Creating Customer Profiles in Google Analytics

By Nathan Pabich

Many business owners will pay brand agencies a lot of money to help them develop customer profiles. Businesses spend a lot of time and energy surveying customers and mining the responses to get the data they need. It’s important to create customer profiles to not only understand who your customers are, but to provide them with a better experience as well.

In addition to this, customer profiles can also help you market to customers better and more efficiently. But what if I told you that you can get all of the information you need to create a customer profile for free? Below are five ways that you can get data within Google Analytics to build your customer profiles:

Using Google Analytics data to build customer profiles

Types of Customer Segments in Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a powerful tool. When you delve deeper into customer profile analytics, you can learn valuable information about your customer base, and better target potential customers and ideal customers in the future.

In this post, we’ll explore five segments in your Google Analytics profile that can help you build customer profiles.

  1. Demographics report
  2. Interests
  3. Location
  4. Search queries
  5. User flow

Demographics Report

By adding a simple line of code to your GA tracking code, you can unlock a ton of great data about your customers, including age and gender. You can get a breakdown of how many visitors fit into each category and what percentage of your traffic they make up.

Insights into audience demographics can help you identify which subsections of the population are your target customers and assist in building your ideal customer profile.

Interests

In addition to general demographics data, you can also learn about other interests your website visitors have. Categories include:

  • Technophiles
  • TV Lovers
  • Business Professionals
  • Travel Buffs
  • News/Weather
  • Arts & Entertainment

This information can help you better understand your user’s interests and where they go for news and entertainment, a key part of creating your customer profile.

Location

You can get a breakdown of where your visitors are coming from by city, state, and even country. This can help you understand where your customers are coming from. Bonus: This Google Analytics customer data can also help you create local based content. For example, if you find out that 50% of your traffic comes from Chicago, you might be able to create a piece of content specific to the city.

Search Queries

Although Google has been hiding keyword level data from us, you can still get a good idea of how people are searching for you. Under Acquisitions > Search Engine > Queries, you can see the number of impressions and clicks for various keywords people use to get to your business. The results for queries you rank for could surprise you. They can also help you better understand the types of problems/solutions your users are searching for.

User Flow

You can see how users are navigating through your site. This can help you better understand their purchase process and what pages they look at before they decide to buy. You can also look at the attribution report to see how many times users come to your site, and through which sources, before they convert.

This is just a start to what you can uncover about your users in Google Analytics to create a customer profile. There’s no need to survey your customers and mine the data; it’s all available for free in your Analytics account.