It is quite a rough day for all tools, services, agencies, etc. when the main data provider decides to stop supporting the very vital data that is needed to convert website visitors to sales leads.

Unfortunately there is always a chance for this if you rely on 3rd party services. One day you can find yourself in the deep water without a swimbelt. Now let’s see what are the chances to stay on the surface when this happens!

What happened to Google Analytics?

As most likely you’re already aware, the network location and network domain dimensions are no longer available in Google Analytics, taking effect on 4th February 2020.

You can see it for yourself: look up technology/network in GA after the above mentioned date, the only value you’ll find is “not set”, which is not much of a clue for AI data prediction tools, such as Leadberry.

So the way we identified leads for you until now is gone. This is not just a temporary data outage, it’s gone for good.

There was always a slight chance this would happen - there was word about it here and there. It was always like a Sword of Damocles: whenever the main source of data decides to change the way to go, we’ll have to take a new direction too.

What will happen to Leadberry?

We knew that once we can’t rely on GA, the only way to go is to set up Leadberry’s very own tracking code that can obtain the visitor data that is now missing from GA.

So we did.

From now on, Leadberry can only identify companies visiting your website if you install the custom tracking code provided by us. You can see how to do it here.

We’ll still retrieve the rest of the visitor metrics from Google Analytics. So time on site, pages visited, source of visit, etc. will keep coming from there. That means you’ll have to connect your sites to GA plus copy-paste the tracking code too to your site(s), but this is just one more step than it was.

What is the downside of this?

First of all, we know that connecting with Analytics by 2 clicks was much more convenient than dealing with the tracking code. So this may be a disadvantage.

But here is the thing: there won’t be any other way to collect anonymous visitor information from now on, only custom snippets. So to say so, this is the only way now. No more 2 click lead generation installation.

What is the upside of this?

A custom tracking code allows a more accurate visitor identification. This is because with that we can track the actual IP address of the visiting company (GA stopped providing IPs long ago - this is why we used network locations). It also leads not just to more captured companies, but to more accurate visitor data as well.

Back then we decided to go for a Google Analytics based service because getting started with the tool indeed took just a few clicks. Moreover, many companies are not really willing to place an extra tracking script to their sites, and we didn’t want to lose them either. Well, the decision is not up to our clients or up to us now. This way or no way.

What’s next?

If you’d like to start (or continue) using Leadberry, you’ll have to install the tracking code, as mentioned above.

Many lead gen tools used this or a hybrid solution already, so there is nothing new under the sun after all.

B2B lead generation and anonymous visitor identification tools have the option to start using their own tracking codes or vanish. We aim to head for the first direction :)