Alternative to Pardot Visitor ID

My company has been using Pardot’s free “Visitor ID” service for quite some time now. Our sales people really love getting an email each day showing them their Top 20 Visitors. The report was just the right amount of information and was very easy to understand.

But, all good things come to an end and recently Pardot has said: “VisitorID will reach end-of-life August 20, 2012. The application will remain available for as long as possible but will no longer be monitored or supported.” The service also broke my companies website for a couple hours the other day b/c the javascript file you have to include on your website was blocking for a very long time.

I was told this was too much effort for their engineers to maintain… but when asked if it would remain an option in their paid version the answer was yes.

So, i’ve been investigating an alternative. So far I’ve found a way to make Google Analytics mimic the output of Visitor ID. In short, you create a report on Service Providers. Then apply a filter… If you do something like contains “Universities” you’ll get a list of all the visitors that came froma University internet connection. I compared this to the data to what I received from Pardot and it’s identical.

The only difference is Pardot seems to automatically captitalize the names which looks prettier. So, “university of kansas” —> “University of Kansas”

I’m still experimenting with what I can do in google analytics and see if I can get an emailed report going daily. If you’re in the same spot as me and are looking for an alternative now, leave me a comment and i’ll make it a higher priority to post something sooner. Or if you know of another service that offers this please let me know.

Note: For the record, I would have been willing to pay a reasonable fee for VisitorID (~$20/mo). But, there is no such option. They completely did away with the free offering and their entry level marketing packages start at $1000/mo. Their packages do come with an additional other things for that price tag… but we’re just not looking for something that advanced right now.

UPDATE Aug 22

I found out how to get this data through Google Analytics. Here’s a usable query (the link will bring you to a query builder site which will let you customize the query to include your analytics account and modify the filters):

http://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/explorer/?dimensions=ga%253AnetworkLocation&metrics=ga%253Avisits&filters=ga%253AnetworkLocation!~(cellco%257Cservice%2520provider%2520corporation%257Csprint%257Ccomcast%257Cat.t%257Ccharter%257Ct-mobile%257Ccox%2520comm%257Cmetropcs%257Cverizon%257Cnot%2520set%257Croad%2520runner)&sort=-ga%253Avisits&start-date=2012-08-08&end-date=2012-08-22&max-results=50

My plan is to invoke this query every night and programatically do something cool with the data like display it on a dashboard in our CRM. More on that later…

UPDATE AUG 27

Got a pretty sweet Google Analytics to SugarCRM integration working.

Update September 11, 2012

Just posted my solution on

Blake Robertson | 2 Comments | Share Article Permalink

tagged CRM, Google Analytics, Marketing Automation