Lead Forensics vs Google Analytics: What Each One Shows

Lead Forensics vs Google Analytics is not really a head-to-head contest, because the two tools answer different questions. Google Analytics 4 counts visits and measures what people did on your site; Lead Forensics, like other visitor identification tools, tries to name the organisation behind each visit. For most B2B teams the useful answer is not "which one" but "how do they fit together", and that is the gap Scout is built to close: it names the companies behind your visits and shows each one with its own GA4 and Search Console data, in one place.

Are Lead Forensics and Google Analytics the same kind of tool?

No. They install in a similar way, but they produce different things.

Google Analytics is a measurement tool. It tells you how many sessions you had, where they came from, which pages they read and whether they converted. It reports on everyone, in aggregate.

A visitor identification tool is a prospecting tool. Lead Forensics describes its own process in four steps: a visitor arrives and "their device initiates an IP handshake with your web server, which logs their public IP address"; a tracking snippet captures the session and passes the IP to the platform; "the IP is matched against a database"; and a company record is returned.¹ Its pricing page makes the installation comparison directly: "Lead Forensics uses a small piece of code, much like Google Analytics, which tracks the IP addresses of businesses visiting a website."²

Lead Forensics' own comparison article draws the same line. It positions Google Analytics for evaluating overall website performance and Lead Forensics for B2B sales teams that want to know which businesses are visiting.³

So the honest summary is: Google Analytics gives you counts, a visitor identification tool gives you names.

Why can't Google Analytics 4 show which companies visited?

Because GA4 does not keep the one piece of data a company lookup needs, and it has no report built on it.

Google's help centre is explicit: "In Google Analytics 4, IP masking is not necessary since IP addresses are not logged or stored."⁴ For UK traffic, Google adds that "Google Analytics does not log or store IP addresses from EU, Switzerland, or UK users", and that for this traffic "IP-address data is used solely for geo-location data derivation before being immediately discarded."⁵ What survives is coarse location: city, region, country, continent and subcontinent.⁵

You can see the result in the list of dimensions GA4 exposes through its reporting API. There are location dimensions (city, region, country) and device dimensions (device category, browser, operating system), but no dimension for the network, the internet provider or the organisation a visit came from.⁶

What happened to Service Provider and Network Domain?

Older Google Analytics users will remember a free workaround. Universal Analytics had two dimensions, Service Provider and Network Domain, that showed the registered owner of the visitor's network. For a visit from a large company with its own network, that was often the company's name.

Google stopped supporting both on 4 February 2020, along with the ability to filter by ISP Organization and ISP Domain.⁷ iDimension noted at the time that the dimensions began showing "(not set)" in reports.⁸ Seer Interactive wrote a month later that it had "received no clearer communication about why Google made this change".⁷ Whatever the reason, the free method ended then, and GA4 was never built with it.

This is also why a GA4 add-on that promises company names has to do its own IP lookup outside Google Analytics. The IP address is not available inside GA4 to look up.

What does a visitor identification tool add?

It adds a name, and the context around that name. Using Lead Forensics as the example, its guide says identified records include company name, firmographics, and "pages visited, session detail, and available decision-maker contacts".¹ It is careful about what that means: "B2B website visitor identification tools do not identify individuals. The technology reveals the company, not the person." Its contact data identifies "who the likely relevant contacts are within the identified organization, not necessarily who was browsing."¹

On top of the record, the tool does the sales plumbing. Lead Forensics offers real-time alerts, with ideal customer profiles and watchlists so that "alerts are triggered selectively", and lists CRM integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive and Zoho.¹

Two limits apply to every tool in this category. First, identification works at the level of the network. A visit from a company's office connection can often be named; a visit from home broadband, a phone or public Wi-Fi usually resolves only to the internet provider. We explain that in why BT, Sky or Virgin Media "visit" your website. Second, a match is an inference, not a fact. A good tool should tell you how sure it is. Scout, for example, gives every identified company a confidence score from 1 to 99 with a one-line reason, and holds ISP, mobile, VPN and data-centre traffic in the low band (how the score works).

What does GA4 still do better?

Almost everything that is about your whole audience rather than a named few.

• Coverage. GA4 reports on every visit it measures, including the large share that no identification tool can name.
• Acquisition and campaigns. Channel, source and campaign reporting tells you which marketing actually brings people in.
• Conversions and funnels. Form fills, sign-ups and purchases, and where people drop out before them.
• Content performance. Which pages hold attention and which lose it.
• Cost. Lead Forensics' own comparison acknowledges that Google Analytics has a free version available to businesses of all sizes.³

An identification tool does not replace any of that. It shows you a subset of visits in far more detail, which is exactly what a salesperson needs and exactly what a marketer cannot plan a budget from.

Should you run both?

For most B2B sites, yes: GA4 for measurement, an identification tool for follow-up. The mistake is running them as two separate worlds, where marketing looks at GA4 dashboards and sales looks at a list of company names with no sense of how engaged each one was.

The better setup links them, so that each identified company carries its analytics context. In Scout, you connect Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, and each identified company shows its session depth, pages read and the search queries associated with its visits. Those signals feed a lead score from 0 to 100 that blends match confidence, engagement, search demand, fit with your ideal customer profile and whether you can reach contacts. If you want to start with the basics first, our guide to seeing which companies visit your website covers the free and paid options.

A simple way to decide who uses what:

• Marketing keeps GA4 as the source of truth for traffic, campaigns and conversions.
• Sales works from the identified-company feed, sorted by confidence and engagement, with alerts for accounts that matter.
• Both agree that a high-confidence company that read your pricing page twice is worth a call, and that a low-confidence ISP match is not.

Lead Forensics vs Google Analytics, and where Scout fits

Information checked 27 September 2026, from each vendor's own pages. The third column is Scout, which is our product: it does the identification job and uses your Google Analytics and Search Console data, so you do not have to choose.

Lead Forensics' strengths are real: a proprietary database it describes as "built and maintained solely for their solution", selective alerts and a broad set of CRM integrations.¹ If you are comparing identification tools rather than analytics, our Lead Forensics alternative page sets out how Scout approaches the same job, and the guide to website visitor identification explains the method in plain terms.

Keep GA4. Add Scout's snippet for 14 days, with no card needed, and see the companies behind your GA4 sessions, each with a confidence score, the reason for it, the searches that brought them and a lead score that ranks who to call first. Start your free trial, or see plans by identified visits per month.

Scout is not affiliated with Lead Forensics. Lead Forensics is a trade mark of its owner. Information checked 27 September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Does Google Analytics show IP addresses?

No. Google states that in Google Analytics 4 IP addresses are not logged or stored. For UK, EU and Swiss traffic the IP address is used only to derive coarse location, such as city and country, and is then discarded.

Can I see company names in GA4 with a plugin?

Not from GA4's own data, because the IP address a company lookup needs is not available in GA4. Any add-on that shows company names is running its own IP lookup outside Google Analytics, so it is effectively a separate visitor identification tool.

Is Lead Forensics a replacement for Google Analytics?

No. Lead Forensics identifies businesses behind visits and supports sales follow-up, while Google Analytics measures traffic, campaigns and conversions across all visitors. Lead Forensics' own comparison positions the two for different jobs, and most B2B teams run an analytics tool alongside any identification tool.

Why did the Service Provider report disappear from Google Analytics?

Google stopped supporting the Service Provider and Network Domain dimensions in Universal Analytics on 4 February 2020, and they began showing "(not set)". Google did not publish a detailed reason, and GA4 was never built with an equivalent dimension.

Sources

1. Lead Forensics: A Technical Guide to B2B Website Visitor Identification leadforensics.com
2. Lead Forensics: Pricing leadforensics.com
3. Lead Forensics: Lead Forensics vs. Google Analytics, a comprehensive comparison leadforensics.com
4. Google Analytics Help: [UA] IP masking in Universal Analytics [Legacy] support.google.com
5. Google Analytics Help: EU, Switzerland, or UK-focused data and privacy support.google.com
6. Google for Developers: API dimensions and metrics (GA4 Data API) developers.google.com
7. Seer Interactive: Moving Forward After 'Service Provider' and 'Network Domain' Removal from Google Analytics seerinteractive.com
8. iDimension: Google Analytics no longer supports Service Provider and Network Domain dimensions idimension.com