How to See Who Is Visiting Your Website

Tools like Google Analytics are built to count. They tell you how many people came, which pages were popular, how long visits lasted and roughly what city the traffic came from. That is useful for judging whether your marketing is bringing people in.

What they will not tell you is who any of those people were. That is by design. Analytics reports on crowds, not individuals, so a visit from the homeowner whose roof you quoted last month looks the same as a visit from a student in another state.

There are really only three.

You add a small piece of code to your website, the same way you would add analytics. When someone browses, the visit is checked against large databases of consumer records. When the visit can be tied to a household, you see a name, a mailing address and the pages that person looked at.

Two things are worth knowing before you start. First, it does not identify everyone. A share of your visitors will be matched and the rest will stay anonymous. Second, it works for visitors in the United States, because that is where the underlying records are.

Rules on this vary from state to state and they are changing, so take this as general information and check with your own attorney if you are unsure. In practice, a responsible setup does a few things: it honors the Do Not Track setting in a visitor's browser, it tells people in your privacy policy that visits may be identified, and it gives them a way to opt out that actually works.

The simplest test is the front-porch test. If a homeowner asked how you got their name, would you be comfortable explaining it? If the answer is yes, you are probably using it well.

The mistake is opening with the fact that you saw them. Nobody enjoys hearing that they were watched. Lead with something useful about what they were looking at instead.

A homeowner who looked at three roofers on Tuesday night will likely pick one by the weekend. A postcard that lands in two or three days, or a call the next morning, puts you back in front of them while they are still deciding. A list you look at once a month is mostly a record of jobs you already lost.

Track identified visitors the way you would track any lead source: how many, how many you followed up, how many became estimates, and how many became jobs. If a month of it produces one job you would not otherwise have had, it has usually paid for itself several times over.