Determining Demographics of Visitors?

[jimbo_mac]

here's one for all of you here.
how many of your visitors are male and female???

i got asked this question today.

seeing my target keywords for a particular product were targetted towards men the buyer told me they were women.
seems she knew my logs better than I did.

[Brett_Tabke]

That is very delicate. Often you are 180 from what you'd think would be the case.

Anyone have any tips on determining demographics (sex, age) just from log files?

[Sinner_G]

Only way I see is if you have links to your site from gender specific sites. E.g. if all your referrers are from cosmopolitan, you have more female users, if they come from the super bowl site, mostly male.

Or if you see completely crazy navigation paths, these are women ;).

[ukgimp]

Could you look at the langauge used in the search strings to find the site. You would not be able to get precise results (not a chance) but you may be able to get an idication. Here's my reasoning after looking through some log files and considering some of the women I know. It would require some proper research, both quan and qaul. There are probably even studies of these already in existance.

Women would tend to use more descriptive phrases to start with.
Men would be straight to the point
Children may have spelling mistakes more often.

At the risk of incuring a serious flame a lady may search for "buy pretty new automobile" and a man "automobile sales" :)

[ritualcoffee]

Without an registration material available and only looking at logs - you're up a creek....

I think the above was the closest - referring sites, however, gender self-indentification can throw that as well or just pure interests.

I mean one would think (no offense) that cooking classes back in the day would consist of mainly females, however my class was 50/50 (signed up to meet girls or just liked cooking?)

One other source - do you buy lists? If so, you might be able to use that as a sample and apply that good old statistical analysis.