You’re probably wondering why demographics metrics are so important. Well, it is, because if your content is being viewed mainly by people in Spain, you may want to have a Spanish translated version of your website.
This is really easy to find in Google Analytics.
You can get basic highlights right under the highlights on the Audience Overview page, as seen below:
Note: At the bottom of this table on the right is a link called “view full report”. Click this to get a detailed breakdown.
Language
Language is so important to your website because if you have people coming from other parts of the world reading your blog, then you should offer a translation system on your blog. Here you can see that the majority speak/read/write in US English, and then there are 31 sessions from users who speak Brazilian Portuguese, all of which are new sessions.
Country/Territory
It’s always a great thing to know what country your traffic from, so you can tailor your content to fit their needs. Remember, your website/blog may be about you, but if you don’t write content for your readers, they will eventually stop visiting. From the above instance, it seems like this website is reaching people from various countries across the world, but Trinidad and Tobago seems to outshine them all by claiming 54% of the sessions.
In the first screenshot, we can see how language affects bounce rates and pages/session. The 31 Brazilian Portuguese users were all new, but they only visited a page or two for an average time of five seconds before leaving. The four Italian folks seemed to have some trouble too, giving a bounce rate of 50%, and a similar pages/session metric. Overall, the higher bounce rates come from the countries who don’t have English as their primary language. This indicates that there may be a need for a global translation system if there isn’t one already installed on the website.
This screenshot shows that there are many countries which are not being reached at all. The African continent as well as South America and several parts of Europe seem to not be marketed to. Looks like a great way to target some paid traffic.
Google analytics also has the ability to track gender, age and interests, based on the collated data they store on each of us through our searches and internet behaviour. This data can be especially important for blogs who are niched into a gender or age based topic.
Knowing who your visitors are and where they are from could also help you refine and tailor your content to your readers. Imagine if you were a tech blog from the United States and most of your readers were from Japan, and you weren’t tracking where your traffic was coming from; you’d never know that your following probably all speak Japanese, or even know that they might be interested in a particular brand more available in Japan as opposed to those available in the US.
Demographics are a powerful force, but you have to use it. Otherwise it just remains as unused data, which is useless to everyone.
