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Best Means of Knowing Your Audience?
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?"
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.)
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http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
matches user agent strings to browser, ip to country, etc
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.
Your gonna have to shell out money to pay for marketing research.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
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.
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That's a hell lot of rotation...
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.
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Take a look at bbclone.
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I use http://www.i-stats.com/ it does almost everything you are talking about... and it presents it very nicely.
the best way to know your audience is to get all their passwords to their online bank accounts...
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 if he has more of a clue than you as to the demographic of his users.
How many users change their UA's or anything else fo that kind?
One percent? I would guess much less than that though.
The easiest, best stats program i've used.
http://www.webalizer.net/
Whack it in webmin and you're laughing.
Or use PHP to make additions to a *SQL database. Then use a PHP script to crunch the database for various information bits and pieces.
Why XML?
And this site does very advanced web site info gathering stuff, but it does cost money: http://www.ninjadigital.com/
or else!
One of the best free tools to know about your users is Pathalizer. 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 different site news pages as with just an node called news (e.g, if your news urls are like /news/123, put a configuration line like "news /news/[0-9]+").
BTW, I'm not affiliated with the developers. It's just a good open source tool that I like.
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 running like linuxhq.org don't expect the stats to be hugely different.
Sure country can have some value, but if you don't offer prices in Euros/Pounds don't expect many Europeans to be interested in your ecommerce site. So it is self fulfilling, no Euro, no Europeans.
The most useful thing we see is Google referrals. And even this is usually pretty predictable.
Polls are easy - ask them something relevant to the business. Although remember some people just never take part in them.
Most cases time is better spent improving content, if you can use a tool that gathers basic stats quickly sure run it, but don't expect miracles from the output.