How to Understand Your Audience: Data Collection & Analysis
The internet is a fast-paced environment. People can come to your website at any hour from a wide range of locations, each of them with different intentions or needs. Unlike physical retail stores, you can’t see who is coming in and browsing around. You don’t know much about the people reading you. How can we develop a rough profile of all these individuals?
You already get a glimpse of them everyday when they interact with your website. Some may register for an account, leave a comment or send you an email. But many are ‘invisible’. They get to your site, see what you put out, click on a outbound link and disappear.
What you currently know about these individuals comes from a combination of visible user actions (e.g comments/emails) and statistics (e.g visit frequency/visit length). Is this knowledge sufficient for most businesses or bloggers? Yes. But I think it would be tremendously helpful to learn even more about your audience.
In marketing and advertising, we proactively define our target audience. We start with our end goals and then structure our website/ads with the right buzz phrases, pitch, style, keywords and angle to appeal to people we want to attract as a consumer/user/reader. Gathering information on visitors to our website makes us more effective marketers.
It is helpful to analyze and construct a general profile of your audience, however shifting it may be, because it provides you with information that will allow you to better improve your content scope, site usability, conversation rate or marketing campaign. Let’s split this process up into two sections: statistical analysis and data collection.
Statistical Analysis: Start Working With What You Already Have
Image Credit: Mint
Depending on the stats tool you’re currently using, you can get a lot of information on how visitors are using your website, where they come from and what they are looking at. There are obviously a lot of different metrics to look at but I’m listing what I think is more relevant to understanding visitors in general:
- Visitor loyalty, bounce rate, recency, time on site. These sites measure one critical thing: the level of engagement. They reveal how often people visit your site, the last time they used it and the depth of their visit. While these numbers aren’t a definitive interpretation of on-site user actions, they are a gauge of their enthusiasm.
- Visitor Location. This allows you to make cultural and linguistic assumptions of your visitors. If you know you receive the most visitors from a few specific countries, you might want to create landing pages/offers or content with a geographic focus.
- Visitor search terms/keywords. This includes both search engines and on-site search boxes. The clearest indicator of visitor interest, search terms tell you what they want to get from your site and it reveals information gaps you can fill up. This is where data collection gets specific. If you consistently get a lot of queries for a specific phrase, you can safely assume that there will be visitor interest in content or offers related to it.
- Traffic source. This includes search engines, referrer sites, type-in/bookmark traffic and ad campaigns. Pay attention to referrer sites: it reveals what visitors are reading or using. Traffic sources also tell you where to improve for greater visibility.
Take some time to look at these statistics. Instead of only looking at them at each single point in time, it makes more sense to regularly study them to see how they trend over the lifespan of your site or the course of a marketing/ad campaign. On the whole, they will give you a good idea of what users want and what draws their attention.
How to Get More Audience Data: Using Polls, Surveys and Features
Now for the fun part: the active solicitation of user information. Instead of simply monitoring web statistics, you create opportunities for visitors to voluntarily reveal personal data and opinions. These can be achieved in several ways:
- Polls. An excellent and informal way to get information on user preferences, they are very easy to set up and maintain on any website. The questions asked can be diverse and they are a good way to gradually accumulate a lot of information without being too invasive. Run a poll for two weeks and change the questions to pull in more information. They can be integrated on a regular basis alongside articles or they can be left alone on a visible corner of the website.
- Surveys. Depending on their length and how they are created, surveys may be more labor intensive. Some visitors will avoid them if they are too long. They are ideal when bundled with competitions or special offers which provide incentives for completion. Short surveys can be used for exiting visitors or as a follow-up after a user completes a specific purchase or opts-out of your payment plan/subscription.
- On-Site User Features. If you’re running a community, social media service or even a blog, you can get more information by simply offering more user features (ways users can interact with each other and your site). For example, allow users to input more biographical info in profiles or give them the option to favorite/rate your blog posts and the contributions of other users. Features also add value to users and increase their engagement with your site. Think strategically about what data you want and create a feature that allows users to indirectly reveal it. Facebook is a good example of a site with features that generate a lot of mineable data. Of course, it is always good to have an appropriate privacy policy and allow users to opt out easily from their side.
- Audience Feedback. To understand your visitors, its useful to ensure that you monitor your feedback channels. Comments, emails, incoming blog links, mentions on online communities and even tweets allow you to get an intuitive feel of what people think about your website. Subscribe to the right feedback channels (Google alerts, blogsearch etc.) and track them daily. Either do it yourself or get someone to be the official feedback/community coordinator. Audience feedback is often unsolicited, although you can easily get more comments/emails by specifically asking for them. This provides you with clues on how to better cater to your target market.
While this isn’t an exhaustive list, some of these methods can be applied online and offline simultaneously. For polls and surveys, you should be able to find some plugins or software available for your site platform. Alternatively, you can always use external online services like SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy, 4Q and Wufoo.
After obtaining this data, setup a system which allows you to segment and compare your findings over a period of time. This can be a simple spreadsheet or something more sophisticated. When combined with the visitor statistics you already have, it’s easy to understand your audience, allowing you to to better accommodate their needs or interest.
Can you think of any other ways to get more audience data?
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Great post – while I do look at these numbers daily, I need to just sit down and really analyze them to learn more about my visitors.
It might also be mentioned that Google Analytics has some new features that really help you narrow down information about your visitors – i.e. People from France that came from Digg.com and purchased a product.
What about Quantcast? Surely adding in Demographics to your normal analytics must be useful…
Agreed on all counts, especially learning more about your visitors. Alternatively when you do strategic marketing for a website and create strategic content geared towards a niche, you should know who you are attracting already based on the campaigns your implementing. Use that data in combination with some of these features and you’ll know who you’re reaching.
Polls are my favourite. I Really think that they add a bit off life to the blog; making it so much more interactive.
taking note and looking at statistics can surely help. Studying the figures are important but this it is not advisable to do this everyday. For a blog, daily stats is not really important especially for a new blog. If you are already established, you can see daily trends from time to time but it is not good to exhaust yourselves looking always to statistics. There are other better ways to spend your time with. Regular checking of statistics should be monthly and weekly is also good. Know where your traffic came from and do something about it.
What poll would you create that will help you gauge your users?
Maki,
This is good stuff… as ever.
I would add to this commenting stats: how many, how often, how much, etc.
On a blog the comments are a pretty key indicator of “social health”… of how deeply you’re breaking into the “conversation”.
Mint and other programs like it do not measure comments, and hence the need for a more “social media”-oriented analytical approach.
More on that when I get a chance to blog it myself
-Alister
Really informative post. In my case i would prefer Poll and user feedback. In user feedback we can most trust on the comments. Still I am confused what kind of polls i should offer? If you can discuss this it would be a great help.
Good stuff. I’d also add that when looking at referrer traffic, it’s very helpful to break down what kind of traffic each referrer sends to your site. For example, traffic that comes to you from Site A may view 3 pages on your site, while traffic from Site B may only view 1 page per visit. Different referrers send you different quality of traffic and it’s good to recognize where your best traffic comes from and try to figure out why.
Also, I think that any metrics become much more valuable when you’re able to compare it to historical data. How your numbers are changing is as important as what those numbers actually are.
Google Ad Planner just opened up with new features. I’d like to see what kind of data it will offer.
Great post on the need to analyze visitors. I guess another aspect of user analysis would be to track the keywords used to find our post, and the type of posts that receive a large read traffic. Through this, you’ll know what type of information interests your readers, and thus would be able to produce more content that would cater to their needs.
A good way to obtain user information would be to provide incentives or to run a competition based for surveys answered. It would also be great if we are clear on the type of blogs or websites or forums that are linked to ours, and to analyze information contained within these sites. Communities that followers subscribe to such as StumbleUpon or MyBloglog followers, would also be possible sources of user information.
Cheers
Samantha
http://www.what-sells-online.com
Good post! If we could analyze visitors it would be much easier to understand what they appreciate on our blogs.I have got better results by using the statistics tool provided by MyBlogLog.It shows what readers clicked on, read and so on.
polls are a great way to get more feedback.
BTW – what analytics packages do you recommend?
Great article and glad to see you talk about google alerts and monitoring conversations. I would also suggest setting up an RSS feed for conversations on Twitter. Though Google indexes tweets, I am not at all convinced it captures them all, and definitely not in an instantaneous way.
You can subscribe to a particular search term in the Twitter Search function or set up something through an app like TweetBeep. Monitoring Twitter in this way gives you a chance to get the information quickly and join in the conversation…
Marketing is all about tracking. If you are not tracking the response of your Google ads, direct mail sales copy, landing page sales copy, and autoresponder sign-ups, then you really are not doing marketing at all. What you are doing is PR. You are throwing something out there blindly and hoping it improves the image and desirability of your product or service.
Marketing is all about the analysis of your advertising efforts. Without marketing, you will never be able to establish the laws of advertising in your niche.
Here is what Claude Hopkins wrote 80 years ago that is still relevant today.
“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood.
The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.
Advertising was then a gamble—a speculation of the rashest sort. One man’s guess on the proper course was as likely to be as good as another’s. There were no safe pilots, because few sailed the same course twice.
The condition has been corrected. Now the only uncertainties pertain to people and to products, not to methods. It is hard to measure human idiosyncrasies, the preferences and prejudices, the likes and dislikes that exist. We cannot say that an article will be popular, but we know how to sell it in the most effective way.
Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures.”
Sometimes just asking the user directly can help get information. If you do it on a small sample scale, you can personalize the email to them and the user would be more likely to answer a few short questions. That way you can get a more personal response than in a poll or survey.
Craig
http://www.budgetpulse.com
twitter/craigkessler
Thanks for such a great post Maki, really useful.
Great post, Maki – One thing to add to this list is sharing, an activity much like searching, that is a built-in part of human nature – everyone does it. Statistics and data surrounding users’ behavioral sharing patterns including what content they share, where online and to who to do they share it with and also, how people are sharing this information (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.) become increasingly important as you tailor your site and its contents. With the limitless selection of social media sites and tools and even the standard Web 1.0 technologies that people are using to distribute information across their online networks offers invaluable insight into their audience when analyzed.
Mark Zuckerberg even cited in his keynote at the Web 2.0 Summit last week how large of a role online sharing will have among the industries key behaviors of Internet users as online sharing activities continue to rapidly increase; to what he says will double in just a year
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/zuckerbergs-law-of-information-sharing/
Greate article!
I use Google Analytics and i’m very happy with it.
Since the update it’s even localized to german.
But Mint looks also good
This information is essential for all newbie Site owners….
We have been preaching this to our clients for years to encourage them to get involved in analysis…
For your next followup piece, please analyze and review the best Website traffic stats services.
Both client and server side, this will be extremely valuable info and will generate great comment from your learned readers.
I use Google Analytics and SiteMeter to get an accurate picture of what is going with my blog.
I suggest everyone use more than one service to gauge the measure of your blog.
I am using Google Analytics and it seem to be reliable. However, when I asked Steve Pavlina on what he’s using, he tols me he prefers using Webalizer as it is server-based. I am still yet to discover that. And yes, understanding our audience is very important to know where you are strong and weak. From there, we can think of ways on how to improve more.
Thanks for this very useful post, as usual.
@ Brian
Yup, the new Google Analytics features are terrific. For anyone who’s reading, here’s more information on them.
@ Rachel Keslensky
Quantcast and those other external traffic monitors are useful to a certain extent. I didn’t mention them in this post because this was more about on-site data collection, stuff you can verify and see for yourself directly.
These external trackers are more useful when you insert their HTML codes in your web pages, but the detailed data they offer is US-centric. Their traffic figures are also wrong, according to my stats package. Just some of the reasons why I don’t trust them or other similar sites to give me a good overview of my audience.
@ willbill
I think the way to do about is to check stats intelligently. Just reading numbers doesn’t really help, its more about correlating it to what type of the user is reading your site and hence work on that basis. Search engine traffic is a good example, tracking queries consistently allows you to create related content that is immediately relevant. And yes, there is no need to do a detailed stats analysis every day.
@ Talk Show, Last month earnings
That depends on what you want to know about them. The questions you choose for a poll should be dependent on your knowledge needs. You might want to know their age group, preferences on certain topics, preferences on what content you are offering, experience with a tool etc.
@ Alister
Yeah, I agree about comments. I put them under the ‘Feedback’ section of this article but there’s a lot to be written about them. Like you said, they are a good indicator of activity/content quality. I’m mostly interested in what they reveal about people who read your site than what comments as a whole mean for your site health. I think their comments give you an idea of their experience, worldview and interest. Its a good way to get more content or product ideas.
@ Josh
Yes, the quality of traffic is different. But the bounce rate for each site is dependent on many factors as well, like your site usability, the goal of the user and the relevance of your webpage. It’s hard to figure out why a user from a source decides to browse more or not to browse more. I think the best advantage of studying referrer sites when it comes to understanding your audience is to get a feel of what other sites they read, how they use the web, what cultural communities they use on the web etc.
@ TomL
Yeah, the MyBlogLog tool has been around for a while. It’s decent and easy to use but doesn’t really allow you to dig deep into user actions on your site..
@ Jake Matthews
Google Analytics is one of the best free stats programs out there. If you are concerned with a company like Google having access to your site data, a self-hosted stats package will be the second best option. I use Mint but I wouldn’t recommend it for high traffic sites. Piwik is a decent open-source, self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. See the demo here.
@ JeanAnnVK
Setting up an RSS feed for tweets is a good idea. I have a folder in my reader that is simply a rss of keyword watch lists, tweets and blog links. It’s useful to find out what people are talking about when it comes to any topic.
@Tim Schigel
Oh yeah definitely. Facebook is a good example of how sharing via the features or apps available produces an incredible amount of detailed data on users. I forgot to mention was the act of sharing gives you a good sense of what is resonating with the audience.
For example, I’ve always been interested in the ‘Most-Emailed’ section of newspapers like the New York Times for example. If you want to look at what users care about, just look at what they are passing around. I use email plugins for several sites and its always interesting to see what gets emailed the most. Usually its not what I expect.
@ Craig
That sounds like something that would work.
@ Arab Publishers
You’re welcome!
@ heXe
Mint is worth buying. I use it and its a pleasure to view it everyday.
@ AD PR New York
Thanks for the idea for the next article. I don’t really have the resources to do a thorough review of many packages but I’ll think about it.
@ VlogHog
I think it depends on the feature that each package has… I only use two or more stats services when they can offer me different features. For example, I use a real-time tracker combined with something more comprehensive but slower. Might be useful to read Avinash’s post on Analytics Data Reconciliation for a different perspective.
@ Angel Cuala
Some say server-based stats are more accurate…well, that might be true. Most webhosts come with built in stats packages like webalizer or awstats or urchin and you can use them if you don’t want to set up another one. As long as they are giving you the data you require, it doesn’t matter.
The important question is ‘does this stats package give me enough info on my visitors?’ Accuracy itself will always be a point of debate seeing how all packages have their own quirks… they do however give you around the same ballpark figure.
@ Everyone else
Thanks for your comments!
I think the best way is by polls! They’re simple to setup.
I cannot agree more – I always check google analytics, stumbleupon, popular sites statistics to understand my readers. This article helped too
Great post, I am suffering from data overload right now and when google analytics upgrades we are all going to be suffering.
What about analysis of top landing/exit pages and traffic paths through your site? In my case, my site has a niche, my business, but that niche has different users. By looking at the pages being viewed and how a visitor moves through my blog, I start to understand what is of interest to one sub-group. It leads me to produce more content to fit that path, or to tune existing content to ensure that I am catching the attention of visitors to have them interact with the site longer.
Really good post, Dosh! This proves I need to upgrade my SiteMeter membership for my blogs.
I also need to get a handle on who’s coming to my ebook landing site, ebookstrategies101.com
Of course, consider yourself invited now!
I prefer to use stats. I like the graphs and what not. Besides some people just like to click random stuff on surveys.
Sometimes i asking to myself, how can you write this articel?
coz this is good article, awesome . . .
can help someone who need this info
n bout audience?
ofcourse always try to understand them heart
An interesting and informative article. Thanks.
Great post – we do look at our Google Analytics a few times a week. Google has some great new features that makes things even faster to browse.
Thanks for the informative post. Especially in niche websites user’s behavior and feedback can be very valuable and statistical analysis of the visitors stats can unearth a golden nugget.
For proper seo and and effective onsite optimisation analytics play a vital part.
Very nice explanation and project research. Thank for sharing…
These are great tips. I think often times most bloggers skip this part of the process and then wonder why no one is commenting or staying.
It is amazing what you can discover about your audience. For instance, if you are getting a fair amount of traffic from Spanish-speaking countries, even without Spanish pages…time to translate!
With one of our clients, people were clicking on a static photo. Clearly, the photo was speaking to them, and there was something they were hoping to find by clicking on it. The solution: create a page responding to what they were seeking, and hyperlink the photo to that page.
Very good articles. Keep them coming. You guys get a lot of comments too! Wow!
I just started with Google Analytics and am totally impressed. Up to now, I’ve been struggling with Urchin and Webalyzer. My appreciation for Google continues to grow. They have made tremendous contributions from which we all benefit, including Google!
The first thing I do daily is to check who came to my site. As a new blogger. The numbers bubbling up can be encouraging.
Excellent post, enviable loyal and friendly audience. Keep up.
Would you mind commenting at my new canadians blog, the currnt post is about ‘Canadian resume…’ http://deartotoronto.blogspot.com/ – Would highly appreciate. MT
Nice common sense approach. It’s hard to remember sometimes that the best way to get information about your users/customers is to simply ask them. Just make sure you actually use the information to make improvements!
That was an amazing post, and it earned you a new RSS subscriber. Keep up the good work!
Loving the article. Lots of good advice and tips. Thanks.
impressive information and I agree on all accounts. I am trying a more effective way to understand my audience to my blog and your post has help alot. Keep up the great work.
As always – information rich article.
Another post which I like was http://www.doshdosh.com/rethinking-blog-comments . (I wanted to leave a comment there -but i could not). Your post offered a unique and long term perspective which was great – “comments are a way to network with a perspective collaborator”.
This post inspired us to create a Flash Animation titled “Blog Comments – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”.
Here is the link http://vizedu.com/2008/11/blog-comments-the-good-bad-and-ugly/
You have been referred in the Animation. Please feel free to embed in you Blog if you desire so.
Thanks
Sandeep Arora
Architect of VizEdu
http://www.VizEdu.com
Very, very and very useful post which stay a back bone always.., that relates feed back about the audience – read about them capture it and present their needy to make them read and make use of it.
In reference to surveys, I just installed and starting using 4Q. It’s a free survey developed by Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions, and its been extremely useful already in providing customer feedback. Highly recommend. You can find it at 4qsurvey dot com.
Thanks. Came across your article while working on a strategy to get to know our customers better. Very helpful article. Survey monkey is a great tool, easy to use, self-explanatory, quick.
Thanks yet again, DoshDosh Very informative article, and very effective tips for improving conversions via Statistical Analysis.
Hi Maki,
I had this interesting revelation last night at 3 am on how people can figure out their niche clickers. I think you would appreciate it. Here’s my posting:
http://cbwebmasterblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/find-your-niche-clickers-and-youre-on.html
I’d really be interested in what you think – I’ve just begun blogging (yep I know newbie!) even though I’ve been online since 1995.
Thanks,
CB Webmaster
Oh btw congratulations on your RSS subscriber achievements! I only hope some day I can do that well!
Great article. Far too often, sites don’t track visitor data enough, and that’s why they don’t know how to market themselves, and ultimately fail.
There’s another dimension to analytics: social media monitoring. Use a free service like ours to find out who is talking about your personal brand in social media. These metrics give you an entirely different view into your reach and influence. Find out who, where, gender, sentiment, related themes, tags and categories, age, etc. of the people your blog or other social activity are influencing.
Google Analytics tells you about your visitors and their interaction with your site. Social media monitoring and analytics tells you about who is talking about you globally when they’re off your site.
great!
I understand now why you get more people on your site.
Thanks. It will help me to get more visitors.
Really informative post, thanks for sharing ,and i will not hestate to spend my time to make a study on it.
I like membership sites (free or paid). I can’t see a best way to get people involved.
Franck
Thanks a lot. Nice article. thanks for sharing.
My bad because I discovered this site a bit late. Better too late than never.
That mint stats tool looks pretty cool – is it better than google analytics?
The same goes for dating sites. If you are going to start a dating site and want to tackle a niche market, then you must know that audience. For example, if I wanted to start a dating site that caters to Buddhists then it might be a good idea that I be a Buddhist. That way I know my market. It makes sense to know your market and if you don’t, you’re going to have a hard time understanding your customers.
Michael
I have read a few of your articles and they are all very informative. Thanks!
Once again, very informative post, Maki. Knowing one’s target market is truly crucial before conducting sales and marketing campaigns. I think that market research should not be limited to the start of campaign. It should be ongoing because people’s needs and wants change and evolve so it’s important to keep track of all the things that influence their decisions to buy or bail, and not just the sales numbers.
There’s an interesting point that i have never seen before. Like how Pools and Survey can help you to bring more audience data which i never thought about it, it really surprised me honestly. Thanks i’ll look at your pools site and see if i can get interested to put this on my blog
Thanks for your great post….really very helpful to those new to the blogosphere (just like me!)
Thanks for boiling down a lot of numbers into very usable categories. I use StatPress and Google Analytics and find that the combo give me the four categories you’re talking about. I also enjoyed the list of additional ways to attract engagement from your audience. Goes along with a lot of what Chris Brogan says.