Writing for the Web
Research your audience
Identifying an audience is like making a sketch of someone. You add eye color, nose shape, hairstyle . . . and eventually the face appears.
Don’t worry about getting the full picture all at once. Start with the questions you can answer definitively, then do your homework to fill in the most important missing information. You’ll be surprised at how soon you have drawn a real person: a profile of your target user.
To get the most complete picture, seek both quantitative and qualitative information.
- Quantitative data—such as visitor demographics and the average amount of time a visitor spends on a page—tells you who your users are and what tasks they’re performing on your site.
- Qualitative information—such as reader comments or answers from surveys and focus groups—tells you why people visit and what they want, need, and expect. Qualitative research is especially useful when you don’t have an existing website and want to define your potential audience.
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Sources for these types of data can include server logs, tools that measure webpage traffic, customer-service feedback, and information from your organization’s marketing department. Methods for collecting additional data include onsite polls, user surveys, focus groups, interviews, and eye-tracking studies. See our Resources page for tools and services.
Ask quantitative questions
Measurable data will give you a solid foundation for understanding your audience. If your site has a marketing department, those colleagues may be able to furnish you with their audience research, which will help you refine your own list of questions. Demographics and site traffic are often fruitful areas of inquiry, but investigate any audience information that seems relevant.
Demographic information—age, gender, profession, and so forth—can help you visualize your audience. It may even reveal that your core audience isn’t who you thought it was. For instance, you might adjust your content if you discover that your visitors are younger than you expected, that a third of them speak Spanish, or that many are self-employed.
Questions about demographics might include:
- What are your visitors’ ages?
- Are they students, retirees, business owners, or part- or full-time employees? If they are employed, what are their jobs, and are those jobs related to your site’s subject?
- How many of your visitors are female? How many are male?
- How much money do they make? What do they spend their discretionary income on?
- How much do they spend annually online?
- Where do your visitors live? What are their ZIP or postal codes? What percentages are in the same city as you? The same region? The same country?
- What is their first language? Which languages do they speak and in what percentages?
- What are their education levels?
- What are their races and ethnicities?
- Do members of your audience have disabilities that affect how they access your site?
- Do they have political or religious views that may influence how they perceive your site?
- Are there any other cultural factors that might affect how they perceive and use your site?
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A survey is an efficient way to gather demographic data. You can also get such data from Yahoo! Web Analytics or a for-pay audience measurement service—or, if your site requires registration, from registration data. See our Resources page for audience measurement tools.
Traffic patterns and other sources of quantitative data are also useful. You might want to find answers to questions like these:
- How much time do people spend on your site? Do they get in and out as quickly as possible, or do they linger and interact?
- Which pages get the most traffic?
- Which links are clicked the most?
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Tools such as Yahoo! Web Analytics and Google Analytics provide quantitative data about your site’s users, what paths they took through your pages, how long they spent on the site, what words they searched on, and so forth.
Ask qualitative questions
Why do people visit your site, and are they satisfied with their experience?
You can deduce some of your visitors’ objectives by using audience measurement tools and by reading comments and customer feedback. For more complete information, you can conduct interviews, surveys, or user testing.
Questions like the following will help guide an investigation of qualitative information.
- What is your audience’s main reason for visiting your site? Possible answers may include:
to read
to look for a job
to buy products
to learn something
to search
to download or upload files
to be entertained
to read stories
to play games
to watch videos or view photos
to do research
to post an advertisement
to blog
to give feedback
to communicate with others
to see what’s new or upcoming
to network (for example, to meet new people, to get a date)
to share content such as photos, videos, or documents
to complete a task (for instance, to back up a hard disk)
to find information about you or your company
to get service or support
to ask for advice
- How well does the site answer your audience’s content needs?
- What do your visitors find most valuable? Least valuable?
- Can people easily find what they want? If not, why not?
- What would people add to make the experience better?
- Why did people choose this site? How does it benefit them?
- Would visitors recommend this site to a friend? Why or why not?
