Authentic question: how would a business know this otherwise in an actionable and effective way?
If you're running anything with an API, then unless somethings horribly wrong it's even easier: look at the number of requests being made to an API endpoint and spot check a few of the user identifiers (tokens, keys, whatever you're using) to see the variety of users.
All of this is assuming you're trying to merely investigate the volume of use of a feature, not trying to diagnose demographics. If you're trying to extract more fine-grained detail, I don't have as many answers; I hope others will chime in with constructive ways to get things like geographic demographics via server logs.
Maybe two cohorts. The people we're really sure about, and the ones we're pretty sure about. If they diverge, ask why.
Note that reCAPTCHA thinks you’re a bot if you block analytics…
The Textarea Cache Firefox extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach... is incredibly useful, but I keep forgetting to install it when I get to a new machine. I forget only once.
Plus, people often don't give valuable feedback when asked questions about features they want and use... people are poor judges of what they actually want, and will list things they think they care about and then end up never using or which don't affect their choices.
Our customers certainly do. We get excellent results from asking a few simple questions now and then, providing both a good source actionable feedback on feature requests and any current problems, and often some encouraging comments that reassure us we are basically doing things that our customers like.
It doesn't just have to be surveys with lots of participants, though. For example, we've known for decades that a simple observational study with just a handful of people is often enough to identify most of the serious usability problems with an interface.
The idea that everything important must be reduced to automated analytics and number-crunching is a very strange disease. Even if the numbers don't lie -- and as we see here, that is far from guaranteed -- you still need to be asking the right questions and comparing useful alternatives for the results to be valuable.
We do. We have real customers do real surveys of our real web sites. In person. We even do shadowing to see how real people use our sites in their daily work.
It's uncommon in SV due to laziness and an unwillingness to talk to actual human beings. Which is dumb because there are companies that will handle this for you.
But SV is stuck in this mindset that everything can be solved by an algorithm. It can't. The tech echo chamber really needs to get over itself.
Sorry, your comment just reminded me of that. Are surveys perfect? No, but they have their uses, and plenty of companies find real value by making use of them.
I don't use Google analytics but I have seen time and again vocal users who seem ignorant of their own usage of an application...and very much not representative of the majority.