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7 Most Critical Audience Indicators In Google Analytics - mOOnshot digital | online marketing agency Singapore
Google Analytics can at first glance seem overwhelming and complex, so here are 7 significant Google Analytics’ Audience metrics that you should master.
Your website is a key marketing tool so it is essential to keep a pulse on how your site is performing. In the first part of our deep dive series on Google Analytics we explained how to set up your account and get started with Google Analytics. Now that you have Google Analytics installed on your website, you need to figure out what metrics are important to your business.
Today we’ll focus on Google Analytics’ Audience report suite that provides all kinds of valuable information about who visits your site.
We know that Google Analytics can at first glance seem overwhelming and complex, so here are 7 significant Google Analytics’ Audience metrics that you should master.
1. Age, Gender And Interests Of Visitors
We’re encouraging all of our clients to enable Demographics and Interests reporting in Google Analytics. To do so, you’ll need to update your Google Analytics code by adding in a single line of code in your backend.
Once enabled, this fairly new feature provides a new level of insights relating to the age, gender and specific interests of people looking at your site.
Demographics will help you refine the audience you are targeting, while Interests will deliver information on preferences (i.e sports, computers & electronics, travel,…) of people browsing your site and help determine if your services or products are of interest to your audience.
2. Location, Location, Location
Under the Geo tab, you will find information regarding the languages and locations of your website audience. Traffic location in Google Analytics gives insights into the origin of the traffic and which area is bringing in some solid leads. This is a good way to evaluate if your marketing efforts are driving traffic from the right regions and optimised for the languages your audience speaks and reads.
It is also a good indicator of potential locations worth investing in and it can also be very helpful for publishers who want to create content that is locally focused.
3. Behavior: How Engaged Are Your Visitors?
The Behavior section includes detailed category reports comparing the number of new and returning visits, how often return visits occur, how long visitors spend on your website, how many pages they visit and more.
The New vs Returning report is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
The Frequency vs Recency report is a good indicator of user interest in your site content, especially important if you have a blog section or are an online publisher.
Engagement is another critical metric and a great indicator of the health of your website content. You want visitors to stay and click around on your website – longer durations mean that your visitors are generally interested in your content which leads to a better chance of converting them. If your average session duration and page depth data are low, you know you must add more engaging content.
4. Bounce Rate: Why Are Your Visitors Leaving?
Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who visit your site but immediately leave after only viewing a single page.
Generally, a high bounce rate is bad, as it shows that many people arrive on your site and don’t engage in viewing multiple pages. Spend time understanding why your visitors are leaving (i.e poor navigation, lack of search facility, slow site speed, non-mobile friendly website, over abundance or poorly placed advertisements, poor design, intrusive pop-up windows, low quality content, etc.) and make necessary adjustments to your call-to-actions, landing pages, or content/navigation structure.
Bounce rates do vary a lot between different industries so it is hard to give a benchmark, but as a rough guide, anything over 60% on your homepage should be of concern.
5. Technology
The Technology report provides you with information about the browsers, operating systems and Internet service providers of your website visitors. This information is crucial for you to ensure that your website is working optimally on all browsers and devices your visitors use. This Technology report can help identify issues your website might be having across browsers so you can effectively focus on troubleshooting. For example, a higher bounce rate on a specific browser may indicate compatibility issues. It can also be used to gauge whether you should be creating Chrome extensions or Mac-based desktop applications.
Note, that it’s always a good idea to check how your website looks on all the popular browsers each time you make a change on your website!
6. Mobile
We’re big advocates of mobile-friendly and responsive websites. With mobile browsing fast overtaking desktop browsing, it is worth keeping an eye on the Mobile report and ensure that your website offers exceptional user experience across all the right devices.
The Mobile report provides a breakdown of devices (mobile, tablet or desktop) and device types (Samsung, iPhones, etc) used to access your website.
Even if your traffic isn’t high on smartphones and tablets (yet), you’ll definitely want to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and future-ready. Our top clients’ websites typically receive 20% to 45% of traffic from mobile and tablet devices.
Bad viewing experiences can lead to a loss of traffic and sales revenue, but also poor search engine ranking. So use these mobile data to identify potential viewing issues with specific devices and optimise the user experience based on your audiences’ viewing preferences.
7. Users Flow
Users Flow is a graphical flow chart or in other words a visual roadmap for your site. Users Flow outlines the path your visitors take through your website, from the starting page they enter to where they are dropping out.
You can use the drop-down menu at the top left to see the flow of users based on various data (language, location, browser,…).
We find Users Flow particularly useful for building an internal linking structure. It will show you from which sections visitors are exiting the site and which pages lead visitors to view more pages.
Time To Crowd Surf
Proper data means you are equipped to drive the continual improvements of your online experiences. Now that you have learned the top Audience metrics you should monitor on a regular basis in Google Analytics, it’s time for you to explore how your site has been performing. Note that this is only our top selection of what you can uncover under the Audience section without going deeper into advanced settings and reporting.
In upcoming posts, we’ll continue to dive deeper into Google Analytics’ ABC cycle: Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, if you need any help setting up your Google Analytics, making sense of all the data or would like to learn more about valuable reports and metrics for improving your business, feel free to drop mOOnshot digital a line!