Deep Dive: Web Intent - Clay University

Deep Dive: Web Intent

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Deep Dive: Web Intent

In today's lesson, we're diving deep into web intent tracking. Web intent is one of the most POWERFUL signals you can capture in Clay. This feature allows you to transform anonymous website visitors into qualified prospects by understanding exactly who's engaging with your content and how they're behaving on your site.

🎯 Understanding Web Intent Fundamentals

Not all website visitors are created equal. Rather than tracking every single person who lands on your homepage (which would be expensive and noisy), you should focus on high-intent behaviors that predict buying interest.

Consider these differences in visitor behavior:

Someone spending 30 seconds on your pricing page and visiting case studies shows strong buying intent

Versus…

Someone bouncing off a blog post after 5 seconds shows minimal interest

Web intent tracking helps you identify these high-value accounts. Then you can use Clay to:

Score accounts based on their engagement
Route them to the right sales reps
Create personalized outreach sequences while their interest is hot

🛠️ Setting Up Web Intent Tracking

Getting started with web intent tracking is straightforward:

Click on your workspace name in the bottom left corner of Clay
Select "Settings"
Navigate to the "Integrations" tab
Scroll down to find "Website Tracking"
Click "Add Connection" to create your first website tracking connection
Copy the JavaScript tracking snippet provided
Paste it into the <head> section of your website

If you're using platforms like Webflow, WordPress, or Shopify, paste this into your custom code section. Or if you have a dev team, send them this snippet—installation takes less than 5 minutes.

Once installed, Clay will automatically start capturing visitor data. The good news: none of this costs any credits. You only use credits when you choose to de-anonymize specific accounts.

🔄 Configuring Data Providers

Next, configure which data providers will help identify your anonymous visitors. Clay offers recommended providers, but you can customize based on your needs and budget

Each provider has different coverage rates and pricing models:

People Data Labs and Versium offer broad coverage
Clearbit specializes in B2B tech companies
Snitcher has strong European coverage

As always, Clay loves a waterfall approach 😍 If you leave on “Recommended”, Clay will try your first provider, and if it can't identify the visitor, it automatically falls back to your second provider, maximizing your identification rate.

IPs are cached for 30 days, so you're only charged once even if the same visitor returns multiple times within that window.

🧠 Setting Up Intelligent Filters

This is where you control your costs and focus on high-value visitors. You don't want to enrich every visitor from every country visiting every page.

Set up filters that match your ideal customer profile, for example:

Geography filters: Select your target countries (e.g., US, Canada, UK)
Page exclusions: Exclude low-intent pages like blogs, documentation, or careers pages
- Add URL patterns like /blog/*, /docs/*, or /careers/*
Minimum thresholds: Only track visitors who:
- Spend more than 10 seconds on your site
- Come from companies where you've seen at least 2 sessions in the past week

These filters act as a pre-qualification layer, ensuring you only spend enrichment credits on visitors who are actually evaluating your product.

📊 Piping Data into Clay Tables

Now that your tracking is configured, let's get this data into Clay:

From any Clay table (or create a new one), click "Add source" in the top left
Select "Signals"
Click on the "Website" section
Select your website connection
Configure your filters for targeted campaigns

For example, to build a table for high-intent pricing page visitors:

Set filter: Pages visited contains /pricing
Add filter: Time on page is greater than 30 seconds
Add filter: Session count is greater than 2 over the past 14 days
Set your time window to track activity from the last 14 days

Click "Save and add to table" and Clay will automatically populate your table with companies matching these criteria.

📈 Understanding Your Web Intent Data

Once data starts flowing in, you'll see several key columns automatically populated:

Company name and domain - who visited your site
Session count - how many times they've visited
First seen date - when they first hit your site
Pages visited - the specific URLs they viewed
Time on site - total engagement duration
Referral source - where they came from (Google, LinkedIn, direct, etc.)
Geographic data - city, region, country

Click into any company row to see the detailed session timeline, showing the complete journey: which pages they visited, in what order, how long they spent on each page, and their referral source for each visit.

This data is powerful for personalization - instead of generic cold emails, you can reference specific content they engaged with and tailor messaging to their demonstrated interests.

Next let’s cover three use cases for Web Intent:

Account-Based Marketing
Automated Sales Alerts
Personalized Outbound Sequences

💡 Use Case 1: Account-Based Marketing with Intent Scoring

You can combine web intent with account scoring to power your ABM motion.

Pro tip: Keep your account score separate from your intent score. They tell you different things and change at different rates:

Account score: Based on firmographics (company size, industry, revenue, tech stack) - static attributes defining your ICP
Intent score: Purely behavioral - tracks what prospects are actually doing on your site

A company might be a perfect fit based on firmographics but show zero intent signals. Or you might see massive intent spikes from companies that don't perfectly match your ICP but could still convert.

To calculate an intent score:

Add a Claygent enrichment column called "User Research Intent"
Have it categorize pages visited into meaningful buckets:
- Pricing
- Blog and Education
- Product Features
- Customer Stories
- Contact or Demo
- Homepage
Calculate engagement metrics for each category
Extract key themes from URLs visited (e.g., "AI for sales," "Salesforce integration")
Build an intent score on a 0-100 scale:
- Start with 20 points if they viewed pricing or contact pages
- Add points based on time spent (e.g., 10 points per 30 seconds on pricing)
- Set run conditions to only trigger when someone has visited 3+ unique pages

The output gives you a quantitative score for prioritization, a qualitative summary for context, and clear segmentation to route prospects appropriately.

🔔 Use Case 2: Automated Sales Alerts with Context

Once you have scoring in place, get this intelligence to your sales team:

Set up a Slack integration that pushes high-intent accounts directly into your sales channel
Add enrichments to find the company's tech stack, recent funding, and employee growth trend
Use a formula column or AI to compile all of this into a clear, actionable message

Instead of "Company X visited pricing page," your Slack alert could read:

🔥 High Intent Alert: Company X - 500 employees, $50M revenue, uses Salesforce - Visited pricing 3x this week - Downloaded ROI calculator yesterday - Intent score: 85/100 | Account fit: 92/100 Suggested action: Sarah should follow up referencing their pricing research and ROI analysis.

You can also add an enrichment column that pulls in your CRM lookup to check if this account already exists in Salesforce or HubSpot. If it does, pull the account owner, opportunity stage, and any open deals. If not, create a new opportunity.

✉️ Use Case 3: Automated Outbound Sequences with Behavioral Personalization

The third use case takes it a step further by automatically identifying the right people to contact and building personalized outreach:

When a high-intent account hits your threshold, trigger a waterfall of "Find People at Company" enrichments
Look for relevant titles (VP of Sales, Head of Marketing, Revenue Operations Manager)
Set seniority filters to start with C-suite, then fall back to VP level, then Director level
Limit results to 1-2 people per company to keep outreach focused
Enrich contacts with verified emails, LinkedIn profiles, and recent activity

Use the behavioral signals to craft messaging that speaks directly to what prospects are researching:

If they spent time on integration pages, mention how your tool connects with their existing stack
If they downloaded a pricing guide, lead with ROI and implementation timelines
If they visited security documentation, address compliance and data protection

Set up a Claygent prompt that takes the pages visited, time on site, and referral source, and generates 3-4 personalized talking points for truly customized first emails.

For example:

The CTO gets messaging referencing pricing research and addressing security concerns
The VP of Sales gets messaging focused on revenue impact and sales team efficiency
The Head of IT gets technical implementation details and compliance certifications

All of this happens automatically within minutes of the intent signal being captured, giving your sales team warm, qualified leads with personalized messaging ready to send.

For a deeper dive on personalization and Clay’s Sequencer, check out the lessons below:

🚀 What's Next

This is just the beginning of what's possible with Web Intent in Clay. As always, you can expect these features to get better and better as the platform evolves.

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