Audience Reports

This chapter was last updated in August 2021, refreshed content on GA4 is coming soon...

Stop wondering who is coming to your website, and start knowing who is coming to your site. Audience reports give you insight on who is coming to your website, from where in the world and how often.

Audience overview

Understand your audience at a glance with the audience overview report. From here you can see the number of users that have visited your site, if users have visited your site multiple times and what language the user’s browser language operates in.

You can toggle the demographic and system options on this report to see the breakdown of user countries, cities, browsers, operation systems, and service providers.

Audience demographics

Find the age and gender split of your audience. The overview screen shows you the stats in a visual way.

To see a deeper split of your audience, go into either the Age or Gender section using the menu on the left hand side. And to get even more granular, drop down the “Second dimension” to find and select the other split (either age or gender).

This view gives you access to the same information provided in the overview, but broken down by the selected audience parameters.

You will find users and new users as well as sessions in the acquisition portion of the table. It’s important to note that the difference between users and sessions is who visits the site vs. how many times the site was visited. As you know, we often visit sites more than once, thus the same user may have many sessions during a time period.

You also get behavior metrics in this view. These include bounce rate, page session and average session duration. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who leave the site without interacting with it. Pages per session and average session duration are both averages of user specific user engagement metrics (pages visited and time on site).

How to use this information:

• Ensure you are attracting the right audience. If you get an influx of people outside of your ideal age/gender demographic, you may be reaching the wrong audience or creating content that speaks to the wrong audience.

• See if your current target audience is actually the correct target audience. It may be that the audience you thought was your target audience isn’t actually the audience that does the buying, or another audience is also interested in using your product or service. Be sure to look at how the audience interacts, not just how many visit. A high bounce rate, low time on site or few pages per session could all indicate an uninterested audience.

Audience geography

You can see where people are visiting your website from under the Geo > Location section of the Google Analytics menu. By default you will see the breakdown by country. However, if you want to see the breakdown by city, you can navigate to it through the menu across the top of the data table.

How to use this information:

• Ensure your site attracts the correct audience. If you only serve people in Virginia, but you get a lot of traffic from users in Washington, you may need to rethink your marketing strategy.

• Identify potential hacks early. An influx of traffic from another country could indicate a site hack.

• Learn more about where your audience is from. If you have an international audience, or even a national audience, this view may help you hone in on the audiences that are the most interested in what you have to offer.

Audience technology

The technology section will show you the operation system your users used to access the website. This information can hint to you what type of devices and brands your audience prefers.

How to use this information:

• Prioritize optimizations for the most used browsers.

• Prioritize optimizations for the most used devices. With just a bit of inference (or by going into the Devices view), you can determine the devices users are most likely to visit your site from. You will want to ensure your site loads quickly and has a great user experience on those devices.

• Identify potential browsers or devices that have loading issues. If bounce rates are abnormally high for a certain browser, it could indicate an issue with Core Web Vitals.