Most startup companies have a clear sense of what types of people make their target audience prior to taking their products or services to market. Unfortunately, this is not true in all cases. While some have incorrect assumptions about their audience others simply do not know their consumers yet. If you have no idea of your target audience, ask yourself questions like:
- Where do my customers live?
- What demographic is of the utmost importance to me?
- What’s the ratio of new clients: repeat customers?
- What are my business and sales goals?
- Is my site mobile friendly?
The answers to these questions will give you the right insights and help you better understand your audience, which is crucial to any type of business. That allows you to improve your consumer loyalty, create a better user experience, modify your approach if needed, and take your practices to the next level. These days, it is fairly easy to analyze an audience thanks to advanced technologies and tools available. So, let’s see how to make use of these technologies when identifying a perfect target audience.
Audience Insights vs. Google Analytics
There are different ways to find out more about your audience. The collected data can help businesses clearly understand who’s interested in your products/services as well as who are engaged in advertisements. However, the two most popular ways to identify a target demographic are Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights.
Both platforms give useful information on the target market, allowing you to convey your message to your intended readers. Not only that you can raise their awareness this way but also create a better connection with your perfect target audience and increase engagement as well.
Audience Insights
Many people find that social media is one of the best routes to go, so they mostly use social advertising and social network analysis to reach and understand their audience. Keep in mind that your page audience shouldn’t represent your actual clients. Actually, many of your Facebook pages are visited by fans who don’t match their consumer profile. Audience Insights is a free tool that helps business owners find their target audiences. With the help of this powerful tool, you can easily access your audience on Facebook and find out more about them. It’s possible to upload a customer database to get insight into the complete demographic profile of consumers. Once you have identified your Facebook page fans, i.e. your targeted public, be sure to compare it to your customer database. It is very likely that there will be a certain difference between the purchasing behavior of your clients and actual demographic information.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far one of the most effective and most comprehensive tools for identifying reference public. With this online tool, you can get valuable information about your primary audience. Since Google Analytics goes hand in hand with social media marketing, you can utilize it to determine how well each of social media channels drives traffic to your site. Still, its main purpose is to show you all the data about people who visit your website as well as their behavior while staying there.
The power of this Google’s tool comes from the great amount of data provided. Many users are intimidated by that amount, though.
This is why many businesses avoid diving into data given inside this tool. Even though most of them have Google Analytics installed they seldom review it to learn about the performance of their website. Once the script is installed and ready to use, you can start measuring a diverse array of data related to your users. Sadly, many people don’t use all the possibilities of this awesome tool. The majority of clients only use Google Analytics to track what pages are most visited, how many visitors land to their website, and where they’re coming from. However, there are also tech-savvy users who create the specific goal conversions in Google Analytics and connect their analytics accounts to Google AdWords accounts for enhanced insights.
COMBINE THEM TOGETHER FOR THE BEST RESULTS
It’s advisable to compare the data obtained from Google Analytics to findings in Audience Insights. Both tools anonymously collect information. All three components — your web visitors, your consumer database, and your Facebook audience — give a clear picture of what your target public is. Let’s say you have finally identified your perfect target audience. Now it’s time for you start digging into the insights and data provided by these two tools. That way you will collect in-depth information on your audience, including their gender, age, cities, and states where they live, interests, lifestyles, behaviors, education, income, what they usually purchase, and what pages they like the most.
ACQUISITION AND BEHAVIOR INSIGHTS
In essence, there are two types of insights provided by Google Analytics: acquisition and behavior insights. When coupled together, they provide a detailed look at reference public.
Acquisition Insights
Within Google Analytics, the Acquisition section plays a vital role in identifying the core audience. It is particularly beneficial for those who market to their audience in varying formats on the Internet. The idea behind this area of Google Analytics is to let you know how users find your site. For instance, you can see how many people found your website through search engine results, social media channels, or external links versus those who found it by typing your web address (URL) directly in the browser. Not only do these facts enable you to determine what type of people commonly visit your website but also help you determine which marketing strategy best works for your business. For instance, if most of your customers are reaching out to your website through content you have syndicated or published on social media, make sure to increase your syndication and content writing efforts to lure even more users.
Behavior Insights
With regard to the behavior insights, website owners use this beneficial tab to get a feel for how their users or visitors behave when getting to their site. It allows you to find some valuable information like how much time visitors stay on your website before leaving, what the most visited pages of your site are, and what the bounce rate of each page is. With this information in hand, it’s much easier to determine which web pages are the most popular so that you can apply some of their characteristics to other pages to boost traffic to your website.
HOW TO USE GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Whether you are a small or big business, you can obtain important information on your site activity via Google Analytics. Many people like this platform because it is easy to use and completely free. It allows you to track a broad range of data points in just a couple of steps. So even if you’ve never used this platform before, you are likely to master it fairly quickly. There are quite a few sections within this platform, if you are new to Google Analytics, you may have a hard time figuring out where to look at. We recommend that you focus on the Acquisition and Audience sections in particular.
Audience Section in Google Analytics
The Audience section is where you need to go if you want to find out more about people visiting your site. For example, you can get data about their gender, age, interests, behavior, location, mobile devices, browsers, and so on. Besides, it lets you know how they were driven or directed to your site. The main areas to pay attention in this section are Geo and Demographics.
Demographics Section
By clicking on the drop-down arrow beside Demographics, you can find some of the lesser-known information about your visitors. In fact, you can find data on their age and gender. To uncover age insights of your website visitors, all you need to do is click on the “Age” tab and pick the particular time frame. In this extensive report, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of your users by age group (18-24, 25-34, 25-44, 45-54, 55-64, etc.) as well as the dates of their visits. For each age group, you can see what percentage of your entire audience it comprises. Aside from the age insights, you can also see a gender breakdown under this section by selecting the “Gender” tab. This way you can find out if the majority of your target audience is made up of female or male visitors. That plays an important role in how your audience engages and communicates online. Knowing this will help you in finding the most suitable tone and words when messaging or speaking to your primary audience.
Geo Section
Location is another significant metric for identifying your target audience. To access and see location data of your website viewers, simply click on the Location button under Geo section and set the specific time frame as per your needs. This way you can discover where your users are located.
If you want to check out country results, simply scroll down and select the targeted state to get a better idea of which cities are driving the most traffic to your site. The cities metric comes into play in the local SEO businesses. Google Analytics will display the top ten states (i.e., regions) at once. Knowing which states and cities drive the most traffic comes in handy when you need to set up a marketing campaign or run a social media advertising strategy. By narrowing down the geographic targeting you are going to save a lot of money and time on paid campaigns. Tip: If the city or region you’re doing business in or living in isn’t at the top of the list, you should shift your marketing campaigns and strategies to target your geo area more closely.
Acquisition Section in Google Analytics
As mentioned earlier, this section displays how people arrive at your site. You can make use of this insight to modify your strategy if a need arises and make a decision on which platforms to go with. Do you want to know which social media channels are driving the most traffic to your website? After clicking the “All Traffic” tab under the acquisition section, select the “Channels” to analyze all the social networking sites as your traffic referrers. Choose the time period you wanna analyze and go through the results. Click on the “Social” tab to check out the results for all social media channels. The top channel is listed at the very top of the list and this actually the one that’s driving the most traffic. Tip: Make sure to view your social networking referral traffic every month and make a not of it in a spreadsheet for better insight.
Other Important Sections in GA
Having more details about your target audience enables you to find the more productive ways to serve or appeal to your customers. Therefore, it’s a good idea to utilize a lot of sections and subsections in Google Analytics and get the most out of this platform. In addition to the Acquisition and Audience sections, there are also other areas such as:
- Real-Time
- Dashboards
- Shortcuts
- Intelligence Events
- Behavior
- Conversions
Do not be afraid to examine all of those sections as many of them hide lots of useful options. So, take the time to check them out.
IDENTIFYING YOUR AUDIENCE WITH ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is a tremendous online tool that lets you identify your perfect target audience. Not only that you get a better understanding of your core audience but also connect with more customers and create brand awareness alike. Once you’ve gained profiles of your customers by means of Google Analytics, you need to make use of this info for your customer services, products, and marketing campaigns. Break down the demographics and other data of your targeted public to uncover new opportunities and strategies for different platforms.
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