"Data literacy" involves being able to identify, manage and intelligently use an enormous amount of information from a huge range of sources. And it's not even as simple as offline sources vs online. One of the lesser known areas of online data is IP address intelligence – a potentially rich and often untapped source of customer insight. Here, Caspar Craven, co-Founder of IDM Corporate members Trovus (who isn't the person in the photo!), provides your very own cheat sheet.

1. What is an IP address? An Internet Protocol address - a numerical label assigned to a computer connecting to the internet. It is basically the address where the machine you use, connects to the internet. There are fundamentally two types:

• A static IP address will have a specific name attached to it, for example Cisco, Touchstone Limited or Coventry University
• A dynamic IP address will be owned by an Internet Service Provider and will generally have their name attached to it - such as British Telecom, AT&T or Tiscali.

2. How many IP addresses are there in the world? The number of available addresses is only limited by the current IP technology in use - IPv4, which allows for 4,294,967,296 possible unique addresses. As things stand, we're running out of these addresses, which means the internet will have to stop growing! Thankfully, we're in the process of migrating to IPv6, which uses hex characters to create the address as opposed to the numerical base of IPV4. IPv6 increases the volume of IP addresses from today's 4.3bn to 3.403×1038... Enough for the foreseeable future anyway.

3. Is it legal to track IP addresses? * Yes, because they are available in the public domain. IP addresses are free to look up and there are free tools where you can do this, such as ip-lookup.net. * And, as IP addresses can only show information at an organisation and not an individual level, tracking them doesn't contravene the Data Protection Act.

4. Why does this matter to me? Think about your own browsing habits. How many B2B websites do you visit and then immediately buy something? But how many B2B websites do you visit to research or confirm information? The reality is that websites, particularly in the B2B space, aren't simply there to sell. The most successful B2B sites are part of a relationship building process.

Fact 1: 83% of B2B buyers research online before making a purchase decision. You will most likely be completely unaware of the vast majority of this activity.

Fact 2: Less than 1% of people do something to communicate with the website owner when they visit a website.

Having IP address intelligence means that, out the of 10,000 or so organisations that your company would ideally like to target, you can identify which ones are actively seeking you out, responding to your campaigns and passing that message around internally. Subsequent marketing activity can then actively target those organisations specifically interested in you, your products and services.

5. What intelligence can I get? IP address profiling is where you can build a company profile using a resolved IP address as the base element. Activity from that organisation can then be aggregated into a single view, which, over time, builds up a rich company profile to include:

• * The number of different visitors from an organisation
• * The number of revisits from that organisation
• * The search terms each person used
• * The pages each person viewed
• * Any referring site that has brought a visitor to your site
• * An immediate reporting and alerting system to instantly tell you who is visiting and why

6. What can I use the information for? Applications of IP address intelligence include:

• * Save time by prioritising key activities
• * Increase the conversion rates of prospects into clients
• * Make the marketing team the centre of excellence and knowledge because they provide business critical information to business development teams
• * Make marketing a visible and demonstrable activity by showing which organisations are responding to each campaign you are running
• * Increase the cross selling rate to your existing clients
• * Identify and target new opportunities

7. Can the IP address show me the name of the person? No. If it did, there would be a danger of contravening the Data Protection Act as pointed out above. But you can find intelligent ways to use the information that IP address profiling produces.

8. How many IP addresses can I actually resolve? This depends on who you are targeting and where they are coming from. If you are a B2C business targeting mums at home, you are likely to have a very high proportion of traffic that only resolves to the ISP. If you are a B2B business on the other hand, targeting very specific organisations, then you are far more likely to resolve recognisable company names at a much higher rate, sometimes as high as 70 or 80% for certain organisations.

9. Is it just big companies that have IP addresses? Not necessarily. It will depend on a number of factors including:

• Personal Preference – A company regardless of size may choose to have a static IP address range.
• ISP Policy – Some ISP naming conventions allocate static ranges to specific clients
• Internal Requirements – Companies large and small may very well have a need to "fix" a place for themselves on the web, for reasons specific to them and their business.

10. How can I access this information? Anyone can access the data, if you take the time to analyse your log files or learn to configure Google Analytics and manually sift out the non-relevant ISP data. But Trovus has spent many years developing the technology to package, present and unlock the potential of the information for clients quickly, accurately and easily.

If you'd like to speak to Trovus to understand how IP address intelligence could work for you please go to: www.trovus.co.uk/contact

This news comes from the Institute of Direct Marketing and the website www.b2balliance.info which brings together best practice guidelines and other key information on a range of B2B Marketing & Communication topics from a powerful alliance of specialist trade organisations.