In marketing, knowing the audience of the business dictates everything. When we know who we want to reach, we will tailor the layout of the website, the types of advertising used, and even the content itself to better appeal to this audience and meet their needs. Google Analytics offers powerful tools to help us all accomplish these goals in an effective and straight-forward system.
Google Analytics can break your audience down in two key categories:
- Where they are accessing your site from
- Their personal demographics
Understanding Who the Audience Is
Google Analytics can offer you can valuable information such as:
- Whether the user is male or female
- Their interests
- Their geographic region
- Whether the person is using mobile or desktop
When we know the demographics that our page visitors fall into, and how that corresponds to the people most likely to convert, we can adjust our marketing efforts to best speak to the intended demographics. If you learn that your customers heavily sway towards a particular gender or region, it will impact the types of content you produce and how you speak to the audience.
The question of mobile versus desktop is also critical. As of April 2015, Google has officially been taking mobile preparedness into account when it comes to search engine results pages. The percentage of your visitors who are arriving from mobile devices, however, you may adjust the types of advertising you do and the amount of time you put into the mobile design and layout of your website.
To access all of the demographics information, you will need to ensure that your Google Analytics account is enabled for remarketing. If you need help setting this up, Google has set up a Help Center page to guide you.
Understanding What the Audience is Doing
Knowing what people do when they arrive on your website will help you make the entire site more effective for moving people through the sales funnel and producing conversions. With the Google analytics tools, you can take the data about who your customers are and analyze precisely what they are doing on each page.
You will be able to answer questions such as:
- How did the visitor arrive on the website?
- What content did they spend the most time reading?
- What reason did they have for coming to the website?
- Do the pages they read inspire them to read more or click off?
- What is the common path of those most interested in converting?
Armed with this information, you can refine your marketing strategies to better reach your intended audience. If your content is having immense success on social media, for example, you can increase your efforts to attract traffic through the various platforms. You can also judge which content produces the highest number of conversions, and produce more options to interest these particular readers. Popular content can also be repurposed in other formats, giving you the opportunity to dive even deeper into the subject matter with your readers.
On the other hand, if you find that certain pieces of content are resulting in high bounce rates, you can investigate further what might be the source of the problem. It may be that the content is not addressing the reader’s needs, which means that you might want to take a closer look at your page SEO to make sure you are not attracting the wrong audience. You might also find that certain pages should just be eliminated.
Google Analytics is an incredibly valuable tool for website owners that cannot be easily replicated. It allows businesses to understand their site visitors on a deeper level, providing them with the insight they need to make their efforts to reach their intended audience more effective. This helps us all improve our profits and grow our brands.
