Using Google Analytics to identify the target audience
Google Analytics is one of the most popular and effective tools for gathering data about website traffic. Notably, the free nature of the service and user-friendly interface make it the common solution for website owners to get the insights that they need for better SEO and Marketing strategies. Besides the information about the user sessions and how they interact with a site, Google Analytics also provides certain information about users. Considering the capabilities of Google Analytics to gather data about the audience, it is vital to discuss how it can be used to improve website marketing.
Google Analytics: explained
Google Analytics is a service which is designed to collect statistics and information about a site’s traffic. In particular, it shows how many users visited a website, how much time they spend on which page, the bounce rate, the region of the users, devices used, demographics, etc. Essentially, the primary objective of a service is to provide information that can be further used to improve the marketing performance of a site. Identifying what attracts users or where they bounce could help to achieve the desired goals. Knowing the patterns of the visitors could also influence what site owners should consider in their overall business strategy.
In order to track activity, a special code snippet has to be added to the header or footer of a website. The service on the admin page provides this unique code. The code tag collects the information about the users’ visits to pages and transfers it to Google servers, where users can view the reports and statistics from the dashboard. However, the important notion remains that it uses cookies to collect the data. Thus, Google Analytics cannot obtain data from the users who have disabled them. Popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc. provide the easy integration of Google Analytics and dedicated sections in the settings where a merchant can insert the special tracking code to collect the data of the online shop.
Target audience analysis in Google Analytics
Finding the target audience is one of the core principles of an effective marketing and advertising campaigns because it helps to personalize the strategy and make it more effective and appealing to specific audiences. The primary characteristics of the audience provided by Google Analytics are:
- gender;
- age;
- location;
- language
- Interests (where possible);
- device;
Google Analytics audience report
This information could potentially describe what type of users are the most interested in your website and how they interact with it. For instance, knowing that the average age of your visitors is 24-34 could signal that your business should emphasize the marketing strategy that targets millennials, while the statistics about the gender of users can help to reorganize the site to appeal to the ones that visit a site the most.
The conclusions and improvements could be made considering all the information above about your site’s audience. Google Analytics itself offers graphs with the visualization of your audience. Nevertheless, to collect this data (about age, gender, and interests) from other sources (not Google), it is necessary to enable Demographics and Interest Reports. Additionally, Google Analytics shows the sources where the visitors come from. This information also helps in understanding which promotion and advertisement channels are the most effective for attracting your target audience.
Google Analytics and eCommerce
For eCommerce websites, using Google Analytics and defining target audiences imply the improvement of the conversion rate. Knowing what locations are the most common for the visitors and how much time they spend on particular pages could be the indication to emphasize the marketing campaigns on the most popular products or services. Also, Google Analytics shows how many new or returning customers a shop has. Analytics makes a lot of marketing work much easier and more comprehensive. Moreover, the integration of Google Analytics directly into an eCommerce platform dashboard provides data about transactions and revenue. As Shopify experts states, Google Analytics is also essential for the eCommerce due to these metrics:
Google Analytics dashboard. Shopify Blog example
- Acquisitions. Shows where the visitors come from.
- Engagement. Shows activities that visitors perform on a website page.
- Monetization. Shows a website’s sources of revenue.
- Retention. Shows the patterns of the returning customers and provides suggestions for the engagement of this audience.
Conclusions
All in all, the use of Google Analytics is almost an integral part of running any website because it shows how well it performs, how your visitors interact with it, and who they are. The data about the target audience is also crucial in making the marketing strategy more effective to appeal to core visitors. In the eCommerce industry, identifying a target audience contributes to a higher conversion rate and helps sales. Thus, Google Analytics can be considered as one of the best free solutions for collecting statistics and improving your website’s marketing results.
