Audience reports are located under “Audience”
in the left-hand navigation. These reports can help you better understand the characteristics
of your users. This can include what countries they’re in, what languages they speak, and
the technology they use to access your site. But it can also include data like age and
gender, their engagement and loyalty, and even some of their interests. Let’s begin
with the “Active Users” report. This can show you how many users had at least one session on your site in the last day, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. We call this “site
reach” or “stickiness.” If your marketing activities and site content encourage users
to visit and return to your site, the active users in each time frame should grow. Next,
let’s look at the “Demographics” and “Interests” reports. The “Demographics”
reports provide information about the age and gender of your users. The “Interests”
reports show your users’ preferences for certain types of web content like technology,
music, travel, or TV. This information is useful in two ways. First, if you know your
target audience, it can help verify that you’re reaching the right people. Second, it can
help guide decisions about your marketing and content strategy. Note that to see data
in these reports, you must first enable advertising features in the “Demographics and Interests”
reports for each property. Go into the “Admin” tab under “Property“ and select “Property
Settings.” Under “Advertising Features,” set “Enable Demographics and Interest Reports”
to on. Once activated, you will see data in your Demographics and Interests reports about
the age, gender, and interests of your users. Note that if you’ve just enabled this feature,
it may take a day or two for data to appear in these reports. Also, the Demographic reports
may not contain any data if your site traffic is very low or your segment is too small.
The “Location” report under “Geo” is one of the most useful Audience reports.
Google Analytics can anonymously determine a user’s continent, sub-continent, country,
and city through the IP address used by their browser. Notice the geographic heat map at
the top of the report, which you can adjust to display different metrics. For example,
switching the map to show “percent of New Sessions" lets you identify potential new
markets based on new user traffic to your website. This can help you decide whether
to build awareness or invest in customer loyalty in particular locations. You could also use
the table below the visualization to identify areas that have a high number of conversions
(or transactions), but low traffic rates. That could indicate untapped markets to target
with advertising. Another analysis technique is to identify the regions where you already
have a large audience, but lower than average performance. For example, if certain regions
have a higher than average bounce rate (or users that leave after viewing a single page),
you might need to optimize your advertising or website. Perhaps you need to translate
your ad or site into a local language or add geographically-specific content. Below
“Geo,” are a set of behavior reports that help you understand how often users visited
and returned to your website. The “New vs Returning” report breaks out acquisition,
behavior, and conversion goal metrics for new and returning users. You can look at this
comparison over time to see how audience loyalty may be shifting. Consider your website objectives,
as well as your marketing activities, when evaluating the mix of new and returning users
to your site. Underneath Behavior reports, the “Technology” and “Mobile” reports
can help you understand what technologies your audience uses to consume your site content.
These reports can help you fine-tune your site to make sure it’s fully functional
on different devices and browsers. For example, you can use the “Browser and Operating systems”
report to quickly identify issues with certain browsers on your site. If your site has a
comparatively high bounce rate on a mobile browser, you may need to create a mobile-optimized
version of your website with streamlined content and simpler navigation. It’s also a good
idea to understand if users are migrating from desktop to mobile and plan your development
accordingly. You can use the “Overview” report under “Mobile” to see a breakdown
of your traffic based on smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. Check this report to
see how quickly mobile usage of your site has grown over time. The “Devices” report
lets you see additional details about the devices used to browse your site. This includes
the mobile device name, brand, service provider, input selector, operating system, and other
dimensions like screen resolution. These reports can give your developers and designers direction
on how to create a mobile-optimized experience to best suit your users.
