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Best Means of Knowing Your Audience?

Posted by Cliff on 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?"

8 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. awstats? by davez0r · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

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

  2. marketing research by madsenj37 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Your gonna have to shell out money to pay for marketing research.

    --
    Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
  3. Re:Why? by a2wflc · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 Media Player so we're better off not putting the links up for Mac users. Some play on most Macs, but not all. By knowing the percent of Mac users we have, we can estimate the support costs of putting the audio links up.

  4. Good Geo-Mapping isn't going to be free ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 4, Informative
    I use the Perl Module Geo::IPfree for my simple geo-mapping demonstration ... 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.

    --
    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  5. bbclone by altstadt · · Score: 3, Informative

    Take a look at bbclone.

  6. i-stats by therubberduckie · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use http://www.i-stats.com/ it does almost everything you are talking about... and it presents it very nicely.

  7. Webalizer by rbbs · · Score: 3, Informative

    The easiest, best stats program i've used.

    http://www.webalizer.net/

    Whack it in webmin and you're laughing.

  8. Re:Find free locations by tengwar · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just tried www.whois.sc. Apparently I'm in Morrocco! I even use the DNS geographical extensions to give my physical location, so that's pretty poor.