Revisiting Google Analytics: Understanding Traffic Demographics
Thursday, May 20, 2010 | 3:08 PM
Labels: Google Grants Blog, Google Products, Tracking Performance
Regardless of whether you’re sending traffic to your website via AdWords, if you’re getting any traffic on your site it’s important to keep track of it, and with Google Analytics that’s free!
We’ve discussed Google Analytics before and have shared a number of great resources with you, but let’s take a closer look at some reports that help you learn more about the types of visitors your website receives.
The ‘Visitors’ reporting section of Analytics shows you where visitors to your site are located geographically, and helps you understand user behavior in terms of trending (how deep into your site they go and for how long), and loyalty (whether they come back and how often).
If you’re curious about where your visitors are located, you’ll want to spend some time using the Map Overlay report. Not only can you visualize what countries, states, and even cities your visitors come from, you can use this information to improve location targeting in AdWords, customize ad text to speak to users in different locations, and understand which areas have historically been the most successful for your organization.
I also love pairing data from the Map Overlay report with data from Insights for Search to see where there’s additional opportunity to reach the desired users. You can look at Insights for Search for some of your organization’s most important search queries and see how interest in those terms is indexed in different locations. We recently discussed using Insights for Search to manage seasonality.
By comparing the data you see there to the volume you’re currently getting on your site from different geographic areas (again, through the Analytics Map Overlay report), you can pinpoint which geographic areas or cities might be good places on which to focus in the future.
Whether your goals are to drive additional awareness, look for new markets in which to grow your presence, share your resources and knowledge with more people, or recruit volunteers, make sure you’re using all the data available to you to make those decisions.
For additional Analytics resources, you can view quick 60-second tutorials or watch other short videos on leveraging AdWords data paired with Analytics reports.