In the field of digital marketing, understanding the types of people and interactions that are occurring on your website has become imperative. Any decent marketing strategy has a general sense or a basic understanding of your customer segments and target market for the best possible customers on your website. However, it can seam convoluted and confusing in trying to mark the right types of customers without a proper tracking tool.
One of the most effective tools that marketers need to get accustomed to for helping choose the right marketing strategies for telling who is visiting, and what they are doing on your website is Google Analytics. This free platform helps you solve this ambiguous dilemma about your website traffic to evaluate your website’s audience to make smarter business decisions about your websites’ target market. One of the many benefits of using and understanding Google Analytics is it provides a detailed overview of your website’s ‘Audience.’
On the ‘Reporting’ section of the platform, imaged on the right, it provides insights for direction as to who you should be focusing on, where, and how for your marketing efforts to further understand your best online customers.
Taking advantage of the ‘audience tab’ in the reporting section, business owners can understand who they should be targeting based on the essential tabs such as demographics, and geo tabs to increase marketing effectiveness and return on investment.
Demographics
When looking at the ‘Demographics’ tab, you want to first look at it from a broad perspective first, then dive deep into individual data segments. Looking at the ‘Overview’ tab for example, you can get a quick glimpse on the ratio of different age groups and gender traffic visiting your website.
From this overview tab, you can catch a glimpse of the overall market segments that are visiting your website. For example, from the website data above, it brings in 66.7% percent of the visitors which are male compared to 33.3% female, with the largest age proportionate bracket for ages 25-34 brings 33.2%. This overview is great for gaining a snapshot of your market segments. You can dive even deeper to find more insights by checking out the specific age and gender sub-tabs under the overview.
Age
The dimensions shown for the age ranges from (18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+). With the individual age brackets, analysts can break the metrics down by the individual parts such as the amount of sessions, bounce rate, goal completions, pages viewed per session, and a few other metrics signifying the age brackets activity on your site. The age brackets are differentiated by colour coding so it makes it easy to disseminate the data as shown below.
Having a sense of your website’s visitors from varying age brackets can provide telling information on who to target your written content towards on your blog that would resonate with that age cohort to better increase conversions and sales. You aren’t going to be successful writing articles or blogs that appeal to everyone with the same tone or voice with (18-24) years old, (35-44) year old, and certainly not (65+) years old. You may find that you need to write more content, and adapt your writing style that would resonate to other age groups to expand your market reach.
Gender
You also may find that you are getting a significant amount of traffic from females, even though you presumed that your target market was mostly males, or vice versa. This type of data provided on the gender tab can be combined with the age demographic that can be used to further analyze specific traffic that is coming your website based on custom filtered metric segments that you desire.
Another strong source for understanding your target market demographics is knowing what language and the location people are finding your website.
Geo
Another strong source for understanding your target market demographics is knowing what language and the location from which people are finding your website. These details are important to know because you want to evaluate if your marketing efforts are receiving a response with increased engagement on your website.
It is also important for scouting out new potential markets to further enhance that geographical area with increased marketing. The ‘Geo’ tab is made specifically for this balance of checking the results of your marketing, while also prospecting new areas to target.
Language
The internet has permitted globalism in trade which has opened the reach and audiences that businesses can sell to around the world. You might have a website in only English, but notice that you are receiving a significant amount of traffic from Spanish speaking countries. If you are an e-commerce store, you may be missing out on a large source of revenue from these people who wish to read your website in their native language. By having pages translated to the language of their native tongue, the consumer can feel assured of your offering that will increase the conversion rates from those Spanish speaking countries.
Location
Location is similar to the language tab in the sense that you gather your success from where you are receiving traffic from your marketing spend, while also prospecting high demand areas that are taking notice looking at your website. This knowledge gained from your traffic location can help you determine overall business decisions on where to target your marketing spend based on the continent, country, region, county, even up to specific city. For example, the image above of the United States from the location tab shows that this website is receiving 44.45% percent of its traffic from the state of Virginia, and 14.94% from the state of California.
From there, if you wish to go hyperlocal, you can further and look at the individual counties and cities where your traffic is coming from by clicking on the specific location on the map.
What You Can Do with This Information?
Through these individual demographic dimensions and geo tabs, you can view and create custom reports on any metric based the individual group you wish to take note off (e.g., Sessions, Bounce Rate, Transactions, Revenue, among others).
From there on, you can monitor custom audience segments to track the target audience data in the future. These segments are essentially a subset of your analytics data that may be tracking a certain group such as from a city, language, age group, interests, custom audience, etc. This allows you to quickly check in the data without manually creating filters every time you want to view it.
By monitoring your websites metrics on the demographic and geo tabs, you can A / B test and improve your website to better adhere to your chosen target market, while also prospecting for new market opportunities at the same time.
With these main audience tabs, Digital Analysts can get a more detailed picture on who they should be targeting for their website customers. Our SEO experts are extremely knowledgeable and competent at being able to gather data from Google Analytics to make insightful recommendations from an SEO standpoint that carry over to your overall business strategy to help your business increase your return on marketing investment.
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