Whether you sell B2C or B2B, the worst case is identifying 5% of your website visitors and the best case is 30% However, those percentages can still provide highly useful information that you can capitalise on to get more sales.
Understanding more about those who visit your website is a competitive advantage for both B2C and B2B businesses.
For B2C businesses, identifying visitors by their home address enables personalised offers (for example, putting a brochure through the doors of houses that are known to have visited your website).
For B2B businesses, knowing the name and exact business location of identifiable companies that visited your website opens up opportunities to reach out to people within those businesses.
In both cases, you can’t identify the actual person from each location – you just get the address or company name.
So: how much of this information can actually be identified?
The short answers to the percentage of your website visitors can be identified by address are:
Those percentage ranges are probably lower than you’d expect them to be.
Whether you sell B2C or B2B, of every 100 visitors to your website, some will be at a business location that can be identified by IP address and others may be from home locations or business locations that can’t be identified by IP address alone.
The majority will be either unidentifiable or will be irrelevant traffic to your website.
I use the word irrelevant to refer to people in locations that you don’t serve, and also people that may not fit your target audience.
For example, you may have a website page that makes you visible in Google when people type phrases related to the topic of the page (e.g. how to spray paint widgets) and although a tiny percentage of those people may be in the market to buy what you offer, the vast majority may be just looking for free information, and many of those will be from outside your geographical target area.
This means that you could have many website visitors who will never get to your core service or product pages, and who are also unidentifiable.
In the case of B2B in particular, many people sometimes work from home (so can’t easily be identified as being from a company unless they are using a VPN). Those same people could also be accessing your website from a mobile device wherever they are (e.g. waiting in traffic, killing time).
So whether your focus is B2B or B2C, and whether low (5-10%) or higher (20-30%) of website visitors identifiable, my point is that the majority can’t be identified in any way.
The percentages focus on both companies and home addresses identification so I’ll cover them separately here …
You may be wondering why there’s a wide range of ‘company’ website visitors that can be identified by tracking software, so here’s a comparison:
This is why two completely different companies targeting different types of people, and with differing website content and marketing, will see different percentages of identifiable companies going to their website.
That’s one reason why it’s important to take a free trial of such identification software before making any decisions about whether it’s worth paying for afterwards.
In the B2C world, although the 10-30% identification range is better, many website visitors don’t give permission to be tracked, which is covered in more detail in the next section and is why 70-90% can’t be identified.
Here’s a comparison of two B2C-focused businesses who get widely different percentages of home addresses identified …
How can you tell whether you’d get 10% or 30% (or somewhere inbetween)? Taking a free trial of this type of tracking software is important for you to assess the percentage of, and value of those home addresses identified.
Home address identification relies on geolocation technology, which requires the visitor to grant permission via a popup request in their browser. If you’ve ever been to a website that has a popup that asks if it can share your location, then you’ll be familiar with this.
Once permission is given, the software can identify the general home location of 10-30% of visitors.
For the other 70-90% of visitors, there’s no way to identify their home address if they haven’t given that permission via the browser pop-up box.
For businesses targeting consumers (B2C), this capability is useful because it enables them to post something to those identifiable properties that they know have been to their website (and also know what the person looked at page by page).
For example, a builder could use this data to identify homes where people have been to their website and have looked at their pages about home extensions they’ve built. If that builder had 100 people look at their home extensions pages within a month, and they identified 20% by home address, then that’s 20 opportunities to send brochures focused on home extensions to those home addresses. It only takes one of those to make contact to be hugely profitable.
Even on the low end of percentages (10% of homes identified), if a website has upwards of 200 visitors per month, and can see 10% of the home addresses that visited various pages of their website, then that’s very much information that’s useful.
Business name identification mostly uses IP-based tracking, a method that requires no active interaction or permission from the website visitor.
The software matches IP addresses to business names by using a database of available IP data. In some cases, geolocation technology is used to supplement IP-based identification for greater accuracy.
For B2B-focused organisations, identifying 5-20% of visitors by their business name is just the starting point which then requires investigation into the people within those businesses who could be worth contacting (knowing that someone from the business was interested in the product or service on offer).
For example, a metal parts provider can identify businesses visiting their website, assess their interest based on the pages they viewed, and tailor follow-up communication with people who could be prospects within those businesses.
The alternative is to be unaware of which businesses are actively looking for products or services, who are identified by competitors who want to salvage more from that initial website visit.
Using the low percentage of 5% as an example, say a business had 400 website visitors in a month and only 5% (20) could be identified as companies, and only four of those (20%) looked to be of significant interest, that’s still four opportunities to reach out to people in those businesses.
It is a numbers game though (as well as the skill of the sales resources who reach out to people within the identifiable companies that have visited a website). If one out of 400 became a sale then that sounds low, but if the cost of the companies-tracking software isn’t high, then it could be worth it.
Setting expectations is important – especially when looking at the low end (5-10%) of identifiable website visitors.
Those are of course the worst case scenarios and the reality amongst my software customers is typically in the middle of those 10-30% or 5-20% ranges.
I feel it’s important to be very clear that nothing can identify high percentages of website visitors, but also, that those percentages that can be identified can be hugely beneficial.
Here are some simple examples (whether B2B or B2C) …
You get the idea – there are numerous resulting numbers of identifiable visitors possible, depending on your website traffic levels and levels of people who can be identified.
What matters are the percentages that YOU get and the only way to get that is via taking the free 30 day trial I offer, which will show you what percentage and number of your website visitors can be identified.
Of course, having information about identifiable homes or businesses visiting your website is only one part of what’s needed. The other part would be your processes and resources to follow up on that useful information of who is actively looking to buy your types of services or products.
If you have any questions related to this, please do contact me and I’ll be happy to answer them.