The Lazy Man’s Guide to Analyzing Your Website

stats

“Statistics are like a drunk with a lamp-post: used more for support than illumination” - Sir Winston Churchill

Get website demographics the lazy man’s way

While it is simple enough to find out where your visitors are coming from using any basic web stats service, trying to find out their profile and demographics would take some amount of effort as you’d probably have to run a reader survey to get the information you need - and even then you’d be getting a sample of people who chose to respond rather than those randomly selected.

Or… you could take the lazy man’s way out - which is to use Microsoft’s predictive engine which analyses a site to give a probable of the make-up of your visitors.

While the methodology isn’t the most robust, it does give an unbiased 3rd party opinion on probable demographics a site would receive based on search information it mined from Microsoft Live Search users.

Here’s what it thinks of Liverpool Football Club’s official website

liverpoolfc

and what it thinks of HelloKitty.com

hellokitty

So the figures do make some sense, at least from the most obvious standpoint which is gender :)

Check out this tool here.

Get website heatmaps the lazy man’s way

feng gui

Site heatmaps are a great way of finding where the hotspots are on a web page, and where people would most likely click. Crazyegg is a service which offers this service, but the drawback would be that it takes time before the results come out, and you would need a reasonable amount of traffic to track those clicks properly.

Or… you could take the lazy man’s way out - which is to use Feng Gui, a predictive engine which analyses a site to give a probable heat map of attention based on previously conducted neuro-science studies. It is useful to note that it does NOT track clicks like what Crazyegg, but rather the probable attention of the reader. In short, it lets you know if you’re drawing attention to the right places.

Try out Feng Gui here

The Conclusion

All in all, these tools are not replacements for actually doing proper testing and analysis of a site, but is great for supplementary information and instant feedback and results.