Google Analytics: Know Your Audience

Google Analytics is a data tool for looking at how your internal website is performing. Google Analytics can answer a lot of questions for your website that will help increase profit. This can include the bounce rate of your users, new users vs returning users, the location of your users, the device used, how you acquire users, and much more. We will use the data from the Google Merchandise Store as an example.

New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors

Are most of your users brand new to your website? Or are most of your users returning? It is beneficial to know this when choosing what information to present to your customers. If they are a new user, you may want to consider offering a coupon for signing up for email newsletters or text messages. If they are mostly returning visitors, you may want to focus your marketing efforts on presenting new information that will make them want to visit your site in the future.

Where are your users located?

Sessions by country:

When your website has audiences from several countries, you will want to make sure that they understand the language you are using. You may want to consider including multiple languages in your website, depending on where your audience is based.

Another factor to consider is culture. What is the culture of your audience? How can you make sure your audience feels welcome on your website? Ask yourself these questions when deciding what kind of information to include on your website.


What are your top devices?

In this example, 73.1% of users conducted a session from a desktop device, and 25.5% of users conducted a session on a mobile device. It is good to know what device your audience uses because it allows you to focus your resources on the performance of your website on that kind of device. While it is still necessary to have easy use on mobile devices, most of your focus should be on desktop users.

How do you acquire users?

When looking at the analytics from this past week for the Google Merchandise store, it becomes clear that most users are acquired through a direct traffic channel. On January 27th, 2.6K users were acquired through a direct traffic channel. On the same day, only 246 users were acquired through paid search. The significant difference in the two numbers tells us that Google should focus more on direct traffic and less on paid traffic.

It is important for service as a business because you need to know where you are acquiring your users. If you are making an insignificant amount of money acquiring users through paid search, but are dedicating a large portion of your budget to this, you can spend less money on this. As a business, you must be aware of where your traffic is coming from so you can use it to your advantage. If you know where your users are coming from, you can focus your resources on that audience.