Posted by
Rank Ranger
If you invest time and money optimizing content and advertising to a specific audience, it would be beneficial to know if you’re actually reaching that target audience, right? Our Analytics Audience Demographics report provides both a quick graphic view of traffic by age and gender, and a detailed analysis of sessions, segments, and goal completions.
Let’s assume you’re managing the SEO for an e-commerce site that sells popular musicians’ t-shirts and your target audience is the under 35 crowd.
Demographics by Age
According to these results, the site is successfully reaching its target audience, and we’re seeing a nice increase in traffic between December (blue) and November (orange) of 2014.
Demographics by Gender
Here we see that your gender breakdown is very close for the time periods we’re comparing, with women representing between 58% and 59% of your site visitors.
We can expand our **** range to further compare this data, and now we see that between 2013 and 2014 the percentage of female vs. male traffic decreased by about 5%. If history has shown that women spend more money on the site than men, then as our e-commerce target, this shift in demographics could be a concern. However, in this case, when we hover over the chart we find that the actual number of site visits by women increased more than tenfold between 2013 & 2014.
Sessions Analysis
The 102% increase in visits – with 75.94% of them being new sessions – is very nice, however, the bounce rate is alarming.
Goal Conversion Rate, Completions and Value
During the report period, we see a 12.69% conversion rate but that represents a disappointing 27.21% decrease in conversions compared to the previous period. This is certainly something you’ll want to investigate and try to correct. The good news is that the number of Goal Completions represent a whopping 445.81% increase over the prior period. If the person who set up the Google Analytics account for this site had invested a few minutes to set up values for those completions, then the Goal Value might have been quite impressive to share with the manager paying for SEO and site optimization services (learn more about Goal Values).
Age & Gender Session Analysis
Tables detailing session data by Age and Gender provide insight into visitor behavior. Here we see that the number of new sessions in the under age 35 target audience has dropped slightly, while the number of new users has grown phenomenally – more than 600% for your target audience! Your goal completions have shown an incredible increase, yet your conversion rate has dropped significantly for every age group and both genders. And the big indicator of content problems – Bounce Rate at more than 40%!- has worsened by more than 10% for all except the 65+ age group compared to the previous period.
From the pages per session and average session duration, we’re also seeing a disturbing drop in audience engagement. My advice… this e-commerce site you’re managing needs content optimization and/or perhaps a different product mix, and it’s quite possible that your advertising efforts may be misleading visitors who click through (costing you PPC $) and immediately leave the site when they realize what you’re selling isn’t what they expected.
This data is, of course, for a fictitious site – your results may (and should) vary based upon your efforts and expertise! Learn how you can customize the Analytics Audience Demographics report and create multiple versions for each campaign using Presets.
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