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?"

Comments

awstats?

[davez0r]

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

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

Good Geo-Mapping isn't going to be free ...

[xmas2003]

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.

bbclone

[altstadt]

Take a look at bbclone.

i-stats

[therubberduckie]

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

Webalizer

[rbbs]

The easiest, best stats program i've used.

http://www.webalizer.net/

Whack it in webmin and you're laughing.