Using Google Analytics to Analyze Your Customers

Google Analytics is an easy-to-integrate tool that provides a wealth of information about your customer base. This free service gives you plenty of data for learning more about your audience to target your sales in the right direction. Simply install the program, and use the results to create business improvements in the following areas for better sales and business growth.

Marketing

Google Analytics provides information to help you infer your customer needs. This data is useful for creating targeted marketing campaigns to better reach potential customers. Get started by checking out the acquisition area. This section shows how your website visitors discover your website. Tallying up the numbers from different advertising campaigns shows which ones are the most effective at driving potential customers your way. The information also helps you infer information about users. For example, if you get a lot of acquisitions from a parenting site, it is likely that your customer base includes a lot of parents or prospective parents. Likewise, if a business magazine is sending traffic your way, you know to target business professionals in future marketing campaigns.

In a similar vein, the audience section of Google Analytics provides general demographic information about your website visitors. The provided information includes gender, age and geographic location. Use this information to create a profile of your typical customer and focus your marketing on that demographic to grow sales.

Website Improvements

The behavior section of Google Analytics provides detailed information about how visitors use your website. Peruse the information to learn where visitors spend the most time, which pages flow into each other naturally and which pages lead to visitors leaving your website. Emulate the popular pages when creating new content, and cut or modify pages that lead to lost visitors. Pay particular attention to pages that flow into actual sales, and focus new content in those areas. Meeting customer needs with interesting information, fun photos and informational graphics is a great way to increase your conversion rate down the road.

Better Branding

Traditional market research often focuses on the hypothetical by surveying small portions of the public. Sales analytics looks at the facts surrounding actual people who interact with your brand and purchase your products or services. Use data from Google Analytics to focus on your actual customers, and develop branding strategies that draw others from that demographic to your products. Conversely, view the available data with an eye toward growing your audience. Look for unique subsets of users, and target content and marketing toward building sales in those demographics. Consider the anticipated needs of these subgroups to create a brand that reaches beyond your typical clientele.

Google Analytics provides information about who visits your website, how they get there and what they do during their visits. Use this information to get a better picture of your typical customer and improve your marketing, website and products to meet their needs. Google Analytics makes it easy to use the available data to grow sales.

Photo courtesy of Panayotis Vryonis at Flickr.com