Use statistics to be more aware of your audience

During the next two weeks I will be gathering statisitics from Google Analytics about the ISEAL website to endevor to build up a better idea about the users of the Online Community.

Areas that I will investigate include:

  • The languages people have configured on their browsers, to find out what language they would prefer to use to read the community.
  • The browsers people use, in order to make sure the Online Community as compatible for as many people as is possible.
  • How people currently search for the site, in order to help with search engine optimisation.

In many cases, people creating a new website or online community from scratch will not have data that they can use when creating a concept. So how do you gauge your visitors’ requirements?

One way could be to place a survey on your community during beta phase asking people to give some information on how they access your website.

You have to consider how to maximise the responses by asking a handful of well-phrased questions that are very easy to understand.

What other methods of finding out how visitors access your site would you use?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 16:53 and is filed under Online Community Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to Use statistics to be more aware of your audience

  1. Wiebke says:
    9 March 2009 at 08:10

    Hi,

    an excellent intro to reading webstats is Beth Kanter’s screencast for nonprofits (http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/06/new-screencast-.html).

    One more caveat though: The ISEAL website is currently not completely indexed by Google, and can thus only be found with searches for the homepage title. Much more interesting are the searches done through the insite search field.

    Cheers * W.