In every retail business, knowing your customers is vital to succeeding. All decisions you make about business and marketing strategies must begin from the user’s perspective. Let’s find out how we can build the user persona with the data that lies in Google Analytics.
Even though Google’s user profile is not as fancy as Facebook’s, you can still have a pretty good idea about your customers.
Let’s start with the basics, and ask the most basic questions:
- How many of my customers are men or women?
- What is the age range of my customers?
- What devices do they use to access my website?
- How often do they visit my website?
- What are their interests?
- What makes them convert?
For the first two questions, you should already have enabled Demographics and Interest reports in your Google account. If not, go to Admin > Property Settings > Enable Demographics and Interest reports.
The split of age and sex can be seen in Audience > Demographics. The most interesting thing here is that you can add a second dimension to compare and see how people are different based on more than one vector.
If you add a second dimension, such as Device Category, you will get a split like this:
You can see from the above screenshot that females prefer mobile and are the majority user. Also when females are on desktop, they are more likely to spend more time on the website. You can go into more depth and analyse the conversion rate also.
You can find out the behaviour of new vs. returning customers from the report, New vs. Returning under Audience. Add a second dimension “Gender” and you will see who’s more likely to come back to your website.
Based on the above screenshot, women are returning about 25% of the time, while men return about 21% of the time. Also, men have a higher bounce rate.
Under Audience, you will also find the Frequency & Recency report and the Engagement report. If you create two new segments by gender: female and male, you will find who your most loyal visitors are.
The interests (Google reads them from the user behaviour online) can be found under Audience > Interests. It is best to split the report based on females and males. You will now have a full view of your customers.
And for the final and most important question: what makes them convert?, you can find this out by going to Aquisition > Channels. Add a second dimension by gender, age or interests and analyse the traffic for each channel. Find out what channel brings the most important users. In the screenshot below, you can see that woman are more likely to buy if the website is referred. This means that the reputation of the website is a big factor in their decision.
Don’t be shy when creating custom reports because you can drill down the data to multiple levels of understanding. Applying second dimensions has its limitations and you can see only a part of the information at once.
If you still need a more detailed view of what each customer does on the website, we strongly recommend the User Explorer menu. We found it useful to find out how different touch points are important and how long the path is for a valuable customer. Also, it was useful in debugging and creating a marketing strategy based on the customer’s flow.
The bottom line is that you can answer “who is your customer?” with Google Analytics through its reports if you learn to see the report from different perspectives.
Feel free to drop us a line if you use any other report that is relevant to this article!
