Best Means of Knowing Your Audience? 32
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?"
Trickier than it looks? Try largely impossible... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Yes, I know most people don't, so you'll get a fair estimate, but you'll never know for sure.)
Re:Trickier than it looks? Try largely impossible. (Score:1)
One percent? I would guess much less than that though.
Re:Trickier than it looks? Try largely impossible. (Score:1)
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)
matches user agent strings to browser, ip to country, etc
tried and true techniques (Score:2, Funny)
So, that's the best advice I can come up with at the moment. Your mileage may vary.
marketing research (Score:3, Informative)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:1)
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)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:My Idea (Score:1)
Re:My Idea (Score:1)
Why XML?
Good Geo-Mapping isn't going to be free ... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Take a look at bbclone [bbclone.de].
Re:bbclone (Score:1)
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..
Cereal Box (Score:2)
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.
Re:Cereal Box (Score:2)
Re:Cereal Box (Score:1)
The contesting works well with media (radio, newspaper, tv) websites, and entertainment related.
i-stats (Score:3, Informative)
You should already know your audience (Score:2)
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)
http://www.webalizer.net/
Whack it in webmin and you're laughing.
Find free locations (Score:1)
And this site does very advanced web site info gathering stuff, but it does cost money: http://www.ninjadigital.com/
Re:Find free locations (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Find free locations (Score:1)
We use whois.sc on my site and 90% of the results seem to be accurate.
Re:Find free locations (Score:2)
Re:Find free locations (Score:1)
Know what your users do with pathalizer (Score:2)
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