As a website owner, you may find yourself struggling when it comes to defining your audience.

I know I did.

When I first started out with my site, learntocodewith.me, it was painful trying to determine who my audience was and what they were looking for.

While managing the site is not a full-time job, per se, I still want to create the best experience as possible for my users. Even with the limited time and funds that I have.

And the first step to creating a great experience, with both design and content choices, is understanding your website visitors and what they hope to gain from visiting your site.

Audience Insights on A Budget. But how?

There is a ton of advice across the web that relates to discovering your target audience. Much of which recommends creating some sort of typical user profile to help channel your users’ motives, goals, demographic information and much more.

While I think this can be a helpful exercise, and have done it in the past, it can be difficult to get started. Especially when your site is new and user base is relatively small.

More than that, do I really have time to create one, or several, in depth user profiles — especially if they could be inaccurate?

Not really. And if you’re like me, you don’t have time either.

Beyond the user profile exercise, there are also expensive analytic tools available. These can give you a full landscape of what’s going on: what your users think (literally, by posing questions at the bottom of the screen), their demographic data, where they fall off and so on.

But do I have the resources to dish out a few hundred dollars every month on said tools? Nope. Definitely not.

8 Tools To Channel My Audience And Their Preferences

Instead, I rely on a multitude of free and painless tools to help gauge my audience. And below I highlight 8 of them.

But before delving into the specific tools, realize that there are limitations on each. That said, don’t utilize one alone as the source of determining your entire website audience. Rather, each tool is like a tiny piece of the greater puzzle.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is my go to analytics resource. I use it for various purposes, including seeing which articles are getting the most views and my most popular traffic sources.

But it’s also a great way to measure your audience.

Specifically, you can do this under the “audience” tab in the side panel, where a slew of insights can be found. A few include,

Which country users come from

The percentage of mobile visitors

What web browser visitors use

And much more

Let’s take mobile visitors as an example, pictured below.

Data from December 11, 2014 — January 10, 2015

My website has predominantly desktop viewership.

This means, for me, optimizing for mobile doesn’t have to be as much of a priority. This strongly contradicts a site like Buzzfeed, where most visitors are viewing on mobile. (Specifically, 60%.)

Knowing this means I should be more concerned with the desktop experience rather than the mobile: since only 15% of my viewers come on their mobile device.

2. Facebook Page Insights

The Facebook Page Insights dashboard is one of my favorite resources for learning demographic data of my fans. Facebook provides information about my fanbase’s age, gender and location.

As you can see below, the majority of my Facebook fans are men between the ages of 18–24.

Furthermore, 68% of my FB fan base are men under the age of 34.

Why is this important? It’s important as far as content creation goes on my actual site, and what I share on my FB page. Because a middle aged woman and an 18 year old boy have very different interests. (And as you can see, I have virtually no middle aged fans.)

Having these sorts of insights also aid in site design decisions—again, because a user under the age of 30 operates differently than someone over the age of 60, for instance.

3. Email Service Provider Insights

Okay, so this isn’t exactly free because I use Aweber— which costs money. Nonetheless, MailChimp has a free option. And it can provide you with similar data.

In any case, Aweber shows me how many people click to read a new article out of the total number that receive the email message.

Why does this matter? Because my email subscribers are my core fans. These are people who took time to give me their email address in a form. And then opt-in to the following email message, confirming their subscription. So, if they’re not clicking the link to the new article, that’s a bad sign.

Obviously other factors come into play like the day of the week the email is sent, the time of day, the subject line, the email copy and so on.

Or, a low click through rate can also mean that the article just isn’t that interesting. And my subscribers aren’t interested in that subject.

4. Surveys

What better way to gauge your reader base than by asking users themselves what they like/dislike?

The people who take time to fill out a survey are the ones who truly care about what you’re doing.

These people are like super-fans.

Do you know how many times I get emails asking to take a customer survey and trash it immediately? We all do it. But then, when it’s a company or blogger I love, I take the time to fill out the survey.

That’s why when I sent out a short survey a month ago, I took every answer very seriously. Sure, some responses were not too insightful. Some were vague. Others left blank.

But then there were some that opened my eyes to other people’s experiences on my site. Things I never considered, like how one section of my site was difficult to find because it was hidden in the footer.

Getting into logistics — there’s a ton of survey applications. As well as a whole methodology to asking the right questions.

However, I used TypeForm most recently. Which I really liked.

Beyond TypeForm, here are other survey services:

Survey Monkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/)

Google Forms (http://www.google.com/forms/about/)

Survey Planet (https://www.surveyplanet.com/)

Survey Gizmo (https://www.surveygizmo.com/)

5. Peek by User Testing

Peek by User Testing is as personal as it gets.

Essentially, it is a free five minute video recording a first time user’s impression of your website. Peek goes above and beyond by also providing audio of the test user speaking aloud as they navigate.

After a few Peek tests, I discovered a lot about how I confuse first time users. One lady even left my site onto another, thinking it was still my site. Which is the last thing I want to do.

For me, watching the videos can be cringe-worthy. Mostly because I wonder how could I have been so … thoughtless … when making certain layout decisions.

In any case, Peek won’t define your audience. But it will show the thoughts of a first time user. Which is just as important.

6. Heat Maps

Instead of just showing which pages users visit, Heat Maps unveil where users are clicking.

I use the free SumoMe heat map. However, there are other more advanced heat map applications out there — some with a hefty price tag.

Like Peek, a heat map alone won’t define your audience. But it will show where people are clicking on the page.

Which, again, sheds light on whether or not you’re confusing your readers.

Because if you see people clicking where they are not supposed to, that’s a problem.

7. Content Analytics

Another SumoMe product, Content Analytics shows how far people are reading on your web pages.

With Content Analytics, you’ll know exactly what content your visitors are reading on a page—as well as where they stop.

Why is this important? Because pages where people are getting five percent through means that said page lacks. Readers don’t like it. If they did, they’d be making it further down the page. (Or, maybe you made an obsure design choice that is preventing users from moving towards the bottom of the page.)

Below is a screenshot of the Content Analytics tool in action on my Tools Page. There is an average read of 31% and 51% of the readers make it to just over 30% of the page.

Content Analytics Screen Grab on Tools Page

For my purposes, this is pretty good. However, there are other pages on my site that did not perform so well. And I have adjusted since.

8. Optimizely

Optimizely is a free A/B testing tool.

FYI, I am relatively new to AB testing. Nonetheless, I see its value.

While I currently use Optimizely to run minor tests, mostly for experimentation, in the future I see it playing a huge role when testing changes to my site.

For instance, I can set up a test on two different versions of a homepage. Then, I can see which version better hits my goals—like filling out the opt-in form.

With these kinds of insights, I can make best navigation and layout decisions that users understand and allow them to get where they want to go.

Conclusion

These are just some of the tools that help me understand my audience and their experience learntocodewith.me.

Recognizing this information helps me build a better website, create improved content, and save time aimlessly experimenting. All at the cost of nothing.

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