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RB2B is taking the market by storm. After all, Adam Robinson and is team are geniuses when it comes to LinkedIn marketing. There's no doubt about it. When it comes to de-anonymizing anonymous website visitors, they have made their mark. However, is it the best option on the market? At Identity Matrix, we think the answer is a resounding NO.
For starters, RB2B de-anonymizes just 10-20% of website visitors and only provides LinkedIn profiles. Identity Matrix de-anonymizes 50-70% of website visitors, while also providing industry-leading contact information.
Why De-Anonymize Website Visitors?
Why use a tool like RB2B or Identity Matrix in the first place?
1) Accelerate Business Growth
Even the best B2B websites convert just 2-3% of web traffic. You spend so much on buying visitors through paid media, SEO, etc. Even organic traffic requires time and money. And, the sad reality is you're going to waste 98% of your budget on site visitors that never convert. That's why companies like Identity Matrix and RB2B are so valuable.
You can drastically accelerate business growth when you identify visitors that are in-market and high-intent. If you run a B2B website, chances are the vast majority of web traffic is not on your site for "kicks and giggles". Instead, they're looking for something specific. But, most don't have the courage to opt-in and take a demo.
When you identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) on your website, it means your sales and marketing teams can nurture and reach out to leads that can become future customers faster than simply hoping they opt-in.
2) Targeted Marketing Efforts
The reality is that the best way to get more deals is to target the right prospect at the right time. While there are automation tools that claim to identify "intent", that data is often a lagging indicator of what a company was looking for and already found. Plus, knowing large companies were looking for a specific solution isn't helpful - you have no idea who you should reach out to.
When you identify anonymous website visitors like you can with Identity Matrix or RB2B, you're able to accelerate the customer journey and reach out to the exact person looking for a solution like yours in real time.
3) Help Users Find What They're Looking For
When you know not only who is on your site, but what users find most interesting on your site, you are able to reach out with more helpful information that influences the buyer journey. Every company wants to increase revenue, but they often do it with a shotgun approach.
People love when you reach out to them with the exact information they're looking for in the moment. When you see a visit to your site on specific pages centered around a certain topic, you're able to have your sales team reach out to that person with hyper-personalized messaging that builds credibility and rapport. Your sales team is put in a better position to seal the next deal.
How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors
Identity Matrix, RB2B, and others in the world of de-anonymizing website visitors are using a variety of methods to show you visitors identified.
Identifying IP Addresses
It's no secret that you can identify the company someone works for by looking at the location of the IP addresses on your website. This has been around for decades. However, this can be a terrible mistake for identifying an ideal account, let alone person, for a two main reasons:
1) Mis-Identified Accounts
Take someone sitting in a Marriott as an example. Someone might be traveling and sitting in the hotel lobby or bar, but they work for ABC company. This person is going to show up looking like Marriott was on your website. Simply put, no, they weren't.
2) Remote Employees
When you work from home, your IP address can be shared with the entire neighborhood. Not only will you show up as working for your internet service provider (ISP), but you could be sharing IP addresses with, quite literally, dozens of other people at a single time.
Furthermore, if you track IP addresses, you might identify the wrong family member in a household. Your target prospect might show, but it could very easily be their spouse or others in the home as well. There's zero reliability in this.
Who is using IP tracking?
While Identity Matrix does not use IP tracking to identify visitors, RB2B certainly does. Their website explains that they use a mix of 3rd party cookies and IP addresses, which aren't reliable either for reasons described next.
3rd Party Cookies
If you're in marketing, you probably know that 3rd party cookies are getting phased out. While Google has paused their plan to get rid of them completely, Safari and Chrome are both instituting easier opt-outs for visitors to skirt around being tracked with 3rd party cookies.
A 3rd party cookie is essentially a tracking script placed inside your users' browsers. This lets you track them to other websites and helps you track down who they are eventually. However, this is becoming more and more unreliable.
RB2B does in fact used 3rd party cookies, but their rate of identifying website visitors is going to fall fairly dramatically as these are ruled out. Identity Matrix does not look at 3rd party cookies in any way, shape, or form.
Device ID Matching
For website visitors that are on a mobile device, a device ID can be captured. When a user opts into partner marketing through email service providers, publishing networks, etc., the company where they opted-in doesn't just capture the email provided. Device IDs and other information are captured as well.
When you go to a website where your device ID was also used to opt-in somewhere else on the internet, companies like Identity Matrix and RB2B are able to match that data nearly in real-time. Both companies use this method for tracking, as it's a hyper-accurate way to get amazing data quality. On top of that, roughly 50% of all website traffic is via mobile devices.
1st Party Cookies
Another form of cookie is called server-side tracking, or also known as 1st party cookies. This is a form of tracking script that operates on your server, not on the user's browser. It means you're in full control of what you do and don't collect, rather than being at the whim of Chrome, Safari, etc.
The downside to 1st party cookies is that they can't follow a user from your website to someone else's. There's no way to do this. However, that also lessens the "creepy" factor. You're stuck with the data that was available in the site visit on your exact website.
The way this works is by taking the 1st party cookies captured and matching them to publishing networks, email service providers, and more. This is similar to the device ID methodology mentioned above.
Both Identity Matrix and RB2B use this methodology, although to varying degrees. RB2B primarily uses 3rd party cookies, which are fading away.
Hashed Emails (HEM)
In your browser, you have what is called a hashed email. For example, if you're logged into Chrome, you have what is an anonymous email stored in your browser. This is called a hashed email (HEM)
When you opt-in to partner marketing on any website, that company is also collecting your HEM. That enables companies like Identity Matrix to match your HEM captured to the email that you opted-in with elsewhere.
RB2B does not seem to used hashed emails based on documentation provided on their website. However, Identity Matrix uses this as one or our core ways to identify anonymous website visitors with amazing data quality.
RB2B v. Identity Matrix Comparison
Now that you have an idea of how both companies de-anonymizes website users, let's dive into a more direct comparison of the two.
RB2B Overview
Retention.com, created by Adam Robinson, was started as a way to de-anonymize web users for e-commerce companies. They aimed to help B2C marketing efforts by providing emails of leads. RB2B ended up coming as a brainchild of Retention.com as a B2B version of the product.
It's customers are primarily very small, early-stage companies with little to no revenue. The reason is simple: they have a forever-free plan.
The Pros of RB2B
RB2B is great for super early-stage companies that are only looking for the LinkedIn profile of their website leads. If you have a sales team that can spend time scraping data from LinkedIn and eventually reaching out to the most engaged users, it could be an option for you.
Plus, it's hard not to like the forever-free plan that they are known for. However, information provided is very limited.
The Cons of RB2B
To start, RB2B only de-anonymizes 10-20% of US website visitors. This leaves nearly 80% of your traffic, that could be high-intent and in-market, left to the wayside.
Because the company only provides LinkedIn profiles, and some email addresses thrown in the mix, it leaves your sales and marketing teams to scrape additional information, requiring additional tools. RB2B doesn't provide any mobile phones, doesn't verify information in real-time, and will take resources to make it a true part of your sales stack.
Furthermore, RB2B has a very limited lead scoring model. While you can have "hot pages", the lead score model doesn't take into account both users' engagement and ideal customer profile (ICP) filtering. Therefore, you have to weed through a lot of "noise" to find the leads that will actually promote revenue.
Identity Matrix Overview
Identity Matrix, developed by Stephen Lowisz, is a tool that de-anonymizes 50-70% of US website visitors. Compared to RB2B, this is 3x or more traffic identified.
Furthermore, Identity Matrix is intended to be an all-in-one intelligence suite, not just another tool in your sales or marketing stack.
Identity Matrix Pros
In addition to the vast majority of website visitors being de-anonymized, Identity Matrix helps marketing and sales drive revenue through key metrics and analytics not provided by anyone else. These include:
- Full contact info including mobile phones
- Integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier, etc.
- Visual page paths filtered by ICP
- Proprietary lead scoring model
- Real-time, verified data
With data that can't be found on any other platform, not just RB2B, Identity Matrix stands out as a leader for SMBs and enterprise marketers alike. It improves CRO insights, routes leads to your sales team so they can sequence leads, and gives you the ability to focus on the right prospects at the right time.
Identity Matrix Cons
The negative to Identity Matrix comes from the lack of a free-forever plan. While the company does offer a free trial, the resources required to de-anonymize website visitors at the rate it does, plus providing a database of real-time information on each lead, demands a commitment from users in the form of a small, monthly fee.
Which Technology is Best for Your Success?
If you're a very small team with limited resources, RB2B might be your best path to lead identification. Capturing 10-20% of your website traffic is certainly better than nothing. The benefits of doing something significantly outweigh the alternative.
For companies that don't want to deal with the additional software required to make RB2B work successfully or want identification a far superior number of leads, Identity Matrix is the route to go.
The insights provided by RB2B and Identity Matrix are hard to compare. RB2B is surpassed by Identity Matrix on every level. If your business is looking to sell more, have flexible integration capabilities, and marketing analytics all in one software, Identity Matrix is the way to go.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do RB2B and Identity Matrix do?
Both tools are used for gaining insights into who is on your website, not just which account. This enables you to improve your success rate of creating opportunities out of visitors, whether they opt in or not.
How do these tools work?
Both RB2B and Identity Matrix use what is considered digital fingerprinting to figure out who is on your site. While RB2B leans into 3rd party cookies, which are going away, both companies leverage 1st party cookies and device IDs as well. These data points captured or compared to databases of partner-marketing opt-ins.
Which Software is Right for Me?
RB2B and Identity Matrix are obviously competitors; however, they're both great tools depending on your use case. If you have few employees, resources, and web traffic, RB2B could be a good tool for identifying a small portion of contacts on your website.
Identity Matrix is great for companies with multiple sellers that conduct outbound sequences and find the number of leads identified crucial. With 3-7x more contacts identified than RB2B, sellers are able to access data not found anywhere else. In addition, marketers can conduct analysis on ICP behavior on websites and stand out from the competition more easily.
How Much Do RB2B and Identity Matrix Cost?
RB2B does have a free-forever plan that provides limited contacts (and no contact info) for tiny companies just looking to dip their toe into de-anonymization. After that, pricing starts at $119 per month for 200 de-anonymized leads.
Identity Matrix has a free trial and then plans start at $149 per month, which provides access to 750+ de-anonymized leads with full contact info: mobile phones, LinkedIn, corporate and personal emails, and much more.
Are these solutions legal?
Yes, both RB2B and Identity Matrix solutions are legal. They follow GDPR, CCPA, and NYPA compliance. The reason it is legal is that contacts provided by both have opted in to partner marketing. In addition, once identified, each lead is enriched with publicly available data from LinkedIn and thousands of other data sources.
