Profile of the Ghanaian On-Line Community

This article presumes two things: one that, most visitors to WebPages devoted to Ghanaian issues are Ghanaians and two, all such visitors constitute the Ghanaian On-Line community. When one reads some Ghanaian WebPages one finds several kinds of comments. Some are very positive but others are very troubling. I have occupied myself with finding the profile of such persons. I started with the premise that most of the readers and commentators in the discussion forums were Ghanaians living abroad. But this conclusion was not to be. Read on.

But where do these persons come from? Where do they live? Where do they visit on these WebPages per any one mouse click? Answers to these questions are obtained by Data Mining of WebPages. This is even made easier by such Traffic ranking analytics like alexia.com or trends.google.com. Particularly useful especially for Marketing Analytics is Google Analytics.

With the help of these tools I found out the visitors of Ghanaian WebPages. I do not need to be a web master to get this data. I took the sample for the period July 1, 2008 till Dec. 25, 2008 for two and three WebPages. This period is unique because of the Dec 2008 elections. True Ghanaians home and abroad were seeking information on the election and its results. For marketing purposes I should not name the WebPages concerned.

For one Webpage, on a three-month average the Ghanaian online community constituted 0.0137% of global web users, but on Dec 7, the number jumped to 0.02%. On average 5,634 persons visited their favourite WebPages. All WebPages exhibited the same pattern but not the same intensity. The number of unique pages viewed per user per day was 7.56. Which sections of these favourite WebPages do the On-Line community members visit? 97% visit the news section and 1.9% the discussion forums.

Here comes the most interesting result. Where do these persons in the Ghanaian Online Community come from? Of all the visitors to these pages, 41.2% came from Ghana, 26.5% came from the USA and 8.3% came from the United Kingdom. I was particularly surprised since I had always held the notion that about 90% came from abroad.

Visitors from Italy constituted 3.9%, the Netherlands about 3.6%, Canada had 2.1%, the Ghanaian On-Line Community from Germany had 1.4%, Nigeria constituted 1.0%. Others include Australia with 0.9% while Benin, China, South Korea, Switzerland, India, Norway, Russia and Japan having between 0.5% to 0.8% each. All other countries around the globe made up the rest 5.3%.

The results here may refer to one visitor to one Ghanaian Webpage but this could be used to simulate the needs of other WebPages. These figures point to two things: one, the migration patterns of Ghanaians around the globe and two, the probability that anyone who writes a comment in the discussion forums is from a particular country. This is difficult to estimate. I hope to be able to do this if I find inspiration in my quiet and typical village of Atikpui on Latitude 6°45'0N and Longitude 0°37'60E. Until we find the formula to predict this probability, the results here offer all Webpage owners the possibility to tailor their pages to the needs of their visitors.

Paul A. Agbodza
(Atikpui via Ho).
(Email: [email protected])