Where do average website visitors live?

August 24, 2010 9:01 AM

I'm community manager for a site that's kind of like metafilter (community blog) but for developmental biologists only. I need to present some site stats soon, and I think I have this really cool analysis of how the top 10 visiting countries are all countries with existing developmental biology societies (which is rare, with only 11 societies worldwide) but, being a properly trained scientist, I need controls...

I'm looking for the top 10 visiting countries of *other* websites, so I can show that ours are different, but I have no clue how to find those. I'm sure someone somewhere must have posted this kind of info for their particular sites, but if I google related phrases I get a bunch of "Top Countries to Visit!" tourism sites.

Is there a go-to place to find such stats in general? Or do you know of a site who published theirs? Is there a normal/average/default geographic distribution of website visitors?

Or would anyone who runs a site for a related audience (other globally targeted group of academics for example) be willing to share *their* top 10 so I can compare? I don't need the numbers, just a list of the top 10.

posted by easternblot to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: rather than 'website visitors', you might have more luck with 'web users'. Here's the global distribution, you can surely demonstrate how your visitors are not representative of the population.

I think it'll be hard to do a comparison to other sites, unless you can find ones that target a similar kind of audience (ie scientists within a subspecialty.) Comparing to, say, EBay, or CNN.com probably wouldn't be useful because those sites have themselves a bias towards certain countries.
posted by Kololo at 9:33 AM on August 24, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks! That's somewhat useful. Their list of top internet countries includes four that I expected to be there, but aren't in my top ten at all (Brazil, China, Russia, and India). I *might* be able to get a hold of data for a site with more general (no subspecialty) biologists if I ask the right people nicely, so that would be most useful I suspect.
posted by easternblot at 10:49 AM on August 24, 2010

Another option - if you use Google Analytics you can enable an option that will submit your anonymous data to their aggregate pool, and they will in turn share that pool data back with you. They judge the content of your site and find similar sites or pages with similar content and allow you to bring that back into GA for comparison. Enabling this also lets you pull down global comparisons, regional, and content based comparisons. If you're using Google Analytics, go to the dashboard and click the Edit Account Settings link next to your profile name and tick the radial to enable sharing of your GA data.
posted by msbutah at 2:10 PM on August 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Hm, we're using StatCounter, so that won't help me much, but that would be totally helpful if we *did* have GA!
posted by easternblot at 3:41 PM on August 24, 2010