How to analyze your audience for free using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to analyze your online audience. It provides comprehensive user information through third-party cookies and offers easy-to-understand reports that even the newest business owner can quickly peruse. 

However, Google Analytics does have its limitations. To truly analyze your audience, you may find you need more information than it can provide. Let’s examine all of the data you can get from Google Analytics and other solutions to understand your audience on an ever deeper level.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool available to all website owners. Through the use of third-party cookies and data collected from Google account users, it can provide basic insights into your website visitors, including geographic, demographic, and psychographic data. Each of these verticals captures information that businesses often find useful in better understanding and analyzing their audience.

Within Google Analytics, the six main audience metrics are:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Geography (Geo)
• Behavior
• Technology
• Mobile 

All of this data is available for free, as long as you sign up for a Google Analytics account and allow access to your website to gather metrics.

Benefits of Google Analytics

When it comes to audience analysis, Google Analytics’ biggest benefit is that it offers quite a bit of information for free. It’s also able to use its own user data to track users’ previous online and purchasing behaviors. 

Build your audiences

Google Analytics allows you to build specific audiences from the data collected, giving you more control over who you’re tracking. This can lead to better and more targeted advertising via A/B testing. 

Track campaign ROI

A primary benefit of any metrics, including Google Analytics, is the ability to track your ROI for your advertising campaigns, including pay-per-click, social media, and more. These expenses expand quickly, so it’s helpful to have a tool that gives you a snapshot of what you’re spending and how you’re performing. 

Make better decisions with research

All of these benefits lead to more targeted advertising and wiser decision-making when working to get the right audience to your site. Google Analytics provides a fairly complete tool for analyzing your audience.

Limits of Google Analytics

However, as with any free tool, there are limits. Google Analytics, and many other platforms, will face some challenges in the near future as third-party cookies are phased out and greater Internet privacy laws take effect. Here are a few other limitations.

Limited insights

For a new website owner or small business, the insights provided by Google Analytics might be all you need to analyze your audience. However, because Google relies mostly on third-party cookies and extrapolating data from its own users, your audience insights are often limited.

End of third-party cookies

Third-party cookies are estimated to be phased out of most online advertising by the end of 2022. Also, with more savvy Internet users demanding more privacy, the reliance on third-party cookies to gather information is already waning. Other tools like ad blockers and incognito mode make this information inconsistent at best.

Surface-level analysis only

To truly analyze your audience, you need to know more than the facts. While Google can provide demographics and interests information, there are still gaps in the data. You still won’t know why someone came to your site, what they might be looking for, or what truly influences why they buy.  

A better way to analyze your audience

You need a robust platform for analyzing your audience. Lytics has built a reputation for finding and targeting audiences across a variety of industries, using top-notch tools and insights, as well as AI and third-party integrations.

Use your own data

Because of its direct integrations with partners like Salesforce, NetSuite, and other CRMs, Lytics works with your data—information directly from your customers—to build customer profiles. 

Reap the benefits of ETL

ETL, or extract, transform, and load, is at the heart of our work at Lytics. We believe in not only gathering all of your audience data, but combining it into dynamic reports that will provide insights you haven’t seen before. 

Test ideas in just a few clicks

Because all of Lytics’ gathered data is in one central location, you can identify audiences easily and quickly send them to different ad platforms. There is no lag time between discovering a detail by analyzing your audience and then putting that detail into practice. This includes platforms like Google Ads, as well as all of the most popular social media sites.

Lytics does more to analyze your audience

Lytics offers tools to make businesses more successful. We do this by enabling you to leverage your own customer data and diving deeper into audience analysis than many other tools on the market. While Google Analytics is a great place to start, to truly push your business to new heights—and new revenue goals—you’ll need more than just the basics. You’ll need the type of insights that Lytics offers.

We know that working with a true audience analysis and data management agency is a big step for many brands. That’s why we offer a free 30-day trial that provides you with a terrific overview of all we can do. To get your free trial started today, click here. 

If you still have questions or want to know more, reach out to learn how our team can help you analyze your audience for maximum growth right now.