Checking Your Web Site Visitor Demographics

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For a long time, those of us who have a web presence have used web statistics to tell us how well our site is doing. We use it to figure out what kind of traffic we’re getting, what content brings in the traffic, who sends us the traffic, what people are searching for, what people use to access your content and more. These are all important.

The problem, web stats don’t tell us who these visitors are. The ‘other side’ of the information like demographics. If you’ve been in business for a while, you more or less have an idea who your audience is. You get that by talking to them on the phone or during webinars and teleseminars. You meet them face to face. You correspond throug emails, blog comments, social networks and more. But are these same people the ones who visit your web site? Is your web site really speaking to your target audience or not?

Do you know…

  • What kinds of income bracket are they?
  • Are you serving more women than men?
  • Are you visitors more likely to be of a certain ethnic group?
  • What age brackets are most of your visitors from?
  • Do they have children?
  • Are they college educated?
  • What kind of lifestyle do they lead?

If you don’t, you can use Quantcast to find out. Quantcast is stats tracker that tracks the finer stuff like these. What’s also cool, they tell you what else your audience will like – great for researching new topics, new affiliate products to promote or create your own products. If there’s enough information on a web site, you’ll also find out what other web sites your audience visits.

On the flip side, because you can look up any web site from Quantcast, it’s a great free tool for some competitive snooping or checking out a site you want to advertise on. Of course, it goes without saying that you can’t get statistics for every web site out there. Especially the smaller sites and sometimes the larger sites are estimates. And some publishers choose to hide some of the data.

You may think you know your audience well, but try it out and see how close you really are from your target.

10 thoughts on “Checking Your Web Site Visitor Demographics”

  2. Melissa Ingold

    Oh, that is so cool Lynette! Thanks for sharing, I’m going to check this out for sure 🙂

  3. Ed Roach

    I popped over to Quantcast – how in the world do they know what ethnic group, # of kids, education level etc. from a simple bit of java code?

  4. Noobpreneur

    Lynette,

    My question is the same as Ed’s – a big question mark.

    I guess it’s not possible for services, such as Quantcast to know ethnicity, level of education, etc. unless the site launches a simple survey that pop up when the visitors are about to leave the site.

    Any ideas?

  6. Matt

    Thanks for this link. I’ve been looking for a way to drill down into the demographics of my visitors, and had yet to find a solution. Now that advertisers are asking for this information more and more, I will be able to give them the details they need to make informed advertising decisions.

    Thanks,
    Matt

  7. Jessica W

    Thanks for sharing the link. Every professional website should make more detailed demographic stats about visitors and customers in order to provide better service and products.

  8. Santa

    Hi Lynette,
    thanks for sharing your ideas about Checking Your Web Site Visitor Demographics.
    Unfortunately quantcast covers only US traffic in detail – sites with a worldwide audicence like mine ( chrsitmas is nearly worldwide, isn’t it? ) cannot benefit so much. Do you hapepn to know of any other/ssimilar services that cover other geographic areas?

    Still 16 days and 11 hours to go – do your christmas shopping NOW!

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