Establishing your target audience might provide valuable insights and help give some direction to you digital marketing strategy. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew who your target audience is? You could tailor content according to their hobbies and interests and begin to engage with them on the personal level that people expect to be engaged on these days. The good news is- establishing your target audience is relatively simple. All you need is Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides deep insights into the demographics of people using your website. It is one of the most powerful tools available in digital marketing and it’s free. One of the features in Analytics is the ‘Audience’ feature.
Features within Google Analytics
Enable Demographics and Interests Reporting
You may have to enable this feature before you can begin gathering data and start using the information gathered to start appealing to your customers. Here is the link to get you started, https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2819948?hl=en. Once enabled, Analytics will begin to collect data and you will be able to use this data to start generating really dynamic reports.
Demographics
The demographics section will give you information on the age and gender of your website visitors. You could tailor and generate your content according to your data to maximise your engagement. So if 75% of your traffic is male and 25% female, you can create three pieces of content targeted at men for every one piece targeted at women to maximise your content generation.
Target Audience Interests
You can see what interests your visitors have. This ranges from ‘Dating services’ to ‘Motor Vehicles’ to ‘Business Technology’ and everything in between.
Geo
Find out where your visitors are searching from. Are they international or regional? Are you getting a lot of interest from the town down the road? Maybe you need to expand your catchment area. Use this information to tackle these kind of questions.
Behaviour
Here you can see data relating to how your audience interacts with your site including ‘New vs Returning Users’, ‘Frequency and Recency’ and ‘Engagement’
Technology
Here you can see what browser or operating system your audience is using. You can also see who their internet provider is. I find it hard to see how this can be made relevant to a standard business plotting a digital marketing strategy but the information is there if you want it.
Mobile
This has become more and more relevant in recent years with the explosion of smart phones. You can see how many of your users are viewing your site on a desktop, tablet or phone. You can even see a breakdown of the type of mobile devices being used.
Benchmarking
This is a brilliant tool! Here you will find information on how your site is performing compared to your industry average. Essentially, how you are doing against your competitors. You will be able to analyse this data and figure out what you need to work on to start edging ahead.
Conclusion
In conclusion, using Google Analytics is a great way to not only establish your target audience but to really dig deep into what they are interested in and how they interact with your website. With this data you should be able to really streamline your digital marketing strategy. If you would like to discuss any of the above further, don’t hesitate to get in touch. For more articles like this, please feel free to sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page.
