to power a wide range of account-based marketing strategies, including on-page content personalization, targeted ad campaigns, website attribution, and more.

Platforms like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics are excellent web analytics tools, but they have their limitations. When it comes to B2B traffic, these platforms may only tell you the total number of sessions or impressions your pages are getting but lack the deeper insights that make account-based marketing possible. However, integrating IP address intelligence into your current website analytics platform can change this.

By leveraging IP address intelligence within your Google or Adobe platforms, you can see a detailed breakdown of the exact companies visiting your website as well as valuable firmographic data including: 

• Company name
• Industry
• Revenue range
• Employee count
• Headquarter location
• And more!

This data will transform your website analytics platform into an ABM powerhouse and drive more conversions. To see it in action, check out our guide 3 Steps to Reduce Ad Waste in Google Analytics and Google Ads.

Building an ABM target list can be a daunting task, so many companies out there, how do you narrow it down to create 1:1 messaging? 

Looking deeper into the firmographic breakdown of your website traffic can give you valuable insights about the companies that are actively engaging with your content and are in the market to purchase. These are the companies you want to target. 

By looking at things like industry, revenue range, geolocation, etc. you can build much more effective target lists on which you can create more effective sales marketing campaigns. For more tips check out our blog post on Creating Your ABM Target List Using Firmographics.

Website content personalization involves displaying customized website content based on visitor data to deliver a better, more engaging user experience. Leveraging personalized content on your website is one of the most effective ways to deliver 1:1 marketing at scale and drive higher website conversion rates. IP address intelligence allows B2B marketers to leverage firmographic data to customize everything from a simple banner or image to unique navigation and content for high-value target audiences.

Here’s how website personalization works: IP address intelligence technologies determine what company the visitor is coming from and provide firmographic information (industry, revenue, location, and more) in the time it takes for a web page to load. This data is then used by platforms like Google Optimize and Adobe Target to personalize your website by showing relevant content to the visitor based on their firmographic profile.

If ABM has taught us anything it’s that one size fits all messaging just doesn't work. 

Different companies can have widely varying goals, budgets, needs, etc. that must be addressed if we want to create content that resonates with them. 

By looking at a firmographic breakdown of your website visitors, you can see which industries, company sizes, etc. are showing the most intent to purchase your solutions. This will give you a good sense of who you should be crafting your messaging for to maximize the impact of your sales and marketing campaigns.

On average, only around 2% of your website traffic will convert into a lead via a contact form, direct email, etc. Retargeting ads are highly effective in re-engaging with accounts that have visited your website but have left without reaching out. IP address intelligence can gather website visitor information, including their IP address, which is then leveraged to serve ads directly to those IP addresses associated with accounts that have visited your site. To see retargeting in action, check out our article on 5 Ways to Decrease Ad Waste.

Just as IP address intelligence can be used to identify new potential in-market buyers, it can also be used to make sure that your marketing campaigns are bringing in the right traffic. As we discuss in our article, Marketing Attribution ABM’s Final Frontier, looking at a firmographic breakdown of the companies visiting your website, you can see the real-time impact of your marketing efforts.

Website fraud can take many forms including phishing, credit card scams, ad fraud, and more. IP address intelligence can be utilized to detect fraudulent activity on your site by uncovering the IP addresses of your website traffic and allowing you to set up defensive measures against online fraudsters. More on that in our IP geolocation article.

Website Analytics Website analytics refers to the practice of tracking a variety of behaviors of visitors to a website including traffic, clickpath, conversion rates, attribution, and more.

You might be familiar with Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics platforms. These are fantastic tools for providing insights into website traffic volume, but they have their limitations. For effective account based marketing to take place, B2B marketers need to know exactly which companies are visiting their website. By integrating reverse IP lookup data into your website analytics platform you can not only see sheer traffic volume, but you can dive deeper into your traffic to see exactly who is visiting your site. To read more about how IP address intelligence can enhance Google Analytics, check out our article on Reducing Adwaste.

If you’ve read our other article about how TWIN Caching works, then you probably already know that it doesn’t operate alone. It requires a skilled team of Data Integrity Specialists working on updating, maintaining, and normalizing the data constantly. Here are just a few of the many factors that contribute to our data integrity process.

If we asked 1,000 different people to type "United States", most of the time it would come out just fine, but undoubtedly we would see at least a few like this:

• USA
• United STates
• United States
• united states
• UNITED STATES
• United States of America
• US

The list could go on, but the point is that if we simply left it up to each individual person to type it out on their own, we’d be in trouble. The same goes for company data. If we just took all the company data at face value without doing the legwork to make sure it’s clean, accurate, and normalized it would be a mess and nearly useless to our customers. However, our team of Data Integrity Specialists follows strict standards set by ISO (International Standards Organization) to make sure that every company name, address, SIC/NAICS code, phone number, etc. is usable right out of the box. This makes life much easier for Developers that might otherwise spend hours cleaning, organizing, and normalizing the data. 

So, when you want the company names of your website visitors uploaded into your CRM, for example, you don't have to go through the thousands of entries one by one to see if they are all spelled correctly. Instead, your Dev team can simply copy and paste them knowing that they’re going to be accurate and up-to-date.

While we love our machine learning algorithms, there are just some elements of the IP analysis processes that require a human touch. For example, to do their jobs properly, machine learning algorithms require vast amounts of data that they consume to train themselves on what to look for. This training process must be overseen by a team of data experts whose job is to ensure that the data our algorithms are trained on is good and will result in an algorithm actually learning. 

Once an algorithm is operating on its own, it will inevitably run into something it hasn’t seen before. When this happens, our data experts step in to analyze and train the algorithm on the new data. This helps the algorithm improve while further ensuring that we only pass along accurate data to our customers.

The world never stops changing, so we never stop listening. In our research, roughly 7-10% of IP addresses change ownership every month, as companies are bought, sold, acquired, dissolved, and change names every day. All of these events have an impact on the data we provide to our customers. Because we report on more than 26 different company data points, we have to be constantly listening to and reporting on what’s happening in the corporate world 24/7.

Around our office, you'll hear this phrase all over the halls: “no data is bad, but bad data is worse.” At KickFire, we won’t give bad data. We only pass along IP data we are confident about. We have a complex system that produces a confidence score, which measures how confident we are that a certain IP address is in use by a specific company. 

Moving beyond public IP address data and elevating your business intelligence can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns and increase revenue generation at all stages of the funnel. However, when choosing an IP data vendor, picking the right one can mean the difference between success and failure. 

If you want to learn more about KickFire’s own IP address intelligence technology, check out our guide!