Who’s using and converting on my site?

This is a basic intro to GA demographics

You’ve got your product ready to go, your site looks great, and you’re ready to start targeting with ads. Before you do, take a step back to see who your real audience is, it might surprise you.

Gather up some data

This will probably take you the most time to do

We’ll be using Google Analytics to look at data. Not only is Google Analytics detailed and easy-to-learn, it’s also free! Anyone can (and should) set up a Google Analytics account for their site. After the tracking code is implemented, you’ll need to give Google up to 24 hours to start processing your data.

If your site is new, we recommend that you take a few weeks to compile user data to see who you should be targeting.

Using your noggin’

Often, we fail to realize the difference between customer and consumer. Let’s say we sold phone cases, these phone cases had pictures of basketball players on the back. We could say to ourselves "18-44 year old guys will love this, let’s target that age group on Instagram." Time goes by and we realize that we aren’t getting the results we wanted. We need to think a little more.

Once we open up Google Analytics, we have access to who is viewing the site, which pages they view, and if they’re converting. So we notice that a lot of women aged 18-24 are buying our cases. That’s really weird, we didn’t expect that audience. Except it’s not weird, that’s the customer we should be targeting, girlfriends and wives buying phone cases for their boyfriends/husbands. But we wouldn’t have realized that without looking at Google Analytics.

Demographics

Demographics are a severely underappreciated part of GA

Make sure demographics are enabled!

Enabling demographics will let you collect basic information about your customers. Age and gender being a couple of them. Segmenting demographic data can help you make remarketing campaigns in the future!

Make your way over to Demographics: Left hand menu, Audience -> Demographics -> Overview

Do a quick overview to see who’s coming to your site.

Quick and easy, no real work to it. In case you just started your site or haven’t used Google Analytics before, these are your users!

We can see that most of our users are male between the ages of 18 and 44 (with 40% being 25-34). This already gives you the foundation to start understanding who is going to your site and interacting with it.

We can go deeper

Basic users. A little too basic. We need an answer to our question. The question is…

Who bought my stuff?

Assuming you sell things online, you most likely have a page that a customer is directed to after purchasing. Find that page’s url, it probably contains something like "Checkout" or "order-confirmed" in it.

Let’s head back to GA and segement it out:

1. Go to Demographics
2. Press "Add a segmemt"
3. Press "+ New Segment"
4. Go to Conditions -> Change the first drop down menu to ‘Page’ and the second menu to ‘contains’, if not already there.
5. Paste in "order-confirmed" or whatever your URL path to an order is.

6. Give it a name and save, you’re done. Here’s mine:

Now that we have that set up, we can view side by side demographics of people performing a checkout from our site. Those are real customers right there!

As you can tell, the largest age group viewing our site is 25-34 year olds, but our largest costumer age group is by far 18-24 year olds. Now your targeting can be even more specific!

Those are your Users

That’s was a short little run-down of who your users are. If you need specifc analytic rundowns for you or your company, feel free to reach out us here at PINT. We do this stuff for a living and love looking at charts and graphs.