• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 12, 2010

If you knew in real time who would visit your Web site, what would you do differently? Demandbase plans to release an API Wednesday that identifies Web visitors just before they reach the site. The service, Real-Time ID Service -- geared toward the business-to-business (B2B) industry -- allows the company to serve up a custom message to clients.

The technology identifies the browser's IP address and matches it to the business office stored in the company's database with thousands of client names and locations. It aims to improve conversion rates by customizing messages, measuring responses, and reducing the number of questions in Web forms.

Real-Time ID Service works without cookies or personally identifiable identification (PII), but rather mapping the IP address to a business office location through the API. It works similar to the way ad networks target dynamic ads. This technology relies on the way the browser requests information from the Web site. Within five milliseconds, the API can determine the direction of the browser and serve up the content.

It gets a bit technical, but Demandbase built a proprietary database that maps IP addresses to business-office locations. "We put it on the cloud wrapped in Web services, so it's lightning fast," says Chris Golec, Demandbase chief executive officer.

Demandbase's API can plug into a company's CRM, Web analytics, marketing automation or CMS platform to provide more information to serve up personalized content to the person visiting a company's Web site. Industry research firm Outsell estimated that in 2010, B2B companies will spend $129 billion on marketing programs, with more than $52 billion spent online and half that amount going toward corporate Web site projects.

The significant investment has not paid off for the average B2B marketer, however, with an average of 97% of visits resulting in zero action. Real-time identification of business visitors using Demandbase's platform allows marketers to provide a real-time Web experience. Marketers also connect offline and online response for measuring multichannel attribution.

The Real-Time ID Service scores and integrates more than 20 million contact records from Dun & Bradstreet, Jigsaw, Edgar Online, Harte-Hanks, Hoovers, LexisNexis, and NetProspex into its Business Resolution Platform.

The combination of the multisourced data platform overlaid with industry information and hundreds of millions of monthly Web visits from more than 2,000 B2B Web sites provides an advantage in identifying business traffic in real-time and then doing something significant with the information based on the relevancy to a target audience or a specific company name.