In the second week of our ongoing How to Start & Setup SEO blog series, we are looking at how to identify your business’s target audience using analytics tools.
In Part 1, we discussed a few free and easy steps that you might take in order to increase your Google and Bing search rankings. If you haven’t already, please take a look at Part 1 now, as implementing a search engine analytics tool will be essential for Part 2.
Both Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster offer extensive reporting tools that can help your business to identify its target audience. Although Bing has been steadily increasing its market share each year, the majority of users still use Google as their primary search engine.
As a result, we will only be discussing Google Analytics in this blog series.
Google Analytics Reporting:
Digital Marketing has completely changed how individuals and businesses sell products online.
It offers vastly superior reporting tools compared to traditional marketing methods such as television or print ads. This information can then be used to help seek out additional customers with similar interests.
Google Analytics can provide website administrators with invaluable information about their customers and their interactions with the website. Using this information, we can begin to create your target audience customer profile and begin your targeted marketing campaigns.
To get started, let’s look at a few of the most important reporting tools that Google Analytics has to offer;
The Demographics report allows you to quickly determine the percentage of male vs female visitors to your site.
Knowing that your site is made up of a majority of men vs women will help you to structure more effective marketing campaigns by focusing on and targeting your larger male audience more than your female audience.
Demographic reports will also include the most popular age range of customers that visit your store, knowing whether to market your product to college students or the elderly will be a huge factor in your campaign’s success.
To better understand your site’s customers, the Interests Report provides information about what your customers are doing while they are browsing the web.
Your customer’s affinity categories and in-markets segments can be used to create or to expand customer profiles.
Affinity categories will let you know whether your customers are Technophiles or Movie Lovers while in-market segments will give you an idea of what industries your customers are most likely to make purchases in.
This information can be helpful in determining key differences between converting and non-converting customers.
Now that you have developed a better understanding of the customers that are visiting your site, it’s important to find out how these users are interacting with it.
The Behavior Report gives you metrics such as the number of New vs Returning customers and Customer Engagement. These reports allow you to identify if your customer base are made up of primarily new or returning customers and more importantly see how long customers are spending on your site.
Use this information to develop marketing strategies that better suit your particular situation.
For example, if your customer base is made up of mostly returning customers, offering loyalty programs can be a great way to increase engagement. Using the information on how long customers spend on particular pages will help you to determine if you are getting your message across of if your page’s content is unclear to the customer. If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to consider redesigning the page to be more clear and engaging.
As you can see, Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for a business trying to succeed in the online marketplace.
The ability to identify your target audience allows you to think like your customer and begin to better target your marketing efforts specifically towards them.
Targeted marketing has been shown to increase conversion rates in both new and returning customers.
