Copywriting: A Better Way to Know Your Audience
January 3rd, 2008 by Vishen Lakhiani Read more about CopywritingOne of the first rules of copywriting is “Know Your Audience!”
But it’s not often easy to get a snapshot of the average visitor. Unlike a physical store, on the web, your visitors are represented by bar charts and click counts on analytics software.
And so, I was quite delighted to find this free service called Quantcast
Go to http://www.quantcast.com and type in your site name and the service will give you a clearer idea of your visitors in terms of age group, ethnicity, income level, education, family type and more.
Very very useful for anyone writing copy and trying to get into the mind of the visitor.
I found out some interesting things about our own site.
Our audience is 73% Male
41% of our audience is in the Over 65 age bracket.
We tend to have a higher than normal appeal to college educated people.
We tend to have a higher than normal appeal to Asian people.
Interesting stuff. Check out Quantcast. It bills itself as:
“Quantcast is the only open internet ratings service. We provide advertisers with audience profiles for millions of websites and services. We invite publishers to participate and demonstrate the unique value of their audiences. The service is free to everyone.”
What insights on your blog or site will you get from it?
Screenshot of their Main Page:
Screenshot of the their Graphs showing Site Stats:
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About the Author
Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley.
Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.
Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani
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That information is highly useful, but how do they get their demographic information, i.e. how do they know I’m a 35-year-old male?
While QuantCast can provide interesting insight to your website’s demographics, it should by no means be taken as the truth. It’s similar to Alexa — they use a panel of people who have “agreed” to share their internet usage information. As a website owner, you have the option of getting “quantified” by placing a small piece of code on your website. The data that QuantCast provides will be much more accurate… but will also be public to anyone who wants to see it.
Being quantified (which is the only way to get accurate data from QuantCast) would be a useful strategy for non-profits, smaller businesses, or businesses that don’t think their competitors will benefit from the demographic information they’re sharing. Interestingly enough, the site is really aimed at advertisers — that way they know the demographics of the sites that they’re advertising on… or think they do, anyway.