Checking Your Web Site Visitor Demographics

Lynette ChandlerLynette Chandler Written by Lynette Chandler
on November 28th, 2008 / 8 Comments / Print this

For a long time, those of us who have a web presence have used web statistics to tell us how well our site is doing. We use it to figure out what kind of traffic we’re getting, what content brings in the traffic, who sends us the traffic, what people are searching for, what people use to access your content and more. These are all important.

The problem, web stats don’t tell us who these visitors are. The ‘other side’ of the information like demographics. If you’ve been in business for a while, you more or less have an idea who your audience is. You get that by talking to them on the phone or during webinars and teleseminars. You meet them face to face. You correspond throug emails, blog comments, social networks and more. But are these same people the ones who visit your web site? Is your web site really speaking to your target audience or not?

Do you know…

  • What kinds of income bracket are they?
  • Are you serving more women than men?
  • Are you visitors more likely to be of a certain ethnic group?
  • What age brackets are most of your visitors from?
  • Do they have children?
  • Are they college educated?
  • What kind of lifestyle do they lead?

If you don’t, you can use Quantcast to find out. Quantcast is stats tracker that tracks the finer stuff like these. What’s also cool, they tell you what else your audience will like - great for researching new topics, new affiliate products to promote or create your own products. If there’s enough information on a web site, you’ll also find out what other web sites your audience visits.

On the flip side, because you can look up any web site from Quantcast, it’s a great free tool for some competitive snooping or checking out a site you want to advertise on. Of course, it goes without saying that you can’t get statistics for every web site out there. Especially the smaller sites and sometimes the larger sites are estimates. And some publishers choose to hide some of the data.

You may think you know your audience well, but try it out and see how close you really are from your target.

About Lynette Chandler

Lynette ChandlerLynette Chandler

Lynette Chandler is a mompreneur who has a knack for teaching other entrepreneurs about the technology and how to recognize and apply its power and trends to their marketing. Lynette brings to the table a marketing career of sixteen years as well as four years of experience doing technical management. She is the owner of
TechBasedMarketing.com and is a married mother of 3, living in Eastern North Carolina.

Subscribe to Lynette's RSS feed here.

8 Comments to “Checking Your Web Site Visitor Demographics”

  • www.freefor15.com
    November 29th, 2008
    4:16 am

    This is an often over loked and extremely valuable tool for all website owners especially new ones. If we do not know who is visiting then we can never find out how to get more of theses people to our site in the future.

    Thanks for the reminder

    Erik
    http://www.freefor15.com

  • Melissa Ingold
    November 30th, 2008
    10:25 am

    Oh, that is so cool Lynette! Thanks for sharing, I’m going to check this out for sure :-)

  • Ed Roach
    November 30th, 2008
    1:05 pm

    I popped over to Quantcast - how in the world do they know what ethnic group, # of kids, education level etc. from a simple bit of java code?

  • Noobpreneur
    December 1st, 2008
    5:43 am

    Lynette,

    My question is the same as Ed’s - a big question mark.

    I guess it’s not possible for services, such as Quantcast to know ethnicity, level of education, etc. unless the site launches a simple survey that pop up when the visitors are about to leave the site.

    Any ideas?

  • Lynette Chandler
    December 1st, 2008
    11:43 am

    @Ed & @Noobpreneur: Unfortunately you’ve asked me a question only Quantcast can answer and I don’t think they are telling anytime soon. So I guess it is a matter of whether you choose to believe it or not. I know that they have a panel and they probably use the panel as a projection. The best place to get that information is their help pages itself
    http://www.quantcast.com/docs/how-quantcast-works

  • Matt | Small Biz Bee
    December 1st, 2008
    4:19 pm

    Thanks for this link. I’ve been looking for a way to drill down into the demographics of my visitors, and had yet to find a solution. Now that advertisers are asking for this information more and more, I will be able to give them the details they need to make informed advertising decisions.

    Thanks,
    Matt

  • Jessica W
    December 2nd, 2008
    2:45 am

    Thanks for sharing the link. Every professional website should make more detailed demographic stats about visitors and customers in order to provide better service and products.

  • Santa
    December 8th, 2008
    4:11 am

    Hi Lynette,
    thanks for sharing your ideas about Checking Your Web Site Visitor Demographics.
    Unfortunately quantcast covers only US traffic in detail - sites with a worldwide audicence like mine ( chrsitmas is nearly worldwide, isn’t it? ) cannot benefit so much. Do you hapepn to know of any other/ssimilar services that cover other geographic areas?

    Still 16 days and 11 hours to go - do your christmas shopping NOW!

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