In this T-Time episode, Mark demonstrates how to work with and how to create a Google Analytics demographics dashboard.
So why would you want one of those?
A Google Analytics Demographics Dashboard is used to look at data based on the demographics of people so that you can optimise your campaigns around those audiences. This is data from people who are looking at:
- Content
- Visiting your website
- Buying your products
- How much your customer are spending
How To Set Up An Analytics Demographic Dashboard
From the assumption that you already have a Google Analytics account, Mark takes you through step by step how to create an Analytics demographic dashboard. Explaining how to use wizards and widgets to configure your display along the way using pie charts, bar charts and tables of information.
What can we look at in Analytics? What does analytics tell us?
Our first example is looking at goal conversion rate by gender, this could equally be the eCommerce conversion rate, if you are an eCommerce store. It could be how much money, or how much revenue you get by gender, for example.
Mark talks you through how to make changes to see different data, bounce rate instead of goal conversion rate for example. How to display a pie chart for session, or sessions by gender, again in a pie chart and how to read the resulting data is also covered, as is how to segment the data further to look at your organic data coming from Google Search or your paid search from AdWords to your Google shopping campaign. Other things you might want to look at could include:
- How much of the traffic is male/female
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
- See if women or men are spending more money
The use of this data allows you to optimise your campaigns where you are spending money or investing in organic traffic.
What Are In-Market Segments?
In-market segments is Google data, when you start searching Google for particular products or services Google then places the user into one of these segments. Some of the major ones that show up for the Tillison website are:
- Employment
- Travel/Hotels and Accommodation
- Business Services/Advertising & Marketing Services
- Business Services/Advertising & Marketing Services/SEO and SEM Services
- Business Services/Web Services/Business Technology/Web Design and Development
In-market segments allow you to see the visitors to the site and what they are in the market for. We can see the conversion behaviour by market segment which can help in our advertising decisions.
So if we were advertising on the Google Display Network or YouTube Video Ads we might want to use this data to see if, in these in market segments, we want to spend more advertising, pay a higher cost per click or not advertise at all in some cases, depending on the performance data to these in market segments.
The thing to remember about this data is any single user that comes to the website could fit into many of these segments at the same time. So you can not add the total of the segments together as the total would be much too high. Just bare this in mind when working with this data.Get a User Experience Audit
Recent Google Analytics Posts
What are Affinity Categories?
An affinity category, as opposed to an in-market segment, is where users fit into a kind of interest group. Some examples include:
- Movie Lovers
- TV Lovers
- Shutterbug (people that like photography)
- News Junkies
- Travel Buffs
Looking at these categories, we might want to include those with a low goal conversion or maybe reduce bids in our display campaigns. We may also want to tailor our content away from those and towards with a higher goal conversion rate.
Customising Analytics Dashboards
So we have an overall demographics dashboard, but there are still lots of things you can do from here. We can clone widgets to give us yet further variations in reports and we can drill down further into those results too, and use the data to make further decisions.
Displays can also be changed on your dashboard, with options such as two column and four column and there are lots of different widgets too. An example is used in the video of a 2 column report with a 30/70 split displaying tables and graphs.
Comparing Your Analytics Data Over Time
This is where the powerful stuff starts. The power to see if things have got better, things have got worse or things have stayed relatively consistent by using comparisons, in this case, the last 30 days with the previous 30 days.
Dashboards are a really powerful way of having an immediate visual to compare month on month or maybe segment by segment and you can build these audiences based on a huge number of things. For example, you could say:
- Show me all my social traffic
- Show me my Facebook traffic
- How does my Facebook compare to my Twitter traffic?
- How does my Pinterest Traffic compare with my Google+ Traffic?
- What is it like in comparison to everything else?
- How does mobile compare with desktop and with tablet?
So there are huge numbers of things that you can do. You know you can segment that and have a look at it. You can have a look at page load times, all of this sort of stuff.
This Analytics demographic dashboard is very specifically just about the demographics of the users on your website and how they behave.
Email Your Analytics Reports
The final tip that I would say to you is, look you have got this dashboard and you can come in here and you can check this and you can go and change the date range, and you can compare it to other periods and all that kind of stuff, but, we all get busy and forget to look. No need. There is a function for you to use to email the reports to yourself, your boss, or whom you like every week, every month or even every day if you wish. The email arrives in the form of a PDF all ready for you to action your data, without the need to remember to go and fetch it.
Analytics Demographics Dashboard Link
To save you time having set up this dashboard from scratch please use the link below to install it directly to your Google Analytics account.
The dashboard includes:
- Goal value by age shown as a percentage of the value of the goals.
- Sessions by age
- Goal completions by age
- Goal completions by age with a breakdown of goal conversion rate.
- In-market segments as before
- Sessions and goal conversion rate for affinity categories
- Goal value by age broken down by gender
- Session between male and female
- Goal completions
- Numeric of goal conversion rate
Remember all this data becomes much more vivid when the date range is changed to compare it to a previous period and you can see where things have gone up and down.
If you get stuck with Google Analytics please put your questions in the comments and we will help out where we can. If your requirement surpass a comment we do have Google Analytics training courses available which can be carried out on a one to one basis.Speak with a SpecialistLearn Analytics with a Pro
