Knowing Your Audience for Better Connections
When you first start out blogging you really don’t know what kind of audience will stick, I am not talking about those who are just interested in the niche or target you are blogging about but also the other audience factors, one that companies consider their customers and do polling to learn who their customers are based on geographic location, gender, age.
With websites we can go further and know more about customers based on not only these factors but their method of accessing your site is also a telling sign and can help cater to how you blog, what your blog about and especially how you may present your blog.
Leveraging Google Analytics is a good idea for your blog, not just to track your unique visits, pageviews and which content is most frequently accessed, but it also gives you information about your audience, the sources and the guts can help you adjust your blogging tactics.
Location Based Information
Looking at the Demographics section of Google Analytics lets you see where the majority of your traffic comes from. You can use this information to tailor articles toward your most popular demographic, or even write articles that target demographics to your smaller markets to help raise traffic from countries where you aren’t getting much traffic from.
Knowing where the top 10 source countries are for your traffic also helps you align your affiliate marketing strategies as well, as trying to affiliate sell a non-digital product that won’t ship to a country where you get a lot of traffic from may not be such a good idea. Also not all CPM/CPA networks count visits/clicks from other countries so knowing to tailor your affiliate marketing and banner advertising for your top traffic origin sites is important.
One major note, don’t look at one month metrics when factoring this, you should look over the course of 1 year or 6 months before shifting your marketing strategy to a more geographic centric targeting approach.
Browser Visits
Leveraging the Technology, Browser & OS demographics information we can see which browsers visit your site most often.
You can see from this screenshot Chrome is the majority of traffic followed by Firefox. This would cause me to be extra focused on making sure that my blog or website renders properly in Chrome and Firefox, that the CSS aligns properly, images are clear…etc. You also can see if Android browser popups on the list, knowing you should start catering to mobile browsers, but you can get more information from the Mobile demographics section.
Mobile Demographics
Knowing how much mobile traffic you are getting is very important, you then need to make sure your website or blog is optimized for mobile browsers which are not only on slower networks (generally) but have so much smaller screen real estate. If your blog has a lot of images or load time, you may consider a mobile theme like WP Touch (Free Version) or WP Touch Pro to greatly simplify your blog display for mobile sites.
If you see mobile visits start to grow to more than 10% of your visits or higher then you need to have a mobile strategy in place, banner ads for mobile need to be smaller and less intrusive. Giant banners for sales images in posts just don’t work properly in mobile browsers, so you need to adjust strategy. It is very hard to optimize a theme for both mobile and desktop browser at the same time so typically you need a separate mobile theme/plugin to assist here unless you are working with a theme designer on a theme that has support for desktop and mobile web browsing.
Visitor Flow
Finally the Visitor Flow demographics is very important as well and is tied to visitor location.
This helps show you what countries visitors are coming from and what are the most popular resources on your site accessed from those visitors, this again helps you find out which article types do well in certain geographic locations and can help you focus on writing more articles of a certain type or changing existing articles to help become more applicable to other geographic locations if necessary.
In Summary
Paying very close attention to the type of traffic, where it comes from, what browser or device it comes from and more can help you choose the direction you grow your site. You can choose to optimize and cater to your already stronger locations or you can grow in areas where you were intending to draw in more traffic. If you are looking to branch out more in other geographic locations it helps to sometimes hire some writers from those locations who can bring perspective there as well.
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Hi Justin,
I like the breakdown here. By checking metrics you can improve where you need to improve and play to your strong suits too.
Thanks for sharing,
Ryan
Thanks Ryan, after 4+ years of blogging I have seen various changes in demographics on my own sites do I try to change my focus, target where I want to grow. I often do this with article topics and categories as well, focus on areas that are weak to draw in more audience for those subjects.
It is very important to know your audience and where they come from I always check my stats on google analytics and see from where the biggest chunk of visitors come from , this will even help you write content that a targeted audiene will enjoy and find interesting thanks for sharing this thought provoking article have a great day !
Hi Justin,
That’s a good idea but to be frank, I rarely check my demographics.
It’s a habit I need to change now.
For the first 6 months of blogging I really didn’t either, demographics became something I started looking into more than a year after I started my first blog. I became more curious when I brought in some writing staff from India and their Android articles starting jumping up the percentages of my India and Pakistan visitors on DragonBlogger, this made me curious and I started doing a lot more into learning about the writing style, types of words, phrases and other things that may have caused certain articles to resonate in certain countries more than others.
Hi Justin,
Good points about the traffic. I had not thought about how writers from other countries may have a different slant. Excellent thought. I look at all the numbers on analytics and just say well the numbers are going up. That’s good. I will notice the browser info more.
For me it is important to find out which articles appeal to various demographics and it helps me tailor or learn where I need to grow. Google Analytics and Web Master Tools both are very powerful free tools that Google provides, and I don’t even scratch the surface of what you can do with them.
Hey,
Yes, I do feel the same that you need to be very interactive with your audience. I like the mobile demographics that you have shared. Nice one. Thanks for the share!!
Mobile is constantly growing and I do feel it will one day account for more than 50% of a sites total traffic, so we must cater and learn how quickly to adapt our site to mobile traffic. I would think if the site gets 20% or higher mobile traffic, then the owner must have a mobile friendly / catered theme and start thinking about mobile strategy sooner rather than later.
I’ve always been one for using Google Analytics to help out with my audience on my blog, sometimes they can be overwhelming, special when you first start reading them and seeing all the numbers, but with anything they become part of the blogging lifestyle and something that all bloggers should really get use to using at some time or another.
I agree, analytics are the life blood of blogs, it is hard to just write and ignore who and what groups of readers are finding your content interesting and reading it, it helps know what resonates and what doesn’t and you can drill further to find out why certain articles get more traffic and others don’t, is the traffic referral, direct, search, how did you write it so that it command so much search traffic…etc. Bloggers learn by digging into the analytics and researching this info.
Justin, well put article. I too endorse that as much as other important thing in blogging, one also needs to take high care to its audience., make better connection and never let them leave and this one reason why I too oftenly go through my ANalytics. 🙂
I admit when your site starts getting tens of thousands of visits per month (or much more) you can spend more and more time digging through analytics, you have to measure your time to be efficient and effecting or you can drown in the analytics it seems.
This will actually help us a lot. Not only because we can build connections but they’ll love us more and it’ll give our business and niche some loving and favors. 🙂
This is especially helpful for niche blogs, though any blog even a portal blog like myself helps find content to curate further and grow in directions I am weak or expand where I am already bringing in good content. Recently I am using the Google Analytics to find ways to grow my site after having a severe traffic falloff over the last few months due to a few articles which used to get thousands of visits per month now not turning out very much traffic anymore.
It is of great importance to keep a tab on the location of the visitors. When one keeps a tab on the chunk of individuals who regularly visit the blog, it becomes much simpler and easier to decide the niche and particularly the topic for discussion. Google Analytics plays a key role in this endeavor. Thanks for the share.
These are very generic, advance customization provides numerous options to filter and alter your GA reports according to your requirement
Of course these are entry level and generic (non advanced filtering) if someone reaches this article it means they wouldn’t have likely even used these basic filters and demographics information yet and can benefit from it. If you run local company you would filter and focus demographics more on individual locales rather than country and isolate further. What are your favorite types of demographics to look at in GA and use to gather information to tailor your content strategy?
It is indeed essential to know the type of audience using the analytics tools so that the content can be managed accordingly. Thanks for sharing the guidelines on how to go about it.
Again, this is only the basics and merely an initial dive into the demographics to consider. Thanks for taking the time to read the article.
Hey Justin,
Nice post and Thanks for sharing this post with us. Yes, for getting success in blogging we have to know about our audience and try to make good relations with them. I really like this post.
Thanks for article post and share me. These are great methods for increase traffic.