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The Internet Communications Programming Technology

Best Means of Knowing Your Audience? 32

Posted by Cliff from the getting-to-know-you dept.
Pieroxy asks: "As an administrator of various websites, I am always eager to know about my audience. Without going through the hassle of setting up polls and other information gathering systems, the http headers (and connection) are the primary obvious source of information available. However, getting meaningful information out of a User-Agent string or out of an IP address can be trickier than it looks. There are some websites out there that seems to provide some of this information (User-Agent detection, User-Agent explanation, IP localization, or even an IP-to-country mapping), but none seems to be either free, in a usable form or even complete. Would anyone have pointers for free code/service that can help match a User-Agent String with an OS and a browser? A service/code that would match an IP address with a geographic region? Anything else that one can use to try and have a clearer view of its audience?"
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Best Means of Knowing Your Audience? More

Best Means of Knowing Your Audience?

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  • Trickier than it looks? Try largely impossible... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by datastalker ( 775227 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @03:44PM (#11913408) Homepage
    Try near impossible, since most of that stuff (ie, UserAgent) can be changed at will.

    (Yes, I know most people don't, so you'll get a fair estimate, but you'll never know for sure.)

    • How many users change their UA's or anything else fo that kind?
      One percent? I would guess much less than that though.
      • Few people change their User Agent string, but it comes back to "Why?".

        Unless your userbase is radically different from everyone elses, most will use IE, 8% will use Gecko based browsers, and a piddling amount will use something else. Similarly the vast majority will be using Windows, mostly XP, and a couple of % Linux or MacOSX. Unless you are a technical site the only use I could see in this information is to discover you broke something.

        There are a zillion tools for discovering this, but unless you are

  • awstats? (Score:5, Informative)

    by davez0r ( 717539 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @03:44PM (#11913420)
    http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

    matches user agent strings to browser, ip to country, etc

  • tried and true techniques (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, an ex of mine said the best way to really know somebody was to fuck them (right before she dumped me).

    So, that's the best advice I can come up with at the moment. Your mileage may vary.

  • marketing research (Score:3, Informative)

    by madsenj37 ( 612413 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @03:59PM (#11913563)
    Your gonna have to shell out money to pay for marketing research.

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @03:59PM (#11913567) Homepage Journal
    OK, before going into any of the "How" questions (How do I gather this information? How do I assure its validity?) let us as the more fundamental question:

    Why do you want to gather this information?

    For example, why do you care what browser and OS I am running? Unless you are selling computer software or hardware, you shouldn't give a rat's testicles what my computer is - so why do you need to know?

    Why do you care where I am located? Are you trying to guess what the shipping costs will be? Are you trying to gauge whether your site's content is applicable or legal in my area?

    Are you really sure this information is going to do you any good, even if you can aquire it?

    And having aquired it, how are you going to insure that anything you've found out will NOT be "leaked" to somebody else? Considering the ChoicePoint et. al. fiascos, *I* would not want to gather one bit of information more than I absolutely needed - information you do not have you cannot leak.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by monkeyserver.com ( 311067 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:12PM (#11913707) Homepage Journal
      While I do think that you have a somewhat valid point, I believe that knowing more about your audiance is always good. Ideally you would want more probing info about your user than their browser type, OS, Screen Rez, or country of origin. However, if that is all you have then it is somewhere to start.

      Browser type and OS and Screen Rez- Knowing what the prodominant visual settings for your users are means you now know how to adjust your site to make it more enjoyable to your mass audiance. You don't want to spend so much time making sure it all looks good in 800x600 if you core audiance is at 1600x1200. Why bother making sure it works with Mac IE if most users are on Linux or Windows.

      Country - This is a great one. Are you getting a lot of hits from Europe, then show your prices in euro as well. Or translate it into Germain or French (or at least provide a link to the google translated page).

      Basically, knowing your audience can save you a lot of time and provide your users with a better, more customized experience. Sure, I'd rather know their interests, but these bits are a start.

      Now, as an aside, if I look through my logs I can see which pages have more hits and more time spent on them, this can tell me which parts of my site are more interesting and can focus on flushing them out.

      idek, just my thoughts.
      • Why bother making sure it works with Mac IE if most users are on Linux or Windows.

        While Mac IE is not really existing, please make sure you're following standards, that in turn will make any site available to anyone, or that someone should change browser.

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

      by a2wflc ( 705508 )
      My company has 2 reasons why.

      1. We get 2-3 web sites (or more) a month from different creative agencies. In our QA we find out they don't look right in some browser. We can check what percentage of our users had that browser last month and determine if it's worth sending back to the agency (and delay the deploy) or if 1% of the users not seeing something lined up correctly is acceptable.

      2. We have links to different types of audio. Some is DRM with certain system requirements, and only play in Me

  • Good Geo-Mapping isn't going to be free ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Friday March 11, 2005 @05:03PM (#11914193) Homepage
    I use the Perl Module Geo::IPfree for my simple geo-mapping demonstration [komar.org] ... but it's far from perfect as people point out to me - despite the page saying exactly that! ;-)

    This is a very non-trivial problem, especially to do well, and I have yet to see any "free" solution out there that provides reliably good data.

    In terms of the User Agent (which can, of course, be easily spoofed), it's simply a string matching exercise and there was a recent Slashdot story that looked at how well the various stat'ilizers handle these.

  • bbclone (Score:4, Informative)

    by altstadt ( 125250 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @05:07PM (#11914220)

    Take a look at bbclone [bbclone.de].

    • I used to use bbclone on my site [shuttertalk.com] and it was awesome - lots of useful information. But it kept breaking for some reason with some obscure error. And pretty frequently too - maybe once a week...

      The stats file would be partially written to and I would have to delete/reset all my historical stats to fix it.

      Maybe it's a problem with my web host provider... but oh well, I now use webalizer with the raw access logs. I do miss bbclone though..


  • Anything else that one can use to try and have a clearer view of its audience?

    How about providing a monetary incentive to your audience to describe to you what they think they want, who they think they are, etc?

    Something like the side bar menu on Slashdot, where if you click the hidden survey gif button and answer 20 questions about your likes and dislikes OSDL sends you a check for $30.

    • Contests are always a good idea to solicit personal information from users. HOWEVER, be warned, I've had a lot of clients offer sign-up-giveaways and end up getting form-spammed by overzealous obsessive-compulsive-contest-enterers using Java-based tools to hammer contest entry forms. Make sure if you do any kind of promotion to collect information, outline terms that prohibit people from sending multiple submissions and keep your eyes open for these annoying pests. I think there are web sites out there t
      • I think this is a good way as well. There are 3rd parties out there who solely specialize in "contesting." Within a contest environment you can reward users for filling out surveys with "points" that they can redeem for prizes. As mabu mentions, there are lots of nefarious exploits of contesting, so using things like requiring a login (a subription to your "rewards program") kind of thing may help with that.

        The contesting works well with media (radio, newspaper, tv) websites, and entertainment related.

  • i-stats (Score:3, Informative)

    by therubberduckie ( 628264 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @05:29PM (#11914497) Journal
    I use http://www.i-stats.com/ [i-stats.com] it does almost everything you are talking about... and it presents it very nicely.
  • If you are operating the web site as a commercial venture, you should already know your audience demographic or else you're woefully inadequate in terms of business planning.

    Your demographic will be the demographic you target.

    OTOH, If you're slapping up a goofy web site and you're getting more traffic than you expected, the HTTP_REFERER is usually the best place to look to find out who is visiting your site and why. If you see a lot of links coming from another web site, contact their webmaster and see i

  • Webalizer (Score:3, Informative)

    by rbbs ( 665028 ) <robbieNOSPAMhugh ... m ['wor' in gap]> on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:40PM (#11915210)
    The easiest, best stats program i've used.

    http://www.webalizer.net/

    Whack it in webmin and you're laughing.
  • This site will find the location of an IP for free, and also do some other stuff if you pay for it. http://www.whois.sc/0.0.0.0 (where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address).

    And this site does very advanced web site info gathering stuff, but it does cost money: http://www.ninjadigital.com/

  • One of the best free tools to know about your users is Pathalizer [sourceforge.net]. From your logs, it draws a graph with the most followed sequence of pages. You can see the "most interesting" subjects in your site and segment your audience based in it. Another nice benefit is to discover if your users are stucked somewhere in the middle of an interaction path.

    You'll get even more interesting info if you tweak the configuration with regular expressions to aggregate similar pages. Represent in the graph all your diffe

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