2025 State of the Website Visitor Identification Industry Report
The Website Visitor Data Accuracy Crisis No One Is Talking About
How We Uncovered the Massive Data Quality Problem in the Website Visitor Identity Resolution Space
In late 2024, Customers.ai engaged a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to independently verify our anonymous website visitor identification data accuracy and compare it to other providers.
Instead of a competitive race for the best accuracy, what was discovered was a concerning display of inaccurate visitor resolution data across popular anonymous visitor ID solutions.
We took the hint and partnered with multiple ecommerce brands to see how wide-spread anonymous website visitor identification inaccuracy was. Using a first-party data validation model, predicted website visitor IDs were tested against verified identities. The results?
Let Us Prove Our Data is the Best
If you’re using website visitor ID tools without knowing the accuracy of the data you’re using, people will blame you when things blow up.
If you’re an agency, your clients will leave you and you will lose all your credibility.
Stop what you’re doing and let us help you get a handle on this right away.
You owe it to your business or client to understand the quality of your visitor ID data!
Bad Data is Causing Massive Problems
Why Bad Data is Permeating the Website Visitor ID Industry
DSP Data Isn’t Built for Website Visitor ID
Most identity resolution providers rely on DSP and co-reg networks, which was designed for ad targeting (not high-accuracy identity resolution) and vulnerable to bots.
Website Visitor ID Vendors Don’t Know Their Data is Bad
Since website visitor ID tools are not original source compilers, they don’t actually know how accurate (or inaccurate) it is.Â
Obsession with Fill Rates Over Quality
The industry standard is to focus on fill rates, or the percentage of visitors you claim to be able to identify. No one has questioned the accuracy of those IDs.
Data Testing Has Been a Challenge
Until now, data testing methods have focused on sales data or consensus models, neither of which truly measure accuracy.
Quantity Masks the Problem
Email providers evaluate deliverability across your entire account. If emails from website visitor ID products are 90% inaccurate but make up a small portion of your total email list, the delivery issues can easily go unnoticed.
Website Visitor ID Tools are Costing Brands More than Money
Most brands assume that if their visitor ID provider returns a match, the data must be usable. This cognitive dissonance leads them to overlook critical flaws. The result?
- Higher Costs: Low-accuracy data means paying for more contacts while inflating ESP fees.
- Email Damage: Bounces, spam complaints, and low engagement kill deliverability.
- Ad Waste: Meta’s algorithms rely on your data—bad IDs send targeting off course.
With bad data, the damage builds over time. By the time you notice, it’s already too late.
The True Cost of Contacts
See what people are saying about competitor solutions
How Customers.ai Is Fixing Website Visitor ID Data from the Ground Up
At Customers.ai, we built a simple tool that implements a straightforward data testing protocol for calculating the accuracy of a website visitor ID data product. You can use our tool, or implement the testing protocol yourself in-house.
Step 1.
Install the pixel for Customers.ai and one or more additional providers.
Step 2.
Wait for a completed purchase to establish the TRUE identity of visitors.
Step 3.
Compare predicted visitor ID’s with your customers TRUE Identity.
Want to learn your visitor ID provider's accuracy rate on your site?
Schedule a simple test we’ll set up in 15 minutes.
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