In marketing and advertising, a target audience, or target group is the primary group of people that something, usually an advertising campaign, is aimed at appealing to. The same rules apply for a website. The target audience for the website of an artgallery are art collectors, artists and art lovers.

To design a new website tailored to the preferences of this target audience, you have to identify the profile of these people, which is not an easy task. A first approach is to analyse the profile of the visitors of the old website, assuming that it reflects the typical profile of the target audience.

The following data sources can be explored to get useful informations :

• Google Analytics (if installed on the website)
• Alexa (web traffic metrics)
• Quantcast

The Google Analytics report for an artgallery website, operational since more than 3 years, provides data from more than 4 million pageviews, 3 million visits and 2.3 million unique visitors, which is quite impressive and representative.

The  results from the analysis for the browser capabilities are the following:

Browser types:

• IE : 75,6%
• Firefox : 18,2%
• Safari : 5,1%
• others: 1,1%

Operating Systems:

• Windows : 91,8%
• MacIntosh: 7,5%
• Linux: 0,5%
• others: 0,2%

Screen Resolutions:

• lower or equal 800 pixel horizontal: 7,2%
• 1024 x 768 pixel: 43,5%
• higher or equal 1152 pixel horizontal: 49,3%

Flash support:

• Flash 10: 20% (augmenté à 40% les trois derniers mois)
• Flash 9: 64,4%
• Flash 8 or less: 15,6%

Java support:

• yes: 98,3%
• no: 1,7%

Traffic sources :

• Direct traffic : 58,2%
• Refering sites : 40,1%
• Search Engines : 1,1%

Key search terms : women in art, artgallery, digital art

Number of recurring visitors (more than 9 visits in 3 years): 31.326

Number of very loyal visitors (more than 200 visits in 3 years) : 2.891

The Web Information Company Alexa provides the following metrics (Demographics) for the website:

• Age : Relative to the general internet population, 55-64 year olds are greatly over-represente
• Gender : Relative to the general internet population, Females are over-represente
• Education : Relative to the general internet population, people who went to graduate school are over-represented
• Location :  Relative to the general internet population, people browsing from home are over-represented
• Key search terms :  video,  alice, women in art, digital art

Quantcast provides following informations : This site reaches approximately 12,614 U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a 50+, somewhat wealthy, rather female, more educated group.