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

Trickier than it looks? Try largely impossible...

[datastalker]

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.)

awstats?

[davez0r]

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

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

tried and true techniques

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

marketing research

[madsenj37]

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

Why?

[wowbagger]

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.

Re:Why?

[monkeyserver.com]

While I do think that you have a somewhat valid point, I believe that knowing more about your audiance is always good. Ideally you would want more probing info about your user than their browser type, OS, Screen Rez, or country of origin. However, if that is all you have then it is somewhere to start.

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?

[a2wflc]

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.

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.

Re:Find free locations

[tengwar]

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.