Demographics

Demographics refers to the population traits of an audience — age, gender, location, language — that is, who the users are, apart from what they do.

Demographics is the identity side of an audience against its behavior, and it serves content and market decisions. But in web analytics one must separate two very different classes. The first is technical and locational traits that come from the browser request itself — country and city from IP, language from the browser setting — obtained without any personal identity. The second is age and gender, which cannot be extracted from the behavioral data of an anonymous visit; any tool that shows them has either logged the user in or borrowed from an external ad network that knows the user, and even then the figures are modeled estimates with high error. So a domestic, privacy-first analytics tool typically provides the first half and honestly stays away from the second.