Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience



The map is extremely useful for targeting social and search ads—especially if you know the locations and languages of visitors most likely to convert using your Google Analytics goals. It can also come in handy for local businesses that want to know if their marketing efforts are driving traffic from the right regions, and for publishers who want to create content that is locally focused. One free and easy place to look for new insights into your consumers is in Google Audience reports, which can be freely enabled by implementing Google’s Universal Analytics (or RLSA tagging).

On most sites, over 90% of visitors leave without converting.

That’s an estimate for all traffic to your site.

As bad as that might sound, the numbers are even worse for first-time visitors. You can expect that only 2% of your site’s visitors will convert on their first visit.

Regardless of what your goals are for your website, these statistics are a bit depressing.

It might be enough to lead you to despair. After all, if you don’t do anything to bring these visitors back, many of them will never return.

But that’s only if you don’t take any further action. Thankfully, you can take matters into your own hands to get conversions from these once-lost visitors.

That’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing is one of the best ways to avoid losing potential customers.

When you do it correctly, it can be a great way to bring users back to your site and increase the percentage of your visitors who become customers or clients.

But much like any other channel, creating an effective remarketing campaign requires careful planning and a strong understanding of your target audience.

Google Analytics has long been one of the most important places to find data to help you understand your audience. And now, Google offers even more help.

The new Custom Audiences Report in Google Analytics gives you access to in-depth information on how users respond to your campaigns and help you create even more effective remarketing ads.

If you aren’t yet using it for your remarketing, now is the time to try it out. In this post, I’ll teach you how you can use your audience data to improve your remarketing efforts.

But first, you need a basic understanding of what this report is. Let’s start there.

What is the new audiences report?

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, your first thought may be that an “audience” report is nothing new.

But it’s important to note that this new feature refers to a completely different set of data than the standard “Audience Overview” report.

If you have access to this report, you may have seen the following announcement after logging into your account over the past few weeks.

If you see this notification, you can click “See Report” to access the new audiences report.

If you don’t see this notification, you can access your data manually by selecting “Audiences” from the “Audience” tab.

If this is the first time you’re accessing the report, you’ll see another banner that provides more detail than the first.

As this pop-up explains, Google designed the new audiences report to help you “easily view how your audiences are performing and evaluate your remarketing efforts.”

However, this report will only show data if you’ve enabled demographics and interests reports and have audiences configured in your Analytics account.

So if you haven’t yet created audiences, you’ll need to do so before you can gain any value from this new report.

Fortunately, the process is fairly straightforward. In fact, you should be doing this anyway if you’re running any marketing campaigns with Google’s ad network.

How to create an audience in Google Analytics

First, it’s important to understand what the term “audience” means in the context of Google’s advertising platform.

Fortunately, it’s not all that complicated.

An audience is a group of users that you want Google Analytics to group together based on any combination of attributes that is meaningful to your business.

These attributes can be as broad or as specific as you’d like them to be.

These attributes allow advertisers to deliver custom ads in real time.

For example, if you want to create an ad campaign that targets all of your customers, you might create an audience that includes all of the users who have ever made a purchase on your site.

This would necessitate a fairly general ad, but it would give you a large pool of potential viewers.

Now, let’s say that you want to create an ad campaign with the goal of earning new customers.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Analysis

In this case, you might want to create an audience segment with users who have downloaded a whitepaper on your site but have not yet made a purchase.

This way, you can focus your efforts on the visitors who don’t yet think that buying from your site is worth it. This will allow you to tailor your campaign toward convincing them.

Using google analytics to build your audience profile

Regardless of the exact qualifications you choose, this is an excellent way to focus your ads on the exact audience you want to reach.

And, if you’re ready to get started, you can create a new audience in either Analytics or AdWords.

In this article, we’ll focus on how audience creation works in Google Analytics.

But once you’ve created an audience, you can activate it on AdWords, too, as long as you log into the same Google account.

To get started, navigate to the “Admin” page of your Google Analytics property. Then, select “Audience Definitions” and then “Audiences.”

Next, click “+New Audience.” From here, you can choose from preconfigured audience types or create your own new audience definition.

Google’s recommended audiences make it easy to create audiences based on criteria that many marketers find important. Here are some of Google’s recommendations:

  • Smart List: Smart Lists use machine learning to determine which users are most likely to convert in subsequent sessions. It uses signals like location, referrer, session duration, and page depth to compile this list.
  • All Users: This type of audience includes all of your visitors with necessary advertising cookies.
  • New Users: This includes users who have only conducted one session on your site.
  • Returning Users: These users have visited your site more than once.
  • Users who visited a specific section of my site: These audiences include users who’ve visited specific pages or directories within your site.
  • Users who completed a goal conversion: These users have completed a goal on your site.
  • Users who completed a transaction: This type of audience is only available for e-commerce site owners. It includes all users who have made a purchase from your site.

If none of these criteria meet your needs, you can also create a new custom audience with the audience builder.

This option can take a bit longer than using one of Google’s preconfigured definitions, but it gives you much more control over which users you include in your audience.

You can determine who your audience is based on demographic information, device, behavior, date of first session, traffic sources, e-commerce actions, and more.

The criteria you use will depend on what your goals are, but it’s important to consider that you would typically want to use audiences for the purpose of remarketing.

And most remarketing campaigns center on users who visited your site but did not take the action you wanted them to take.

So whether you want to reach users who visited a specific page without converting or users who never made it to a conversion page in the first place, your audiences should reflect that goal.

Once you’ve created an audience, Analytics will populate it with up to 30 days of data and make your audiences report available within 24-48 hours.

How to use the new audiences report for your remarketing campaigns

The audiences report will give you insight into specific sets of your site’s visitors.

And that’s great!

But it’s only useful if you know what to do with that data.

So first, it’s important to understand what you can expect to learn from this report.

To put it simply, it allows you to dig into data regarding each audience’s acquisition, behavior, and conversions.

This way, you’ll be able to see how well each audience performs in comparison to other audiences and your site’s overall traffic.

And the way you respond to this data will depend on how well the specific audience you’re looking at does at moving your business closer to your goals.

Let’s look at some different scenarios of what your data can tell you about your audiences and how you can respond to that information.

Scenario 1: An audience performs well

If an audience is performing well in terms of engagement and conversions, this indicates that they’re a valuable set of users for your site.

In this case, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget to ads for those users. Or, if you aren’t yet running ads for these users, you’ll want to create ads for them.

For example, Marketo just took this approach.

Their ads were already performing well.

But, later, they defined their audience further in Google Analytics to push personalized ads through AdWords.

They saw 200% more conversions for B2C and 150% more for B2B by segmenting between two groups to create personalized ads.

If you want to see numbers like this, then follow Marketo’s example.

If an audience is performing well, don’t settle for “good enough.” When you discover that a particular audience is yielding results, it’s time to double down on your efforts to convert them.

Upping your advertising budget for them isn’t a blind risk. It’s a reasonable investment in light of real data.

You also may want to consider expanding the number of sites on which you advertise to those users to maximize your chances of bringing them back to convert.

Unfortunately, not all audiences will perform well.

Let’s look at what you can do when an audience isn’t yielding the results you want.

Scenario 2: An audience performs poorly

On the flip side, if an audience shows low engagement or conversions, this indicates that it isn’t a high-performing set of users for your site.

When you discover this, how should you respond?

You’ll either want to scale back on any ads that target this audience or spend some time editing the audience.

GarentaDAY, an auto leasing website in Turkey, developed a remarketing strategy to push special discounts to previous site visitors who did not convert.

GarentaDAY segmented their audiences by location and keyword terms for their remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).

The edits they made to their audience paid off. 30% of their revenue came from the remarketing ad campaigns.

If you decide to edit an audience, it’s important to note that one of the most common issues among remarketing campaigns is that the targeting is too broad.

For example, let’s say that you created an audience that targets all of your site’s visitors over the previous month.

You might think that this is an effective way to target users before they forget your brand altogether.

But what if a large chunk of them found one blog post or piece of content via search, read it, and left?

These users likely have no intention of becoming a customer so targeting them with ads is a waste of your budget.

But revising this audience to only include users who visited a product page could eliminate the issue — and have a major impact on the overall performance of your ads.

Scenario 3: An audience is attracting users who don’t convert

Some audiences are clearly high or low performers.

But in many cases, it’s not quite that black and white.

For example, let’s say that you have a campaign that’s targeting a specific audience. This campaign is effective in attracting site traffic, but it doesn’t lead to many conversions.

In this case, you shouldn’t write off that audience entirely.

After all, those users are showing interest in what they’re seeing in your ads. They just aren’t following through on that interest.

And it’s up to you to figure out why that is.

Dig into your campaigns and look for any disconnects between your ads and the content they direct your audience to.

For example, you can look at which goals in Google Analytics are converting your audience more and then develop new ad campaigns and landing pages around those goals.

If your campaigns don’t provide this level of convenience and simplicity, you could be missing out on conversions simply because users don’t want to spend time navigating your site.

Identifying and remedying any disconnects could be the solution. It might be exactly what you need to help your high traffic numbers translate into results for your business.

Scenario 4: An audience is attracting low numbers but high conversions

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On the flip side, some of your audiences may turn out to have high conversion rates but low overall numbers.

This can be extremely frustrating because it indicates that you’ve found a great set of users, but there aren’t very many of them.

Fortunately, you don’t have to limit your ad targeting to just your site’s visitors. You can also use your high-converting audiences as a starting point for creating similar audiences.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google’s similar audiences, this feature helps you expand campaign targeting by including users with characteristics similar to a site’s visitors.

Once you’ve identified an audience that performs well for your business, you can use this feature to target other users who haven’t yet visited your site.

This way, you can expand your campaign’s overall reach. And, as you do so, you can have confidence that the new set of users you’re reaching has the potential for a high conversion rate.

Conclusion

Bringing new users to your site is challenging.

So, when those users leave without taking action, it can be extremely frustrating.

Fortunately, remarketing makes it possible to bring them back to your site and encourage them to convert.

But achieving that goal requires strategic targeting.

You need to make sure that you’re reaching the visitors who are likely to become customers and that you’re communicating with them in a way that will make them want to return.

And with the new audiences report from Google Analytics, you can access the data you need to make informed decisions about your targeting and your campaigns.

The custom audiences report offers you detailed data about how your site visitors are responding to your conversion efforts on your site.

By digging into the behaviors that each audience takes on your site, you can see if they are performing well for your business.

Then, you can use that insight to decide how to improve your results moving forward.

You may find that you should ramp up your campaigns, adjust your targeting, alter your ads, or experiment with similar audiences. Each audience will likely necessitate that you take a different course of action.

And that’s precisely why these reports are so powerful. They’ll show you how you should respond to the audiences you set up so that your marketing efforts to them will be effective.

And if you use multiple custom audiences, you may find that you need to combine all of these actions.

But with each improvement you make, you’ll become more successful at turning lost visitors into customers for your company.

How will you use Google’s new Custom Audience Report to help you with your remarketing campaigns?

An article containing Google Analytics in the title looks intimidating, I know. One that boldly states Google Analytics personas looks even scarier. But bear with me for a second here. What if I told you that you could use data you already have about your website visitors to create your customer avatars?

In the next 2,000 words (or so), I’m going to show you how Google Analytics can help identify your ideal customers and build your perfect audience.

First, we’ll have a look at what customer avatars are and why they are so important for any business niche strategy, then we’ll focus on what information you’d need to have to start building yours. Finally, we’ll show you how to find this information in your Google Analytics account and create the perfect Google Analytics personas.

What is a Buyer Persona & Why You Must Have It

As a marketer, you know all too well how important it is to build personas. You can call them customer avatars or buyer personas (and we will, in this article) but it won’t change what they are. They are fictional representations of our ideal customers and their main purpose is to segment your audience into buckets.

Having them handy will help to inform of how to direct your marketing initiatives. And when I say all, I mean – literally – all of them. Selling a product does not only involveswhat you are offering but also – and perhaps, more importantly – who you are offering it to.

Most marketing focuses on the product itself, its features and benefits. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll need that along the way. But what is essential when you get started to build your brand story is to understand who your ideal customers are and make them the center of all your communication efforts.

Making your customer the hero of your brand story has many benefits, including the fact that when you’re writing it, you will be telling their story. It will stop being just a description of something you are selling but it will resonate with them and ellicit an emotional connection. When the connection is made, action will follow.

You Need Avatars, Like, Right Now

Marketing is all about communication, right? Every piece of content that will come from your brand will be impacted by your knowledge of your audience. Not convinced yet? Here is a list of the essential assets you’re going to write to market your product and – guess what? – all of that will change according to the audience who will receive it.

  • Blog posts, videos and podcasts. When choosing the topics of your blog posts, videos, and podcasts, you’re looking for something that can interest, excite and engage your audience. If your content doesn’t resonate, chances are your potential customers will move over.
  • Social Media. Content is out there, on the internet. That’s not enough, sadly. You need to find your audience and that involves finding out which channel they are mainly on. But also when and how frequently you should post on social to engage with them.
  • Advertising. It’s not only about targeting, I know. But once you’ve identified the channels your potential customers hang out, targeting them will let you find them and, in the long run, avoid you wasting money with paid traffic.
  • Lead Magnets. Yay! Your potential customer is excited about your product or services. Now they get to your landing page and are ready to take the next step and leave you their contacts… but only if it’s relevant to them!
  • Email marketing segmentation. Although you cannot foresee which campaigns will get you the most opens and clicks, you can certainly identify which segments of your audience are likely to be more responsive to a specific email campaign depending on their needs.
  • Your (next) product. When you are aware of the needs your product is able to solve, you can go further the line and tackle these needs more in-depth. You’ll be able to direct your product development into solving real pain points and get even more of your ideal customers to convert.
  • Any content you write. Which one? You name it! Is it an email or the text in your product description page? In all cases, you’re aiming at solving a need, knowing your potential customers will help you here.

New Product, New Avatar

Each time you have a new product, you absolutely need to create a new avatar. That is because, ultimately, if you want to sell your product, you need to reach the right person with the right message. And that’s what having a detailed view of your ideal customers’ needs, pain points and what they are trying to accomplish means.

It may be universally acknowledged that the same product can be marketed to different segments because it can answer different needs. However, you’ll need to identify those needs and address them differently depending on your marketing segments. And that’s where customer avatars come into play.

So here you are, with your shiny new product. What kind of information do you need to start marketing it to the right people in the right way?

What Information You Need to Build Your Buyer Personas

Tons of digital ink have been used so far to detail which information you need when you build your buyer personas. Ultimately, you are best equipped to decide what is relevant for your business and niche – but in this section, we’ll see a number of suggestions on what to include when building your avatars.

But first, spoiler! Very likely, you won’t have all the information you need in one go. Don’t worry – and don’t let it stop you. There are several ways of getting to know your customers, via interviews, surveys, and by analyzing data you already have (one way to do it is to create Google Analytics personas, we’ll get there). With time, you’ll learn more and more about your ideal customers using all the above methods.

But you have to start somewhere. And here it is.

  • Demographic information. Start with age, gender, and location but also try and include more detailed information such as their level of education, job description, income, whether or not they are married and/or with children.
  • Online presence. Identify in which channels your potential customers hang out – this is where you need to be too.
  • Beliefs, values, and interests. What are your ideal customers passionate about? What are their hobbies, and interests – both at work and in their free time?
  • Goals, challenges, and pain points. This is where it gets crucial. What are your prospective users trying to achieve and which are the pain points your product or service can help solve?
  • Decision making and objections. Are your ideal customers taking the purchase decision or do they need to convince somebody else? In both cases, which objections they (or their boss) would need to overcome?

How to Build Your Google Analytics Personas

So far, we have seen what buyer personas are, why you need them (now!) and what to include when creating them. Where to find this information, then? Below, we’ll see how to create Google Analytics personas and use the data you already have on Google Analytics. This will kick-start your research, allowing you to get familiar with the audience that is already visiting your website and compile your customer avatar sheet in no time at all.

A couple of thoughts before we get started.

In order to create your Google Analytics personas, you’ll need to have clean data. This means that you’d need to exclude some IP addresses (for example your own and your office’s) to be able to see only relevant data.

Depending on how much traffic you have on your website, you may need to have 6 up to 12 months’ worth of data. This will ensure you have enough time for your results to be relevant and have more confidence in the Google Analytics personas you are about to build.

Finally, this is where it gets a bit technical. Don’t fret, though. Google Analytics can be used to a certain degree even if you don’t have great confidence in data analysis. However, you can boost the quality of the information you are getting with Google Analytics if you learn the basics of how to use it.

Google Analytics Personas #1 – Demographic Information: Audience Report

The first step to creating your Google Analytics personas is starting with the Audience report. This is located under Audience > Overview. This report will only give you high-level data, so this is a good place to start but don’t stop here. At the Audience report level, you’ll be able to see an overview of users, sessions, demographics, languages, and devices.

To get more specific about age and gender, go under Audience > Demographics > Overview. This will give you more insights on which is the best performing age range and gender among your website visitors, but if you want to have in-depth data on those metrics and be able to combine them with other, you have the option to select Age or Gender in the sub-menu on the left-hand side of the page.

Next is finding out where your website visitors are located. You’ll find this information under Audience > Geo > Location. You’ll be able to select the Map overlap or to use the explorer. If you use the second option, you’ll be able to combine location and other demographic information, such as age or gender. Under Geo, you’ll also find Language, this can be useful to you if you need to understand which markets to target.

Google Analytics Personas #2 – Online Presence: Source/Medium & Devices

The second step into creating your Google Analytics personas is to find where your audience goes to get the information they need when they are online. A great place to find this information is to see where they land from when they get to your website pages.

The Source/Medium report can be used with many different goals in mind. Google defines Source as “the origin of your traffic, such as a search engine (for example, google) or a domain (example.com) while Medium as the general category of the source, for example, organic search (organic), cost-per-click paid search (cpc), web referral (referral).

In this case, we’ll use it to understand which source and medium get the most traffic in order to understand if you are on the right channels and if your social presence is giving you the expected results. Based on the results of this report, you can decide to focus on one or more specific channels.

Another report that will help you create your Google Analytics personas is the Devices report. Here you’ll see which device your visitors are using to access your website. This report can be found under Audience > Mobile > Overview. Here you can combine the results of the device data with other demographics data – i.e. age – to find out additional information about who they access your website.

Google Analytics Personas #3 – Beliefs, Values, and Interests: Interests report & Affinity

The next step to create your Google Analytics personas is to dive into your website visitors’ beliefs, values, and interests. All of this can be found in two different reports: the Interests report and the Affinity report. While these reports can be useful on their own, you’ll unleash their full potential if you combine them with other demographics: feel free to add a secondary dimension and combine them to find the information you are looking for.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Work

In order to be able to see the Interests reports, you’ll first need to enable Advertising Reporting features for your Google Analytics account. This can be done in a few clicks on your Admin page. This will allow Analytics to collect additional information from the DoubleClick cookie (web activity) and from Device Advertising IDs (app activity).

Pro Tip: even if you don’t plan on running ads on Google just yet, make sure to have your ad account setup. Once you start, you’ll get additional information if you do.

Once you have enabled these features, navigate to Audience > Interests > Overview. This report will give you information about all your website visitors’ interests at a glance.

If you want your Google Analytics personas to be even more detailed, you can plunge into the specific reports on this section. First, there’s the Affinity (reach) report. This report will inform you of which other markets you can expand to which are similar to the ones of your website visitors. It can be found under Audience > Interests > Affinity.

Google Analytics Personas #4 – Goals, Challenges, and Pain Points: Search Console Queries

Following in your Google Analytics persona creation is to define the goals, challenges and pain points of your website visitors. This can be found by investigating what they search before they land on your website. You’ll be able to do just that and identify which pages (aka content) and keywords (aka pain points) rank higher in searches.

In order to do that, you’ll first need to enable the Search console integration. The first time you access it, your page will likely look like that:

Just follow the procedure and you’ll be able to identify both keywords and pages that are getting the most CRT on your website.

Google Analytics Personas #5 – Decision Making And Objections: In-market & Other Categories Reports

The final step to create your Google Analytics personas is to define at which step of the purchase decision your visitors are and which objections you’d need to overcome to facilitate it. You’ll be able to find product-purchase interests in the In-market report and get even more specific using the Other categories report. You’ll find both reports under Audience > Interests > In-market segments and Other categories.

The In-market segment report will help you identify what your website visitors are looking for in terms of product and services. You can combine this information with other demographics categories so as to find out purchase intent based on age, gender or location.

The Other categories report, on the other hand, goes even more in-depth into analyzing which categories people visiting your website are interested in.

Google Analytics Personas Bonus – Segmentation

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Call

All the reports described above will help you create your Google Analytics personas and fill in your buyer persona sheets so as to identify the key segments of your audience and market them in the right way.

Once you have identified them, you can use another feature of Google Analytics to go further in your data analysis. Segmentation will help you creating subgroups of your general audience with specific characteristics. The benefits of having multiple segments of your audience include analyzing if the marketing initiatives targeted at those specific segments are getting the results you were expecting and will allow you to adjust them in case they’re underperforming.

Another (big!) benefit of segmenting your audience is that you’ll be able to remarket that specific audience in Google Ads campaigns. This may not be an immediate need for you (yet) but once you get started with CPC campaigns, you’ll thank me.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Work

In this article, we’ve covered the Google Analytics reports you can use to create Google Analytics personas and identify the customer avatars for your business. If this article helped you, feel free to share your buyer personas in the comments below!