Audience reports are located under “Audience” in the left-hand navigation. These reports
can help you better understand the characteristics of your users. This can include what countries
they’re in, what languages they speak, and the technology they use to access your site.
But it can also include data like age and gender, their engagement and loyalty, and
even some of their interests. Let’s begin with the “Active Users” report.
This can show you how many users had at least one session on your site in the last day, seven days,
14 days, and 30 days. We call this “site reach” or “stickiness.” If your marketing
activities and site content encourage users to visit and return to your site, the active
users in each time frame should grow. Next, let’s look at the “Demographics” and
“Interests” reports. The “Demographics” reports provide information about the age
and gender of your users. The “Interests” reports show your users’ preferences for
certain types of web content like technology, music, travel, or TV. This information is
useful in two ways. First, if you know your target audience, it can help verify that you’re
reaching the right people. Second, it can help guide decisions about your marketing
and content strategy. Note that to see data in these reports, you must first enable advertising
features in the “Demographics and Interests” reports for each property. Go into the “Admin” tab
under “Property“ and select “Property Settings.” Under “Advertising Features,”
set “Enable Demographics and Interest Reports” to on. Once activated, you will see data in
your Demographics and Interests reports about the age, gender, and interests of your users.
Note that if you’ve just enabled this feature, it may take a day or two for data to appear
in these reports. Also, the Demographic reports may not contain any data if your site traffic
is very low or your segment is too small. The “Location” report under “Geo”
is one of the most useful Audience reports. Google Analytics can anonymously determine
a user’s continent, sub-continent, country, and city through the IP address used by their
browser. Notice the geographic heat map at the top of the report, which you can adjust
to display different metrics. For example, switching the map to show “percent of New Sessions"
lets you identify potential new markets based on new user traffic to your
website. This can help you decide whether to build awareness or invest in customer loyalty
in particular locations. You could also use the table below the visualization to identify
areas that have a high number of conversions (or transactions), but low traffic rates.
That could indicate untapped markets to target with advertising. Another analysis technique
is to identify the regions where you already have a large audience, but lower than average
performance. For example, if certain regions have a higher than average bounce rate (or
users that leave after viewing a single page), you might need to optimize your advertising
or website. Perhaps you need to translate your ad or site into a local language or
add geographically-specific content. Below “Geo,” are a set of behavior reports that
help you understand how often users visited and returned to your website. The “New vs Returning”
report breaks out acquisition, behavior, and conversion goal metrics for
new and returning users. You can look at this comparison over time to see how audience loyalty
may be shifting. Consider your website objectives, as well as your marketing activities, when
evaluating the mix of new and returning users to your site. Underneath Behavior reports,
the “Technology” and “Mobile” reports can help you understand what technologies
your audience uses to consume your site content. These reports can help you fine-tune your
site to make sure it’s fully functional on different devices and browsers. For example,
you can use the “Browser and Operating systems” report to quickly identify issues with certain
browsers on your site. If your site has a comparatively high bounce rate on a mobile
browser, you may need to create a mobile-optimized version of your website with streamlined content
and simpler navigation. It’s also a good idea to understand if users are migrating
from desktop to mobile and plan your development accordingly. You can use the “Overview”
report under “Mobile” to see a breakdown of your traffic based on smartphones, tablets,
and desktop devices. Check this report to see how quickly mobile usage of your site
has grown over time. The “Devices” report lets you see additional details about the
devices used to browse your site. This includes the mobile device name, brand, service provider,
input selector, operating system, and other dimensions like screen resolution. These reports
can give your developers and designers direction on how to create a mobile-optimized experience
to best suit your users.