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Keeping an eye upon visitor demographics is a significant part in the overall traffic analysis process because the Internet is global and the visibility of your site does not depend on which markets you primarily target. Monitoring where your traffic is coming from and how it breaks down increases your chances to improve visitor segmentation and lets you take advantage of unexpected traffic from outside your target market.
HitLens provides you with an IP-based method of collecting geographic information which introduces enough precision for the marketing process. Under the "demography" section of this course we also cover the reports concerning the technical details of each visit (i.e. operating system and browser details), although we understand this is not quite relevant to demographics. HitLens breaks these two kinds of reports into two different groups, "Systems" and "Demographics". It is advisable that you keep track of the demographic distribution of your visitors so that you can detect and react to the spikes in traffic from those locations and market sectors you do not directly target. If you are working in the American market and suddenly after another optimization campaign you find out that you get several thousand visitors from the UK , you could adjust your landing pages and marketing campaigns to better convey your message to this particular audience and promptly take advantage of your presence in this market share. Also, the reports that you find under the demography section allow you to find out whether a significant share of your customers speaks a specific language (set by default in their browser), e.g. if your primary market is the USA and then you find out that quite a few visitors speak German, you may want to think of translating your pages into German to see whether your offers to that audience can become productive. Demographic information is helpful when you're expanding your activity into the offline world. Knowing more about what regions are most active on your Web site, you will focus your offline ad campaigns, catalog mailings etc on those regions. HitLens demographics reports The "Countries", "Languages", "Time Zones" and "Regions" reports are all found under the "Demographics" category. The Countries report gives you a sufficient approximation on what countries your visitors are from. Use it to track the moment you start receiving a significant traffic from a certain country outside your primary market. This is inevitable if your business grows and if your SEO campaigns are successful. When you come across such a situation, it means you may count on a successful presence on a market of another country. The Languages report shows you which languages the visitors use by default in their browsers. As soon as you start receiving a significant number of visitors that use other language than the language your Web site is written in, you may think about translating part or all of the site into this language. Alternately, you can create a couple of landing pages in this language to better convey your message to the newly targeted audience. The Time Zones report pinpoints visitor time zones. It can be useful when you are programmatically running certain daily activities on your site (so-called "cron jobs"). for instance, updating a product catalog or performing maintenance operations. Detect the time zone where you have least visitors, calculate the difference in time between this time zone and your server local time, and appoint your cron jobs for this time. Also, you might find your own applications for this report. 
Time Zones Finally, the Regions report is a globalization of "Countries" as it shows you the breakdown of visitors by continent. System-related reports HitLens has a couple of auxiliary reports which may help you technically adjust your site to visitors' requirements. Many Web designers know how difficult it is to balance between optimizing the Web site to different screen resolutions. With HitLens, you can detect which screen resolution is used by most your visitors. You can also find out how expedient it is to utilize JavaScript code and Java applets, in case you are making use of these technologies. It may show that a significant amount of Web surfers coming to your site have the selected technology disabled in their browsers. So, even if it is no more than one third, you should probably favor simpler technologies. The system-related reports can be found under the "Systems" report category. What you should remember - The demographic (geography and language) information will help you to determine when you can safely start expanding your activity into other markets or market segments.
- The system-related reports may give you many useful hints of whether your Web site does not look or function as expected in the browsers of a considerable part of your visitors.
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