When most people think of web site statistics, they think of how many visitors they get a day. And while those numbers are obviously important to any business, there are some other numbers, that in many ways, can be more important. Especially if you’re using video on your site.
For example, when putting video on your site you have many format choices; Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media and Silverlight. And while Flash video is the Internet standard, you may have a large audience of Mac users where the QuickTime format is often the better choice.
Or, you may using a fancy “lightbox” effect to open your videos (like I do). You test it on Internet Explorer and everything works great. But, you have a large audience using Firefox (that you don’t know about)…and guess what…your videos won’t play on that platform for some reason.
Knowing more about the demographics of your audience can even help you tweak your content to match the viewer. For instance, the general belief is that Firefox users are more educated than Internet Explorer users. Notice I said “more educated”, not “more intelligent”. By “more educated”, I mean that rather than thinking they must use the browser that came with their computer, they’ve done research, determined Firefox is a better tool…and this is the big one…they actually took the time to find it, download it and install it (no small task for a lot of Internet users).
If you know you have a large audience of Firefox users (especially if your site deals with techie stuff), you can often dive right into the meat of your content and skip the more basic explanations. You can even have a programmer write a script that delivers different levels of content based on the browser someone is using.
To illustrate how varied user profiles can be…even across two similar sites…I’ve pulled together some graphs showing the viewership of my homepage vs. my blog.
First we’ll look at the location of where the viewers are coming from:
Homepage Visitors
Blog Visitors
Next, we’ll look at the Internet Explorer vs. Firefox question. A few years ago, 98% of web site visitors would be using Internet Explorer. Not so anymore:
Homepage Visitors – Browsers Used
Blog Visitors – Browsers Used
And finally, we’ll answer the growing debate of PC vs. Mac (as well as Vista vs. XP). Again, a few years ago, 98% of web site visitors would be using PC’s. And again, that’s not so much the case anymore:
Homepage Visitors – Operating System Used
Blog Visitors – Operating System Used
The bottom line is that studying your visitor demographics can go a long way in not only understanding your audience, but in determining what content to deliver to them. In addition, it can be a tremendous help in avoiding the “I can’t see your videos” complaints.
Most web hosting accounts should provide basic statistics like I’ve shown above. But if you’d like to go the third-party route for web site statistics, eWebCounter is a good, cheap alternative.