Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics platforms since it is offered free. It is an online tool from Google that will give you a better view of your website’s audience and how they interact with your content.
You can use the platform to track and analyze your website’s performance and get insights on how to improve your business. Besides the performance, you can track how the visitors to your website behave. Google Analytics will help you to better understand your website’s audience.
At first, the reports might seem scary but once you understand them, you will find it easy to grow your business.
You can improve your business by studying the Google analytics audience.
Why Choose Google Analytics?
Your website is your business’ storefront. Those who visit your business can be likened to people who window-shop in physical businesses. Your window-shoppers are looking for something that entices them and if they find nothing, they will move on to the next shop.
The first thing your visitors look at is the appearance of your business. Because you may not have a way to speak to your customers online as you would in a physical storefront, you need to understand your audience through the analytics provided by Google Analytics. Your marketing strategy depends on a number of factors and having good data is the most important one.
Data based on your visitor’s behavior should be the guiding force in your marketing strategies. This is where Google Analytics comes in. The analytics collects data on your visitors and shows you a report that will help you make the necessary changes in your business.
The data includes the channels your visitors come from (referrals, social media, paid channels, organic search, and mediums). It also shows who the visitors are, their location, pages they visit, and the keywords that can bring you more business.
The data will tell you a lot about the behavior of your audience. When you need to improve your communication strategy, the data can help you a lot. There are more than 30 million sites using Google Analytics. Yet, there are those who still do not know what to do with the reports they get.
Below are some of the reports and how you can use them to learn the behavior of your audience:
Audience Overview
The Google analytics audience overview is the first report you get on visitors to your website. Here, you can see exactly who visits you through a general profile of the visitors.
The report shows where those who visit your website are located, the devices they use to access your website, and the amount of time they spend on different pages on your website.
There are at least 15 subsections on the Audience Overview section. Each subsection provides more reports when you click on its dropdown. This section is a brief of what your audience comprises and shows information such as a change in traffic, number of unique visitors, page views, number of sessions for every user, session duration, and bounce rate among others.
You can also view reports on users including the number of users over a given time, cohort analysis, lifetime value, demography, age, technology used, behaviors, and interests. If you have the google analytics audience overview not working, you can always reach out to Google for help.
How Can You Use the Audience Overview Reports?
The Audience Overview section shows you the nature of your current audience. You can use the report to understand how to approach your audience during the marketing and during interactions on your website or on other channels.
The reports offer you a way to improve the user’s experience to reduce the bounce rate and increase the duration of each session.
Through the reports, you can see whether you are targeting the right audience with marketing strategies. You can see the pages that your visitors land on most and find out why that is so to improve engagement in that and other pages.
The audience report will show you how to keep your customers engaged as you can see new and returning customers. You can also see those who buy and those who window-shop and that will help you tailor your messaging to reach the highest number of people.
The idea is to increase the number of returning customers by enhancing engagement and offering a better user experience. Understanding what is audience analytics and how you can leverage that will help you get the most out of your audience.
Creating an Audience
Audiences are groups of users that you group together based on specific attributes. Google Analytics can help group your audiences together as you need it. You can make the audiences as large as you need.
These groups are ideal when you need to market to specific groups. For instance, you can get Google Analytics to group together all the customers whoever bought a product from your website.
If you want to advertise to new customers, you might create a segment comprised of people who may have visited your website and downloaded a white paper but who haven’t bought anything on your website yet.
There are so many other segments you can create including those with more than three pageviews, those who view the pricing page, returning users, those who fill out a contact form, those who view product pages, and many more.
Regardless of the segment you choose, you are able to target your marketing campaigns for better results. If you are using AdWords, you can import the audience from analytics to AdWords for better-targeted marketing.
Customer Acquisition
After you understand the Google analytics audience, you need to find out where your customers come from. How did the visitors come across your website? Understanding where your customers come from is the easiest way to direct your marketing efforts to that channel to bring in more returns.
The Acquisition section shows you everything about where the visitors come from.
It offers the sources and channels that directed visitors to your website. These channels include social media, paid search, organic search, referral, or direct search. With this report, you can see the marketing strategies that are bringing the most traffic.
How Do You Use Acquisition Report to Grow Your Business?
You can tell which of your marketing campaigns are excelling and which are tanking. The reports are an overview of the content that your audience enjoys most and the marketing channels that you should focus on more. You can use the data to enhance your marketing strategy for more conversions.
If you use different content for different channels, it might be time to revise the content for the channels that bring in a few visitors.
The reports also help your SEO efforts as you can see the visitors that come in from organic search. If your organic search numbers are stalling or some pages have more traffic from organic search than others, you might want to optimize these pages to rank better.
Real-Time Reports
Understanding audience destinations Google Analytics will help you but you can combine it with real-time reports to get even better insights. In this section, you get to monitor the action as it unfolds.
You can use the report to see the number of people online at any given time. The data not only shows you how many of your visitors are online at any given time but also where they are accessing your website from, the device they are using, the pages they are on, traffic sources, and any actions they might have performed.
How To Use Real-Time Reports
Real-time reports show you how your campaigns are doing in real-time. You can see the number of people on a given page. With the report, you can see the engagement that each page brings.
This data will help you understand your site gets more visitors and schedule your content based on the number of visitors online at a given time. You can use the data to give your posts the exposure needed.
When you observe audience behavior as it unfolds, you can tell how much they engage with your content. If your visitors bounce off as soon as they land on your pages, you might need to rethink the formats and ideas in your content.
For instance, if the highest numbers of your visitors are on your contact page but they leave without giving you their emails, you might need to think of changing your call to action. This will help you increase conversions.
Behavior Reports
Once visitors land on your website, do they take any action or they just bounce off?
The Behavior section shows you total pageviews, average time on page, unique pageviews, percent exit, bounce rate, most viewed pages, five unique events, and search terms.
Besides these, the report also shows the behavior flow. This shows the path that your visitors once they are on your landing page. With this report, you can see your content’s progress.
The report shows top pages on your website, average revenue from every page, and the highest exit pages. There are other relevant metrics such as site speed, experiment, and site searches.
How can Behavior Reports Help Your Business?
Behavior analytics help you understand how your audience absorbs content from one page to the next. With the reports, you can see how much the audience moves towards specific pages and which pages they spend time on the most.
From the report, you can see whether your customers are doing what you want them to do and what might be causing them not to do what you want. What can you change to influence their courses of action?
Should you change the call-to-action? Should you change your internal linking?
You can follow your website as a visitor and see what you might need to change to make the experience better for your visitors.
Another important report is the content drilldown which helps you understand how long customers stay on specific pages. The report can help you prioritize some topics over others. Use the data when planning your website design and messaging.
Setting Up Google Analytics
If you are creating a blog using one of the main platforms such as WordPress, Google Analytics comes standard.
If your website doesn’t have Google Analytics, you can open Google Analytics, create an account for free, and then sign in to set it up. From there, set up your property or add your business and set up a reporting view.
Google will give you instructions on how to add a tracking code to your website.
From there, you will be prompted to give permissions to get the tool running. Other configurations you can carry out include import audience from analytics to AdWords – linking these two allows easy sharing of data.
You can also create a google analytics export audience for better engagement as explained above. There is so much more you can do besides understanding your audience.
Identifying Your Core Audiences from Google Analytics
Core audiences, also called custom audiences, are groups of website visitors with similar characteristics. The audiences are important when you need to target specific people based on their location, interests, and more.
You can create core audiences from all the reports you get from Google Analytics. You need to have audiences from high-value user groups.
These groups might have any of the following attributes:
• Most Frequent Visitors
• New Visitors
• Most engaged Visitors (those who spend more time on your pages)
• Highest converting customers (those who take the action you need them to)
If any group of users meets all the above attributes, you already have a core audience.
These are users who offer the most visits, conversions, and engagements. Once you identify your core audience, you need to focus all your marketing activities on the core audience.
Some user groups will satisfy one, two, or three of the above attributes. Here, you already have a potential core audience. Note that you can have core audiences interested in different products in your business.
You still need to target your potential core audience as you seek to find why they are not core audiences. You can also work to make them core audiences.
If some of the users visit your site frequently, engage with content but fail to convert, you need to find a way to convert them.
Perhaps your call to action or your products is not enticing the visitors.
How to Create Core Audiences beyond Google Analytics
You can have Google analytics export audience for better targeting but if you do not have a core audience, you will have trouble offering targeted ads.
You can use a few other methods to understand your audiences better. For instance, if you have visitors who frequently visit your website but they do not convert, Google Analytics will not offer you an answer to that.
You may have your hypotheses but the only way to test them is through:
• Surveys – Surveys help you understand your customers better. When sending out surveys, it is better to target them to different audience groups to get the best answers.
The only problem with surveys is that you will have more data that needs you to sit and analyze and you will use more resources. However, if you can use the data well, you will grow your business.
• Customer Interviews – This is ideal when you need to understand a specific customer as a representative of a group of customers. You can call the customer or email them and ask them a few questions.
The answers to these questions will help you understand why a customer might subscribe to your website and not buy your products. If a customer is not sure what they want, they might not give you the right answers over the phone.
• User Testing – User testing is best done through real-time reports on Google Analytics. Here, you can observe visitors’ behavior and see what might make them not be part of your core audience.
You can also ask some people to access your website and access the pages that your potential core audiences access most and see whether there are any errors you might need to rectify.
• Experimentation – This is a more involving method. Here, you can test out different hypotheses and theories. If you have a feeling your visitors fail to convert because of the shopping cart, improve the shopping cart, and observe what happens.
You can then use the results from these four methods to increase engagement and create a core audience with a higher number of people.
Conclusion
Once you understand what is audience analytics, your work is not done, you have to go ahead and use the analytics to better your marketing strategies.
The analytics differ from one website to the next but they help you understand who your visitors are audience destinations Google analytics or where they come from and the pages they visit, and much more.
If any of the sections of Google Analytics fails, say you have Google Analytics overview not working, you need to resolve it fast to have the reports and better your marketing strategies.
The reports from Google Analytics help you make your visitors happy (by giving them what you hypothesize they need) and also keep search engines happy. This way, you will have more traffic and more conversions.
