Craft Smarter, Better Content with this Undiscovered Tool

We all know that Google Analytics is a powerful tool to view how your brand’s audience interacts within your website. For example, you can easily see where your website visitors click the most, how long they linger on each page, and what content drives their visitation.

But what about your audience’s characteristics outside of your website? What are their other interests, hobbies, and passions? And even more importantly, how do these other interests impact their level of interest when it comes to your brand?

Many marketers might not realize it, but Google Analytics can actually answer these questions, too. With the right back-end coding and a few tweaks to your Google Analytics account settings, you can access Google’s Demographic and Interests report. This report will provide valuable information on your audience’s demographics, interests, and position within the sales funnel – ultimately allowing you to better communicate with and market to your customers.

Sound interesting? Here are just a few ways that the Demographics and Interests report can help your brand…

Get an overview of your audience’s demographics and interests. Like its name suggests, the Demographic and Interests report will show you – you guessed it! – demographics and interests. You’ll see what percentage of your website visitors fall into certain age groups (note: visitors under 18 years old are not tracked in the report), what the gender breakdown of your audience is, and what interests and hobbies your audience has. A broad overview of these characteristics will likely confirm what you always guessed about your audience; or, it may surprise you!

Understand who your high-value audience is. Whether the goal of your website is to generate income through a sales platform or simply drive traffic to a particular page, the Demographics and Interests report can show you who your most valuable viewers are in relation to this goal.

In this Google-provided example, you’ll see that the 25-34 age group makes up the test website’s highest value audience (as indicated by the percentage listed in the e-commerce conversion column on the right). Despite the fact that the 18-24 age group makes up a large part of the website’s traffic volume, this age group actually shows a low tendency to convert.

Once you identify the demographic makeup of your brand’s high-value audience, you’ll want to know what that high-value audience is like. With a couple clicks, Google will reveal the interests that are most popular within your high-value audience – and, of course, identify the likeliness of each interest category to convert in terms of your goal.

For example, you’ll see that audience members with the interests outlined in red below have the highest tendency to convert – such as technophiles, gamers, and shutterbugs. On the other hand, although a high quantity of sports fans visit this test site, you could say that the quality of this interest group is low in terms of conversion.

Tailor your website content to meet your audience’s needs. Here comes the fun part. Armed with valuable information about the characteristics of your website’s audience – including what their interests are outside of your brand, plus their age and gender – you can better communicate with them.

For example, if you have a male-dominated audience that tends to be interested in science and technology, you might impress them with detailed infographics and in-depth articles. If your audience is younger and full of foodies, you could try offering recipes on your website or partnering with powerful food bloggers.

Start analyzing across channels. Remember that platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer similar reports that can help you connect with your fans and followers – who might have slightly different demographics and interests than your website viewers, of course. By sorting and analyzing the characteristics of your viewers across multiple platforms, you can refine the content for each channel accordingly. As a result, you should see higher levels of engagement and conversion.

It’s a lot to monitor, but remember that knowledge is power – especially in today’s digital, big data world. Need a team to collect and crunch your brand’s numbers? We have one.