Ready for a better understanding of what customers want to buy?

We all know that analytics and benchmarks let you spot online marketing realities, trends, big ideas, opportunities, and emerging threats.

With Google Analytics’ Demographics and Interests Report, you can segment your customers and analyze your marketing campaigns even better.

With its behavior information relating to a website visitor’s age, gender and interests,  you can build segments using these attributes, apply them to any of your Analytics reports, use that analysis to refine your campaign strategies, and better target your Adwords campaigns on the Google Display Network. These reports let you see how many of your users engage over a date range, who these visitors are, and how their behavior varies by attribute (e.g., male vs. female).

What demographics does it give you?

•    Overview (overview of traffic by age and gender)

•    Age (traffic by age ranges)

•    Gender (traffic by gender)

What buyer interests can you see?

•    Overview (overview of traffic by affinity and other categories)

•    Affinity Categories (behavior by affinity categories)

•    In-Market Categories (behavior by in-market categories)

•    Other Categories (behavior by other interest categories)

How does Google get this information?

The Information for these new reports is derived from the DoubleClick third-party cookie. When someone visits a website that has partnered with Google, Google stores a number in their browsers (using a "cookie") to remember their visits. It’s important to note that this number uniquely identifies a web browser on a specific computer, not a specific person.

After storing a “cookie” on someone’s browser, Google bases their demographic information, such as gender or age range on the sites they visited. In addition, some sites might provide Google with demographic information that people share on certain websites, such as social networking sites. They may also use demographics derived from Google profiles.

How does Google help target a visitor’s interests? When someone visits a Google partner website, Google may use the content of the page or website to show contextually relevant ads. Google uses the main topics and themes from the page as well as data from third-party companies to associate interests with a visitor’s anonymous cookie ID, taking into account how often people visit sites of those categories, among other factors.

Google may also use the websites that people visit and third-party data to infer this information. For example, if the sites a person visits have a majority of female visitors (based on aggregated survey data on site visitation), they may associate the person's cookie with the female demographic category.

Keep in Mind…

Remember that Demographic and Interest information for these reports is derived from the DoubleClick third-party cookie. When that cookie is not associated with a user, Analytics cannot conclude demographics and interest categories. In some cases, not all of the visitor data may be available (data thresholds). So, these reports may represent only a portion of your users and not the overall composition of your site traffic.

Also, Google does not associate with an individual’s cookie any interest categories considered sensitive, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, certain financial categories, and others.

To find and enable the new Demographics and Interests report…

Look for it in the Audience section of Google Analytics.

You’ll need to do three things to get demographics and interest data into your reports:

1.    Modify your tracking code to support display advertising

2.    Update your privacy policy to adhere to our Policy requirements for Display Advertising.

3.    Enable Demographics reports in the Analytics interface (Edit permission required).

For more detail instructions click here.

The Demographics and Interests Report provides you with valuable information that will allow to tweak your online marketing strategies and improve your website's user experience. If you audience is young, market with design and trends that resonate to them. If you audience is an older population, consider the font size and visuals of your website and other marketing outreach your promote. Once you get these insights share with us the biggest aha lessons from this report in the comments below.

If you need support to enable these  reports, contact Xzito and we'll be more than happy to help! Happy Analytics!