Where do our visitors come from?

Demographics is a way of identifying and grouping a broad population into smaller, more relevant, and hopefully addressable, target audiences. Profiling target audiences is 'bread and butter' marketing work; a population or audience can be grouped in any number of ways: by gender, age, education, occupation, income, political preference, language, ethnicity, etc.

Internet interactions offer a way to automatically infer some, but not all, of the traditional demographic categories. They also present some new categories and also offer the potential of responding to detailed individual preferences and establishing interactions with customers/audiences in real-time.

Internet interaction data like this can reveal where a population of visitors/customers/audiences come from. The IP address and IP routing path for a connecting session with a website (via a computer, tablet or mobile device) can be mapped in fine detail to reveal the geographical location of an originating client machine. This is possible because ISPs and intermediary routing services employ well-known internet host addresses (and assignments to their sub-nets) that map directly onto physical devices, networks and sub-networks.

The originating device (computer, tablet or mobile) will also often reveal basic configuration and preference information from the connecting software system (e.g. browser, OS, language, device type). The free availability of this information is desirable for the connecting software client/device combination as it allows both client and server to optimise data presentation and minimise internet capacity utilisation. All of this makes for new and useful demographic information. The following figures illustrate how well the location of a client device connection can be identified.

Visitor locations: San Francisco, California

In the first example specific zones in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area account for the bulk of the web traffic originating from California. 

The example below shows that web traffic from Ireland mainly comes from Dublin but there are also significant interactions from Limerick, Cork, Galway, Kenmare, Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford etc. We can infer that these connections come from customers in these specific locations.

Visitor locations: Ireland

Just knowing where our visitors come from can then help focus our marketing, market analysis, sales, customer support, and other activities.

Visits versus visit duration

Let's plot two metrics against each other in the Audience Overview:
Visits vs. Avg. Visit Duration (diagrams below).
Why look at the number of visits versus visit duration? Well this comparison might highlight specific styles of site engagement.  Have a look at the following report from a low traffic site...

Three distinct kinds of site involvement are evident:

1. Involved readers, high engagement; a user who spends a long time reading through a small number of pages (circled in red).
2. Skimming or surface engagement; a user who visits a few pages quickly but stays only a short time (circled in orange).
3. Sticky or correlated readers; the longer the visit the more pages they view (circled in green).

Figuring out who these readers are is the tricky bit.

Note that you may not be able to make the same conclusions for a high traffic site however as different styles of reader behaviour will disappear into the averages.

Starting small with website analytics

As part of your 10' morning regime, go to your website and follow Google's basic three metrics (we can expand to others in due course):

1. Monitor the bounce rate. These are the visitors who 'land and leave', i.e. visit one page and depart. A low bounce rate indicates that visitors are engaging with other pages/areas in the site. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you are delivering e-commerce or a service that requires multipage interaction.
2. Monitor the Average Visit Duration of a visitor session. The longer the better, it suggests a visitor is either reading and engaging with your content, or that they are engaging with multiple pages/areas in the site.
3. Check the % New Visits. This is the percentage of your traffic that originates from new IP addresses or IP/Browser combinations. A large percentage of new visits could suggest superficial site visits that are never repeated. A large figure might also suggest (in combination with other data) that the activity attracted to the site is growing.

Engagement is a difficult quality to assess. One way, while site traffic is relatively low, might be to require direct registration or email contact from visitors who wish to access reports, white papers and other documents (mainly PDF files). You could then deliver their requests directly after having obtained some key marketing data (name, demographic, market, company affiliation, permission to contact etc). If you get large numbers of these requests then you will have to consider automating the same process. These systems will probably involve cookie software and therefore will need to comply with EU legislation on obtaining visitor's consent for the use of cookies or other tracking technology.

Note that any initiative to gather or harvest visitor/market data will also have to comply with EU and national legislation on data protection (link for Ireland). Your organisation will need to establish the role of 'Data Manager' in addition to policy and procedures for handling these requirements.