Getting to Know Your Audience

[JamesR]

An important and overlooked aspect of many sales ventures is who is buying and why. This knowledge can help you remove obstacles to buying and give you an advantage in knowing who to market to. In a brick and mortar store, you can simply watch who is buying and get a good idea of your audience. Online, however, this can become much more difficult.

So:

1) How do you get to know who is using your site and buying your products?

2) Do you collect information through your order processing? Conduct surveys?

3)What if you are an affiliate marketer and have no access to info on who is ordering?

4) How important is getting to know your audience to you?

[weisinator]

1. I check to see what keywords are used to find my sites, and look at exit pages. It's a rough estimate at best.

2. Don't do order processing: I'm an affiliate-type.

3. Some affiliate programs let me see what people are buying, and the results are surprising.

One site I have targets a younger audience. The click throughs are for CDs, but video games, movies, and baby toys outsell the CDs. (I don't know how to integrate those items into my content, especially baby toys.)

4. It's not that important. This is just a hobby that's slowly turning into a business. Perhaps in 2-3 years knowing my audience will become more important.

[Filipe]

2. Don't do order processing: I'm an affiliate-type.

This is one webmaster's opinion, newbies. There's a lot more money to be made in your own order processing - but a lot more work, too.

[Filipe]

Very good post, by the way, JamesR. You're quite the moderator.
I know you weren't asking these as questions for your own benefit, though my responses might make it seem as though that's what I thought. I'm just expanding on the questions you want webmasters to ask themselves:

1) How do you get to know who is using your site and buying your products?

Very important thing to consider. Market targetting is extremely important and there are a lot of ways to go about this. If you do your own order processing, the simple method is to have them fill out information during their first purchase (or on every purchase if they don't want to store their information for future use). This will give you a general picture.

Then there are things like tracking a user's path through a site with web logs, surveys, polls, and just seeing which areas of your site are most frequented. You want to try to make it like a brick-and-mortar. You want to be able to envision users going in-and-out of your site's sections and how long they spent on each page. With extensive server logs, and some smart software, you can do it.

2) Do you collect information through your order processing? Conduct surveys?

Order processing is a good way, problem is, for each individual user, you're always collecting the same information over and over. Surveys or polls are good. I prefer polls to surveys because it doesn't come off as much as a request for information on a user, but a request for a vote or contribution to a poll. Either way works though, but remember that you can't just blatantly ask for personal information (usually), you have to align your survey with your site somehow.

3)What if you are an affiliate marketer and have no access to info on who is ordering?

I wouldn't know enough about this. I have some ideas, but I won't go into them here.

4) How important is getting to know your audience to you?

Everyone should know their audience to an extent because it's the only way to know which direction to expand to when it comes time to expand. You can't just add something on because you think "Man, that'd be a cool function/section/feature." You have to think "Man, my users would really like this feature, I know what they like."

[weisinator]

Filipe: I forgot to put "I" in front of "Don't". :)

I don't feel the need to invest time in selling product myself. At least not yet.