Identifying individual website visitors (B2C) by postcode and address

First, let’s be clear: you can’t track the one specific person who came to your website.

But you CAN get close.

We’ll show you how postcode tracking leads to new (B2C) business gained, if following a specific method.

Here’s how it works …

 

Switch on 

Using A1WebStats (which is available on a 30 day free trial), log into your account and go to Options – Settings and switch on the geolocation option, as shown below:

 

Wait

When that’s switched on, your website visitors will see a box pop up when they visit.  This depends on the browser they’re using.  Here’s how it looks in Chrome:

 

If people click ‘Block’ then they can’t be tracked in any more depth.

When people click ‘Allow’ then that gives permission to get the postcode of their physical location at the time of visiting your website.  This will often be when they’re at home.

You may be thinking: “that’s an annoying box to appear – won’t that put people off?”.

We can’t control that box – it’s the web browser protecting the viewer.

However, we ourselves have been surprised at the high levels of people that allow themselves to be tracked – a range of 10-24% of visitors is normal.

This means that you will see the postcode and partial address of those website visitors that allowed themselves to be tracked.

 

Review

The A1WebStats system allows you to manually review postcode-located website visitors, or receive a regular (daily or weekly) automated email containing that information.

Here’s an example of a postcode-located residential visitor:

 

It’s important to note that the address shown may not be the precise address of the website visitor.  In some cases it is, but not all – it’s an address that’s linked to the postcode.

It’s also much more accurate when the website visitor has used a mobile device to go to your website.

What you need to do next is to look up the postcode to determine:

1. How many residential properties there are in that postcode area (under 10-15 is generally good).
2. What the value of those properties are (because you may not want to focus on people who are living in lower value properties).

This example below, taken from data used by a chiropractor, shows relatively few houses in that postcode area, plus the values of some of those properties.   These will be people who can afford chiropractic services …

This video explains the typical process you would go through, reviewing which postcode-located visitors are useful to you, and which aren’t:

 

Action

Having reviewed your website visitors identifiable by postcode, you will have a shortlist of postcode areas that you think would be worth targeting.

At this stage, you still don’t know which property within that postcode area was the person who went to your website.

Here’s a typical strategy used by A1WebStats customers who want to achieve more from postcode-located visitors to their websites:

1. Identify postcode areas of less than 15 properties.
2. Send out a pack to each property (this would typically cost £1-2 per pack, including postage).  The pack would be addressed meaningfully.  For example, if someone had been to the back pain pages within the website of a chiropractor, it would be addressed to: “The person soon to be happy living without back pain”.
3. While most of the recipients of the pack will not need the information, the one person who went to your website will do.  They won’t realise that they’ve been targeted and will likely think it’s a coincidence that their property has received something from a business whose website they had been to.
4. That one person will now have something tangible in their hands.  Something that they can review at their leisure, and that will further encourage them to make contact with you.

 

Numbers

Let’s look at some numbers here, based on someone running this as an experiment (which can be done within the free 30 day trial of A1WebStats) …

Postcodes identified: 50

Postcodes worth targeting/without too many properties: 25

Total properties within the 25 postcode areas: 300

Cost per pack sent: £1.50

Total cost of packs: £450

Those may look like sizeable numbers, but the experiment can be run with lower postcodes/properties.

If those numbers above related to a chiropractor who charges £25 for their first session, then typically has customers who continue for more treatment sessions, the chiropractor needs to have a total of 18 sessions to cover their costs.

If one customer pays £25 then returns 3 times, then the chiropractor only needs 5 of those customers to then be in a small profit.  That would be 5 customers out of 25 postcode areas.  In reality they’d likely gain more.

Add to this, there’s the benefit of the happy customers who then refer the chiropractor onto their own family and friends, so you can see how the initial investment can become something much greater.

 

Testing

One of the reasons that we provide a free 30 day trial of A1WebStats is so that you can test out such strategies on a small scale.  We’ve seen customers spend only £100 on a test run to their postcode-located visitors, and gain four times that in value back, so it is worth experimenting with – particularly as you know that people from specific postcodes have been to your website, and so are an opportunity to convert into business for you.