Getting to Know Your Online Customers with Google Analytics
Conversion Rate Optimization for a website starts with tracking website performance and identifying areas of improvement.
This task is best initiated using a web analytics tool.
Although there are several web analytics tools available, Google Analytics (GA) is the most widely used tool across all websites because of its comprehensive reporting system and free availability.
It is the standard for webmasters trying to track visitors to their website or blog, and presents users with demographics data like age group, gender and interests. Such information is invaluable to marketers as well as content writers trying to determine who their audience is and what their interests are.
Google Analytics offers a ton of metrics and dimensions based on which you can evaluate all individual pages of your website.
It is imperative you recognize the metrics and dimensions pertaining to your business and end-goals.
Here’s how to enable demographics tracking with Google Analytics so you can get a better idea of everyone visiting your website.
Enable Demographics
Within the Display Advertising feature, demographics tracking is one option. Go to Admin, Property Settings, and further down the page you will see the option to enable demographics within the display advertising section. Enable it and move on to the validation stage.
Validation
Once you have enabled demographics, go to the standard reports section of Google Analytics. Here, under the Audience menu, Demographics will be available. When you hit Overview for the first time, you will be presented with a page asking you to enable this feature and validate the tracking code. When you hit validate, your website will be checked to ensure the modified code was inputted in the first step, and whether or not you enabled the relevant display advertising features.
While Google Analytics will start collecting demographics information instantly, certain information may be hidden due to a lack of sufficient data. This is done to prevent personal ID information from being extracted from the reports.
Google Analytics (GA) Demographics and Interests feature consists of a series of reports where we can see behavior information relating to visitor age, gender and interests; but even more importantly, this data can also be used to segment standard reports and create remarketing lists.
When you want to learn more about your online customers, Google Analytics’ Demographics and Interests tool provides the following key information:
- Age identifies users by six categories: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+.
- Gender identifies users as either male or female.
- Affinity Categories identifies users in terms of lifestyle; for example, Sports Fans and Cooking Enthusiasts. These categories are defined to be similar to TV audiences.
- In-Market Segments identifies users in terms of their product-purchase interests.
- Other Categories provides the most specific, focused view of your users. For example, while Affinity Categories includes the category Foodies, Other Categories includes the category Recipes/Cuisines/East Asian.
Standard Reports
Seven standard reports are available:
- Demographics Overview: The distribution of Sessions (or other key metrics) on your property by age group and gender. Sessions is the default key metric. You can also use % New Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate, or Pages per Session.
- Age: Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions metrics broken down by age group. When you drill into an age group, you see the breakdown by gender, and then by interest. Ages below 18 are not included in the data.
- Gender: Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions metrics broken down by gender. When you drill into a gender, you see the breakdown by age group, and then by interest.
- Interests Overview: The distribution of Sessions (or other key metrics) on your property by the top-10 interests in Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments, and Other Categories.
- Affinity Categories (reach): Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions metrics broken down by Affinity Categories.
- In-Market Segments: Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions metrics broken down by In-Market Segments.
- Other Categories: Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions metrics broken down by Other Categories.
Custom Reports
You can use the Demographics and Interests dimensions in Custom Reports. For example, you might want to use the Gender and/or Age dimensions to set the context for evaluating Ecommerce metrics like Buy-to-Detail Rate or Product Revenue per Purchase.
Before you can see data in custom reports, you must enable Advertising Features for your product and enable reporting in the view.
Using demographics information allows you to tailor your content to uniquely suit your audience’s needs, and offer display advertising relevant to their interests.
Get the most efficient use of your website. Attract more customers.
Call Ancell Marketing at 778 285 2288 to learn more about increasing and converting your website traffic.