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Web analytics hint at specialist audience
08/02/2010
Sites aimed at IT-savvy readers could find their web analytics results deviate substantially from the average across the internet as a whole.
Employing web analytics can reveal if a website is reaching an audience with an area of specialist knowledge, it has been suggested.
Dustin Marx, architect and principal software engineer at Raytheon Company, writes for JavaWorld that the level of knowledge a site's readership shares about IT issues can skew web analytics results away from the average for the internet as a whole.
He gives the example of W3Schools, a provider of web design tutorials whose monthly browser statistics revealed in January that more than a tenth (10.8 per cent) of the site's readership was using the Google Chrome browser.
This is higher than the average Google Chrome usage of 6.04 per cent during the month, as calculated by StatCounter, which Mr Marx suggests shows "the specialised web development focus of the W3Schools audience".
Internet Explorer - which StatCounter lists as being used by the majority (55.25 per cent) of people in January 2010 - was used for less than two-fifths (36.2 per cent) of visits to W3Schools during the same month.
Dustin Marx, architect and principal software engineer at Raytheon Company, writes for JavaWorld that the level of knowledge a site's readership shares about IT issues can skew web analytics results away from the average for the internet as a whole.
He gives the example of W3Schools, a provider of web design tutorials whose monthly browser statistics revealed in January that more than a tenth (10.8 per cent) of the site's readership was using the Google Chrome browser.
This is higher than the average Google Chrome usage of 6.04 per cent during the month, as calculated by StatCounter, which Mr Marx suggests shows "the specialised web development focus of the W3Schools audience".
Internet Explorer - which StatCounter lists as being used by the majority (55.25 per cent) of people in January 2010 - was used for less than two-fifths (36.2 per cent) of visits to W3Schools during the same month.