One of the vendors I checked out at Blog World Expo 2008 last week was Crowd Science. I spoke briefly with there CEO, John Martin, and he gave me a great, simple overview of what their service is all about.
It’s really as simple as one of the statements on their website:
Traffic stats are only part of the story.
Stats like visitors and page views are only part of the information that’s really worth collecting about your site’s visitors. Crowd Science let’s your serve short questionnaires to your audience and find out more specific demographic information about them. That information has value to it merely because of the ability to then use the information to tune and polish your site for the group of readers you’re already attracting to your site. Or, perhaps you see you’re missing a demographic you’re wanting and you can then tune to attract a different demographic.
Using fundamental research principles, Crowd Science can help you create a model of your audience that reveals more than the records of IP addresses and page views. Our audience measurement service is able to build deep, topic-area-specific statistical models of the demographics and attitudes of the visitors to your website.
After finding out more about Crowd Science, I realized that they are the service that’s hosting the surveys being used on this site and other b5 sites as well. So if you’re prompted to complete the survey, we’d love for you to let us know a little more about you.
I’ve installed Crowd Science on a few of my own personal blogs so I’m really looking forward to finding out a little more about who’s stopping by my sites to visit and see what I have to say.
If you’re running a website, and it doesn’t have to be a blog, you can use Crowd Science to help yourself as well.