Continuing our examination of the reports in the new Google Analytics interface, we come to the User reports. There are two broad divisions: User attributes and Tech. The Overview of User Attributes begins with a map, which shows that we have visitors from 156 countries. It also gives us a quick update on the visitors we’ve had in the past 30 minutes. When we scroll down, we can see more information about our visitors.
The screenshot shows that our visitors are mostly English-speaking women ages 25-54. They are technophiles and they love media, including TV and movies as well as books. They also keep up with news and politics. When we click through to see the full reports, we discover that our visitors also like to travel and that they are family-focused.
None of this comes as a surprise to us. But if your report does bring you surprises, you should take action. For example, if you are an ob-gyn and most of your visitors are male, you may need to take a close look at your content.
We work with a client who provides services for the elderly, and we have noticed that there are more middle-aged people visiting now than in the past. It is possible that his content is interesting to a broader audience than he realized, but we think he may be reaching the sons and daughters of his target audience, who are caring for their parents. If so, we should work with him to target that new audience better and increase our reach with them.
Demographic details
The Demographic details report shows us geographic information only, by default. At this point we should mention that some of the properties we have access to are not showing demographic information other than geography. Those sites just show us where people came from.
However, our lab set does show gender, age, the language visitors chose to experience our website in, and their interests. The Demographic details page doesn’t go into any more data on the demographic apart from geography. However, we can filter the data by the other demographics dimensions. We were able, for example, to look at just our male visitors.
The screenshot shows that, while our visitors as a whole came from 156 different countries, the men represented just 6 nations, all of them countries in which English is a native or a widely-spoken second language. I am not sure what to do with the information that 13 Australian blokes came to the website in the past few months, but it’s there if we want it.
This can certainly be a useful report, and we will watch it in future — it seems to be settling in still.
Other GA4 reports:
- Realtime
- Acquisition
- Engagement
- Retention
- Monetization
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