Understanding the Audience Reports in Google Analytics

The Audience Reporting section of Google Analytics is used to identify the types of visitors coming to a website. Specific reports are used to break down visitors by age, gender, geographical location, device type, browser, operating system, and much more.

Demographics Reports

The Demographic Reports will help you break down your visitors based on their age range as well as their gender. Not all visitors are included in these reports, but only the ones that are able to be determined using Google’s Double Click Remarketing code snippet. The Demographics Reports are not available by default. They require two changes in order to work properly on your account.

The first change is to enable the reports in the Google Analytics Admin interface or in one of the reports themselves. It will ask you to verify that your code is placed properly, but do not worry if this doesn’t come back with a match. If you do not use the exact code snippet provided in the admin area on your site, it will come back as a negative match. Manually confirm your code is correct on your website, and check the following day to make sure it is recording data properly.

The other change required to make your Demographic Reports work properly on your account is related to the Google Analytics code snippet itself. There is a line in the code that must be replaced with the Double Click version, which will use remarketing efforts to determine these designations. Google explains the change needed to the code snippet in this article.

Interests

The Interests Reports are similar to the Demographics Reports in that they require you to enable them in the administration area of Google Analytics, as well as make the same code snippet update.

Interest Reports break down your visitors based on their interests on the internet. If they like to visit certain types of websites they will be tagged as a certain type of user. The Affinity Categories can tell you how many sports fans, news junkies, cooking enthusiasts, music lovers, etc. visit your site during any time period. In-Market Segments are only visitors that are determined to be in the final stages of a buying process. These visitors are more likely to convert on your site, if their interests match your site content. The Other Categories section shows more granular categories for your visitors, allowing you to identify users that do not fit in the other categories.

Geo

The Geo Reports break down your users based on their language and their location. The Language Reports show you visitors based on their language settings in their browser. It usually will show you a language / country combination for the user. The Location Reports can break down your users in many different ways based on their location. The basic reports available in the interface are country/territory, city, continent, and sub-continent region. There are other options available if you use custom reports, the Google Analytics Reporting API, or the Google Query Explorer Tool, including Metro, the area around a large city and Region, which would be a state or province for instance.

Behavior

The Behavior Reports break down how your visitors use your website. The New vs Returning Report breaks down visitors based on whether or not they have ever been to the site before on the same device. The Frequency and Recency Report can show us a breakdown of how often visitors come to the site, and how long the wait in between visits to the site. The Engagement Reports breaks down visitors based on how many pages they view, and how long they are on the site.

Look for Part Two of this post soon with the conclusion of the remaining reports in the Audience Section of Google Analytics.

 

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