How To Use Google Analytics 2 // Your Audience

Seeing as my previous post about Google Analytics went so well, I thought you guys might like another post about how to use it. Last time we covered the basics and how to measure your results to see if your stats are increasing or decreasing. This time I want to show you how you can understand your audience a little better.

Information like this can be helpful when you’re wanting to make sure your content is something your audience might be interested in. Or it might be useful to put on your PR/Work With Me Page or Media Pack so brands PRs can see if their product or campaign is right for your audience.

For this post, I have my data range set at the last 30 days, which is March 8th until April 7th 2016.

Age and Gender.

Click in your ‘audience’ tab in the side bar of Google Analytics. If you go to Demographics, you have 3 options. You can see an overview of the age and gender of people reading your blog or you can go into detail of each.

Overview:

So this isn’t too far away from what I would expect. I’m 29 years old, most of my audience are bloggers and I know that most bloggers I talk to tend to be in their 20’s. 15.7% of my audience being male isn’t normal for me, it’s usually much less.

Age Detail:

As you can see here, age seems to be pretty consistent through the last 30 days. When my views increase in number, the different ages still seem to be similar in growth.

Gender Detail.

This is where things get a bit interesting. You can see that towards the end of the graph, the number of male readers goes up quite a bit. It goes up from around 10% to around 50%.

I know why this is – it’s because over the last few days I’ve been seeing an increase in traffic because one of my posts has been doing well on Stumble Upon. This means that I’ll be having random people coming on the site and it seems a lot of Stumble Upon users are male.

If I was to write a report about my demographics, I would probably look back at the last few months to see what my usual gender split is.

In February, it was 8% males and in January it was 9% males – so this is something to bear in mind if you have an influx of unusual traffic that isn’t likely to last long.

Location. 

Look at the world. It’s cool, isn’t it?

Hi world, how are you? So the darker bits are where most of your audience are.

You can see a breakdown by country below.

You can also break down into city, continent and sub continent.

Interests.

You can also view the interests of your audience and even drill down into the age detail of each interest.

This is a good tool to look at if you’re wondering about what topics to talk about. If you have a lot of Movie Lovers, like I do, a move related post might be a good idea if I’m struggling for content ideas.

Right then, there’s quite a few reports for you to be looking at for now. I think I’ll do a third post in the near future that will get into how your users are finding your site and what technology they are viewing your blog on.

If anyone has any questions, requests or even their own hints and tips to share – then please do let me know. Don’t be shy, show us your pie!

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