In B2B marketing, content marketing plays a crucial role at every stage of the funnel and your website is a vital touchpoint where target audience, customers and prospects visit to learn about the company and their offerings.
Do you want to know who those visitors are? Do you want to find out if your target audiences are visiting your site?
If yes, then Google Analytics Audience Reports provide you with all the data that you can analyse and get your answers.
With the Audience reports, you can analyze the number of visitors you’re getting on the website, how much time they are spending and you can get answers to the questions like –
- How many people are visiting your site?
- What is the geographic location of your visitors?
- What is the demography of your site visitors?
- What are the interests of your website visitors?
- How do they find your website?
The Google Analytic Audience report has 15 sections (few are in beta) but in this article, I will walk you only through the reports which are useful for B2B marketing.
So, if you are ready, let’s delve deeper into each section of the audience report.
1. Overview
The Overview report displays an overall data about your audience broken down into numbers like users, new users, sessions, Pageviews, Pages/session. Bounce rate, etc.
A quick look at this report can give you insights about your website visitors.
Audience Report can be better visualized when you compare the report with different metrics, segments or dates. For instance, in the image below, I have compared the audience overview report of the last 30 days with the previous time period.
2. Active Users
In the Active User section, you can determine the number of users who visited your site within the last 28 days for the selected time period. For the ease of understanding this section, I am selecting the date range between 1st September 2020 to 30th September 2020.
In the report, you can see the following metrics:
- 1-Day Active Users – The number of unique users who visited your site on the last day of the date range i.e, 30th September.
- 7-Day Active Users – The number of unique users who visited your site in the last 7 days of the date range i.e, 23rd Sept to 30th September
- 14-Day Active Users – The number of unique users who visited your site in the last 14 days of the date range i.e, 16th Sept to 30th September
- 28-Day Active Users – The number of unique users who visited your site in the last 28 days of the date range i.e, 2nd Sept to 30th Sept.
The Active Users report is useful when you are running marketing campaigns and want to know its effect on your site. For example, let’s say that you have been running a PPC campaign to drive traffic to your site.
Using the Active Users report, you can determine how much traffic you generated in a time period since the campaign started. Just select “7-Day Active Users”, “14 Day Active Users” and “28 Day Active Users” to plot the data on the chart.
Now, if you notice that 7 Day, 14 Day and 28 Day active users are less than 1 Day active users then that means your campaign is not performing well in driving traffic to your site.
3. User Explorer
In the “User Explorer” section, you can examine each individual user through their user ID or client ID. Generally, a B2B marketer, considers the aggregate user behavior in their business website, as it helps them in handling larger efforts like a marketing campaign for targeting huge geographical extensions.
But it is also important to understand the individual user behaviour as well. This is essential when you want to personalize or customize the user experience or try solving a troubleshooting issue for particular user experience.
4. Demographics
The demographics section helps you analyze the gender, age and other interest categories of your users. Google Analytics collects the demographics of your users through party cookies, mobile advertising ID for both Android and IOS devices.
However, the demographics of users cannot be collected if the device advertising ID or double-click cookie is not present in the user’s device.
The demographic section is divided in two sections – age and gender. Let’s segregate both for a better understanding.
- Age – The conversion, behaviour, and acquisition metrics are broken down through the age group of your users. When you browse through the age groups, you will see the breakdown as per their gender and interest.
- Gender – Just like the age section, the gender analytics segment is also broken down by the metrics of conversion, behaviour, and acquisition. When you browse through the gender segmentation of your users, you will see the breakdown as per their age group and interest.
The image above shows the gender distribution of the user group. This allows you to identify which gender group is actually inclined to your products and services.
5. Interests
The Audience Interests report provides you insights on what your website visitors are usually interested in. Google provides this data based on the search queries and engagement by the users on search pages.
The Interest report is further divided into Affinity Category report, In-Market Segment report and Other Categories report. These reports help you determine the personalities, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles of your website’s visitors.
Now let’s dive deeper into three sections of the Interest report:
- Affinity Categories – The affinity category has similarities to TV audiences. This includes sports fans, media and entertainment lovers, cooking enthusiasts and lots more. Through the affinity category, you can determine the lifestyle and personalities of your visitors.
- In-market segment – The report gives you a breakdown of users who are more likely to purchase products or services in the specified category.
- Other categories – This includes the specific views of your audience and can be considered to be the amalgamation of affinity category and in-market category. For instance, if the affinity category includes a segment called ‘foodies’, then the other category segment will include segments like cuisines/ recipes/ Asian food etc.
Using the insights gained from these reports, you can effectively target ads based on specific interests, especially if you use goals to know which interest group is most likely to convert.
Also, you can optimise your content strategy to meet the interests and affinity of your target audience to reach more people and boost the conversion rate.
6. Geo
As a B2B marketer, it is important to know the geographical location of your users so that you can direct advertising campaigns in the right place. You will want to know what kind of traffic is being driven to your website. You need to know the language and geographical location of those target audiences.
For instance, you are advertising only in the English language, but you are also getting high traffic from Spanish and French-speaking users as well. This indicates that you need to localize your ads to the specific languages so that you can leverage the benefits of a lucrative market.
Here’s an overview pictures of the language and location segments:
The image above shows the language section from which you can determine which language category is bringing out more users on your site.
Next comes the Location report which lists out the top countries from where you’re getting traffic to the site.
Using this determination, you can analyse if you are getting people from your target region. Also, you can find other potential markets where you can promote or launch your business. For example, in the image below, you can see that this site is gaining more users from India followed by the United States.
7. Behavior
For any marketer, understanding the behavior of their users is crucial; continuity in the flow of new users and returning users is important to analyze the growth of a particular business.
In the Behavior section, you can measure how many users are new to your website and how many are returning and at what frequency. In the Engagement section, you can also see how users are engaging on your site in terms of session duration and page-depth.
Using the Audience Behaviour report, you can analyse how well your content strategy is performing in terms of engaging them and obviously, the conversion.
8. Technology
Knowing what kind of technology your users are using while visiting your site can be useful for you to ensure that your site is well optimized for that. Here technology refers to the web browser.
The technology segment consists of details about the browser that your visitors are using and one selecting on one of the listed browsers, you will also be able to see the version of browsers that visitors are using.
This report can be useful to ensure that your website UI and features are functioning properly at least on the most used browsers.
9. Mobile
Just as you can find which browser your visitors are using, Mobile report tells you the mobile device that people are using to access your site.
In the Overview report, you can also see the number of people who have been accessing your website with desktop, mobile or tablet.
In some cases, mobile devices represent the interest, lifestyle and behavior of the audience. So, knowing which device and operating system your website visitors are using helps you understand your audience better and deliver them personalised user experience on the site.
10. Benchmarking
The benchmarking reports provide data for comparing your performance with overall industry data of your competitors or the other companies who often share their data. In this case, Google will anonymously use your information.
In marketing, knowing industry benchmarks can be useful as it provides you with a valuable context which helps you in setting unique marketing strategies and taking well-informed decisions.
To get benchmark data of your industry, you have to first select your industry vertical. Further, you can filter the data based on country/region and number of sessions.
In this report, you can find industry standard data for website traffic from different channels, location and devices.
11. User Flow
The Google Analytics User Flow report explains about the paths that users are taking to navigate through a website. It lets you compare the traffic volume from various sources along with examining the traffic patterns through the website.
But have you ever wondered how a User Flow report can be useful for you? With this report, you can analyze how visitors navigate through your website pages, through which page they land on your site, and where they drop off.
Using this report, you can determine if visitors are following your conversion path. If not, you can find where you lose them and optimize the website accordingly for better conversion rate.
Wrapping up
Audience Report is one of the essential Google Analytics reports for B2B marketers and I hope this guide on analysing the Audience Report will help you in making better business decisions, by analyzing and understanding your audience better.
The data that is provided in the Audience report helps you in understanding which areas of your marketing initiatives are working well and which areas are in a dire need of improvement. So, start with planning for your business by making the best use of the Audience reports, along with other Analytics segments to make your business climb the ladder of success.
Now, you know how to analyse Google Analytics Audience Report to gather insights and use it in B2B marketing. If you want to learn more about Google Analytics in B2B marketing, I have picked some articles that you should read-
- Analysing Google Analytics Behavior Reports for B2B websites
- Most Important Google Analytics Custom Reports for B2B marketing
- Key Google Analytics Goals for B2B marketing