The Demographics report in Google Analytics provides some specialized information about your website visitors: age and gender.
Google Analytics has for a long time given you information about the location and language use of your visitors, the kinds of devices they use to access your website, and their behavior at your website. The demographics report gets a little more personal. This report divides your visitors into male and female and into age groupings using ranges of ages from 18-24 to 65+.
You’ll find this report under Audience> Demographics in your Google Analytics account. The Overview, shown above, gives a quick graphic representation of the age and gender of your website visitors. In our case, we can see that our audience is young, and that it includes slightly more men than women. Check the Age and Gender reports and you’ll see more detail.
For the website you’re visiting right now, we found that 36.91% of our visitors are ages 25-34, and that while 52.76% of our visitors over the past 30 days were male, women visited slightly more pages on average than the guys did.
You can also use these reports to dig deeper into your data and determine the conversion rates for men as opposed to women, find whether social media brings people of one age group more than another (social media brought us very little traffic over age 35 this month), or to see what content appeals to which demographic group. You can explore the day of the month or time of day your visitors from different groups are most likely to visit, as well as data on acquisition, behavior, and tech use.
How does Google know how old your visitors are and whether they’re men or women? From Doubleclick Ad and other cookies. Google does not gather this data or use Google log-in information to determine your visitor details. You get data only from people who have agreed to provide it, and no information is provided for people under 18.
In theory, this could mean that we have a large cadre of security-conscious elderly ladies visiting us, or heaps of children, but we’re probably safe acting on insights from Google Analytics’s Demographics report.
What should you do with demographics information?
If your business or organization provides goods and services for particular demographics, the benefit here is obvious.
For example, we’ve been working with an organization that talks to older adults. If they saw data like ours in their analytics, they would know right away that they are not reaching the right people. They would then develop a strategy for correcting their outreach, and they can use the reports to track their success.
On the other hand, surprising data can offer new opportunities, too. One of our clients sells Willy Wash, a product specifically intended for men. Since they know that most of the visitors to the product page are women, though, they offer this as a fun gift for men.
You can also set up segments for your Google Ads using this data. If you offer a product for young women, you can target a remarketing campaign that reaches out to young women who have made a purchase in the past with a display ad for that product. Just how this new report will work for your business will depend on multiple factors, but it could be extremely useful.
You can enable these reports within Google Analytics, without adding any code to your website. However, you will need to update your privacy policy information.
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