Audience Reports

In this article, I am going to cover the next Google Analytics report section. After you already know what Real-time reports are and what dimensions and metrics are and how to use them, it is time to dive deep into Google Analytics Audience Reports.

Audience Reports

These reports tell you more about the people who are coming to your site, things like what age they are, where they are from, and so on. As with real-time reports Audience Reports are broken down into different sections based on the characteristics of your audience.

Overview

The Overview Audience Report shows you at first glance your current audience. Note that the data here is not real-time, so you are looking at data collected from previous periods. What you can see in the audience overview report is that you can choose how to view the data in the line chart, you can choose between Hourly, Day, Week, and Month.

Currently, I have chosen to view the data by Day, and as you can see on the chart it is broken down by days. The default metric set up in the graph is "Users" but you can change it by clicking on the dropdown menu and selecting a metric that you want to view.

Another thing you can do is compare the first metric with another one. By clicking on "Select metric" and choosing for example Pageviews, the line chart will present both of these metrics compared to one another as shown below:

The metrics you will see in this report include:

• Users- Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range.
• New Users- The number of first-time users during the selected date range
• Sessions- Total number of Sessions within the date range. A session is the period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc.
• Number of Sessions per User- The average number of sessions per user.
• Page Views- the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
• Page\Sessions- (Average Page Depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
• Average Session Duration- The average length of a Session.
• Bounce Rate- The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.

New Visitor vs Returning Visitor pie chart

This chart simply visualizes and shows the percentage of users who are entering your site for the first time (New Visitor) and the users who have previously been on your site (Returning Visitor). Google Analytics determines if a user is a returning visitor by checking for the Client ID stored in the cookies of the browser.

Further down in the report you can see a table like the one shown above. This table can show you a minimalized version of some of the reports in the Audience section. You can see things like what languages your audience uses, what kind of browsers they use to enter your site, and so on.

Active Users Report

The Active Users report shows you the number of unique users that have visited your site over various periods of time- 1 day, 7 days, 14 days, and 28 days.

Note: Active Users don't mean Real-time active users.

This report is useful for tracking the performance of current campaigns. For example, you published a new campaign and want to see how many users are engaging with that content and how often they are returning to your website. To analyze the data for your new campaign you need to check the tick boxes for all four counts.

• 1 Day Active Users- these are the users who have visited your website in the last 1 day of the selected date range.
• 7 Days Active Users- these are the users who have visited your website in the last 7 days of the selected date range.
• 14 Day Active Users- these are the users who have visited your website in the last 14 days of the selected date range.
• 28 Day Active Users- these are the users who have visited your website in the last 30 days of the selected date range.

Continuing with our example of your published campaign, you see that the 28 Day Active Users count and the 1 Day Active Users count is similar. This would mean that your campaign is performing exceptionally because users continue to go back to the content of your campaign as time goes on. If however, you have a huge 28 Day Active User count and a small 1 Day Usage count that means your content is not performing as well as it should.

You can also add segments to the Active Users Report to extract more data. For example, you want to know how much paid traffic the new published campaign is bringing, you can create a custom segment like this one:

And when you apply this segment you can see how many of your Active Users are coming to your site via paid traffic.

Life-Time Value (Beta)

This report is most useful for people who have an e-commerce site and it is only available if you have activated e-commerce tracking in GA. With this report, you can see the date on which a certain user was acquired, and you can analyze this information on a Day, Week, or Month basis. To use this report firstly you need to select the acquisition date range and then choose from the different Lifetime Value (LTV) metrics.

LTV metrics include:

• Goal completions per user (LTV)- Up to 90 days of cumulative Goal Completions for a certain user, starting from the date when you acquired the user.
• Pageviews per user (LTV)- Up to 90 days of data for the total pageviews a user has made from the date when you acquired that user.
• Revenue per user- Up to 90 days of cumulative Revenue for a user, starting from the date you acquired the user.
• Session duration per user- Up to 90 days of cumulative Session Duration for a user, starting from the date you acquired the user.
• Sessions per user- Up to 90 days of cumulative Sessions for a user, starting from the date you acquired the user.
• Transactions per user- Up to 90 days of cumulative Transactions for a user, starting from the date you acquired the user.

Note: If you are looking at data for an app, the "Pageviews per user (LTV)" metric will be shown as "Appviews per user (LTV)"

If you scroll down below the line chart, you can see a table like this one:

This table further breaks down the data, and you have the option to choose from:

• Acquisition Channel
• Acquisition Source
• Acquisition Medium
• Acquisition Campaign

Another useful feature of this report is the Plot Rows option. For example, if you want to compare the LTV between Organic and Paid search, you have to select the checkbox of those two channels and press the button "Plot" as shown below:

After doing this the graph above will change and you will see the Organic Search and Paid Search compared with the LTV metric you chose.

Cohort Analysis (Beta)

A cohort can be defined as a group of users sharing a characteristic, that is segmented based on a date. For example, a cohort can be users who have made a transaction during a specific time period.

The chart visualizes the average user retention (percentage of returning visitors) for the date range, which is set to seven days by default.

To set up a cohort report there are four selections you need to choose:

1. Cohort Type- the only option here is to choose Acquisition Date as a cohort type. Because this report is still in Beta testing (it has been for quite some time now) we do not know when there will be new cohort types.
2. Cohort Size- this is the time window that you want to use: you can choose by day, by week, or by month. 
3. Metric- this is the data you will see presented in the report. You can choose from the following metrics:

• Goal Completions Per User- the total number of Goals completed by a cohort, divided by the total cohort size.
• Pageviews per User- the total number of pageviews made by a cohort, divided by the total cohort size.
• Revenue per User- the total revenue generated by a cohort divided by the total cohort size.
• Session Duration Per User- Total time spent (hh:mm:ss) by a cohort, divided by the total cohort size.
• Session per User-Total number of sessions started by a cohort, divided by the total cohort size.
• Transactions per User- Total number of transactions made by a cohort, divided by the total cohort size.
• User Retention- the number of users in the cohort who returned in the Nth time period (day, week, month) divided by the total number of users in the cohort.
• Goal Completion- the total number of conversions.
• Pageviews- the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
• Revenue- this metric will show you the total revenue from web ecommerce or in-app transactions. Depending on your setup, this can include tax and shipping.
• Session Duration- this metric will show you the length of a session in seconds.
• Sessions-this metric shows the total number of Sessions within the date range.
• Transactions- the total number of completed purchases on your site.
• Users- The number of users within a cohort who initiated a session.

4. Date Range- this is the date range used to construct the cohort; you can choose from the last 7 days, last 14 days, last 21 days, or last 30 days.

Below the graph you can see a table, like this one:

The table provides insight into the percentage of users who returned to your site within seven days of visiting it for the very first time. The dates shown in the column on the left signify the user retention for those specific dates (the users who have visited your site for the first time on that day). So for Apr 16, 2021, the users who entered your site for the first time are 2,187.

Day 0 is equal to the date displayed in the first column, Day 1 is the first day after a user visited your site for the first time. If you look at Apr 16, 2021, on Day 1 it shows 2.83%, which signifies that from the total users for that day (2,187), 2,83% of them returned on the next day (Apr 17, 2021). Following the same logic, we can see the percentage of users for the next 7, 14, 21, or 30 Days (Depending on the date range you choose)

After you understand how to read the report, it is time to understand what information you can extract from this data. Comparing the dates in the table above you can see that for Apr 18, 2021, the Day 1 users are significantly lower (2,27%) than the other dates around it. So what happened on that date? Was your site experiencing some technical issues, was there an unsuccessful campaign launch? Or maybe you made a post on the other dates but not on Apr 18. Following this report, you can start to understand if new content, campaigns, or changes to your site are working or not.

If you want to further break down the data in the Cohort Report a great way to do so is to use segments. You can use up to 4 different segments at the same time in this report. Continuing the example for Apr 18, 2021, let's say you want to drill deeper and investigate the cause of the lower rate compared to the other days. You can add a segment let's say for Mobile traffic and to the table, this data will appear:

This shows the data for users who not only visited your website for the first time in the set time range but were also on a mobile device when viewing your site. You can apply all sorts of segments (default or custom) to extract the desired information from the data.

Audiences

In the sense of Google Analytics, an audience is defined as a group or segment of users with common characteristics (attributes). For example, users who are all from the United Kingdom are an audience or users who come to your site through organic traffic, and so on.

Note: The characteristics of users in a group/segment are time-bound because those same users can show different characteristics in different time periods. For example, a user who is in the audience "February" (for users who visited your site in the month of February) can also visit your site in May.

The benefit of creating audiences in Google Analytics is that they can show you the acquisition, behavior, and conversion performance of a particular group/segment you are interested in analyzing. For example, you published a new campaign targeting students for a new course program you have recently launched. By creating an audience for those students you can monitor how this group with a common characteristic is responding to your campaign, from which marketing channels they are coming (traffic sources), how they consume the content of the course (bounce rate, average time spent on-page, and so on.

For you to be able to populate the Audience report with data, you need to enable Demographics and Interests reports and then create an audience. To create an audience follow the instructions in this Analytics Help article.

When you create an audience it is important to follow certain steps:

1. Define the objectives for the audience. You need to decide what is the purpose of this audience. What data do you want to analyze and what insights do you want to extract for this audience.
2. Decide on the conditions for the created audience. A condition can be, for example, users who have visited a certain page on your website.
3. Decide on the "membership duration". This term refers to the period a user is part of an audience. In Google Analytics a membership duration can be between 1 to 540 days long.
4. Decide where you will want to publish your audience. For example, if you want the audience you create to be linked to Google Ads as well, you will need to first link Google Analytics with Google Ads. If you decide to publish your audience in other places (not only in Google Analytics) it will be referred to as a "remarketing audience"
5. Enable "Demographics and Interest Reports"

In the Admin Panel, under "Property", choose Property Settings and scroll down to Advertising Features enable the toggle and click "Save"

6. Enable "Remarketing" and "Advertising Reporting Features"

Navigate to the Admin Panel, under "Property" choose "Tracking Info" and then "Data Collection" and then scroll down and enable the toggles. Click "Save"

Note that when you enable Remarketing it will automatically enable the Advertising Reporting Features as well.

7. Choose the method through which you want to create an audience.

In this article, I will only describe the most beginner-friendly way to create an audience. More advanced options will be covered in future articles

• You can import an audience from the Google Solutions Gallery Navigate to the Admin Panel, under Property scroll down and choose "Audience Definitions" then "Audiences", and click on Import from Gallery as shown below:

Then when you are taken to the Solutions Gallery choose an audience you want to use and click on "Import"

Then choose the view you would like to apply the audience to and choose where you want to import the audience. If you have Google Ads linked to your Google Analytics it will also show as an option.

Then click on "Create"

• You can also choose to create an audience from the preconfigured ones that Google Analytics offers.
• Another option is to create an audience by importing a previously created advanced segment in GA.
• Or you can create a brand new audience from scratch.

User Explorer Report

This report is available only if you have enabled the User ID feature in Google Analytics. Through this report, you can examine individual user behavior rather than aggregated data for all users. This data is linked to the Client ID (or User ID). I will not go into further detail about this report as it is a more advanced report, but if you are interested in how to set it up, read more about it in this Analytics Help article.

Demographics

In Demographics we have three reports:

• Overview Report

The Overview Report will show you a combination of the next two reports into charts. From it, at first glance, you can understand the main age of your users and whether they are male or female.

• Age Report

The Age Report gives a deeper breakdown into how users from different age groups interact with your site. In the table below the chart, you can view the Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics for the specified age groups.

• Gender Report

The Gender Report shows the same chart and metrics but broken down into the two genders instead of age groups.

Interests Reports

From a marketer's perspective, these are the reports through which you can find the most valuable information. Google Analytics uses data gathered from users' Gmail, Browsing history, Youtube history, and other places to populate these reports. With the gathered data Google Analytics makes guesses about users' personal interests. You can use these reports for advertising purposes or content inspiration, based on the interests of your users.

• Overview

This report shows the aggregate data for the following three reports. So you can get a glance at the data without going too deep into analysis mode.

• Affinity Categories

This report shows you users who have a general interest in a specific topic. The topics in Google Analytics are the same as the ones used in Google Ads. This report is useful mainly for targeting purposes. The users in this report are said to be at the beginning of the sales funnel. The report shows the main Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics.

• In-Market Segments

This report shows users in specific segments who are more likely to be ready to make a purchase related to a segment, meaning they are near the end of the sales funnel. With this report, you can make tweaks and changes to your closing strategy. Once again you can view the standard metrics for the segments.

• Other Categories

This report includes the users who do not fall into the categories in the previous two reports. For example, in the Affinity Category, we can have "Food", while in the "Other Categories" we can have "Cuisine".

Geo

• Language Report

The language report shows you the standard metrics applied to different languages of the users. This report is particularly useful if you run an international business or you plan to expand into international markets.

• Location Report

The Location report shows you a map of your users' locations. This report is useful mainly for targeting ads. The table below the map shows you the standard metrics broken down by country. By clicking on a certain country you can explore further down into cities, which can be helpful for local businesses.

Behavior

The reports in this section can help you understand your audience and how often they visit your site, how much time they spend on certain pages, and so on. From the information in these reports, you can make conclusions whether the content you are creating is engaging your audience, if your marketing efforts are retaining visitors to your site, and so on.

• New vs Returning Users Report

As you already know Google puts a tracking code into a cookie on the users' browser, by doing this Google Analytics can determine if a user is New (no tracking code present) or Returning (tracking code present). The table in this report compares the two types of users based on the standard report metrics.

• Frequency and Recency Report

In this report, Frequency refers to the Count of Sessions, and Recency to the Days since the last session.

The report shows a table of Distribution where there are two options:

1. Count of Sessions

Count of sessions signifies the order in which the sessions of one visitor occur. When looking at the table Count of Sessions 1 signifies that these sessions occurred without having a prior session. The Count of Sessions 2 signifies that there was 1 prior session before this one. This logic applies to all Count of Sessions. The data can show you how many repeat visits users make on your site. For example, if a user visits your site 4 times in the selected time period (without clearing their browsing and cookies history) that user will be counted into rows 1,2,3, and 4.

1. Days since last Session

This report signifies the number of days between the closing of one session and the opening of another session. It shows you the days between users' latest visit and the visit before that. Users who have visited your site only once will be counted in row 0. For example, a user visited your site on Apr 20, 2021, and then visited your site again on Apr 24, 2021, this user will be counted towards row 4.

• Engagement Report

Here you can also see a table of Distribution with two options:

1. Session Duration Bucket

The Session Duration shows you brackets of seconds for which users' sessions lasted. In the first row (0-10 seconds) you can see that the number of sessions and pageviews are in close proximity compared to the other rows. The logic behind this is that for such a short period of time for a session a user does not have enough time to visit a lot of pages. So on average a session with a bracket of 0-10 seconds, a user views approximately 1,05 pages.

2. Page Depth

Put simply, this report shows how many pages a user visited in a session. For example, from the total 19,272 sessions, 2,346 sessions included a user viewing 2 pages. Pageviews are calculated by the number of sessions multiplied by the page depth for the specific row.

• Session Quality Report

You can see this report only if your view meets the minimum requirement of 1000 transactions in the last 30 days. Session Quality is defined as an estimate of how close a particular session was to transacting. (i.e. leading to a transaction).

You can see five brackets in the report, and the higher the number the closer a session is to lead to a transaction. For each bracket, you can view the number of sessions, the sessions that ended with a transaction, and the sessions without transactions.

Technology Reports

The Technology reports in this section provide information about browsers, operating systems, and network providers through which users enter your site. These reports can be useful if your business wants to create software or applications, and you want to know what are the preferred networks, browser, and so on of your audience.

• Browser and Operating System (OS) Report

In this report you can choose from different primary dimensions as shown below:

The Primary Dimensions you can choose from are:

1. Browser- Chrome, Safari, Opera...
2. Operating System- Android, IOS, Windows...
3. Screen Resolution- the screen size
4. Screen Colors- the screen color depths of visitors' monitors.
5. Flash Version- The versions of Flash supported by visitors' browsers, including minor versions.
6. Other

Java Support: Differentiates visits from browsers with and without (Yes or No) Java enabled.

• Network Report

In this report you can choose from two Primary Dimensions:

1. Service Provider- The names of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) used by visitors.
2. Hostname- The hostnames visitors used to reach your site. Typically, your site's URL.

Mobile Reports

• Overview Report

The report shows you a table with a dimension of "Device Category" and the values of the dimension are "Desktop" "Mobile" and "Tablet". The report provides the standard Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics.

An example for the use of this report could be, if you see that the bounce rate for "Mobile" is quite high this would indicate that there is some issue with the mobile version of your site.

• Devices Report

This report gives you a specific breakdown of the devices your audience uses to access your site. The Devices Report is useful if you plan on developing a mobile application or want to test the mobile version of your site.

The primary dimensions for this report are:

1. Mobile Device Info- The branding, model, and marketing name used to identify the device.
2. Mobile Device Branding- Manufacturer or branded name (examples: Samsung, HTC, Verizon, T-Mobile).
3. Service Provider- The names of the Internet service providers (ISPs) used by visitors to your site.
4. Mobile Input Selector- Selector used on device (examples: touchscreen, joystick, clickwheel, stylus)
5. Operating System- The operating systems used by visitors to your app or website. Includes mobile operating systems such as Android.
6. Other- Screen Resolution

Cross Device Reports (Beta)

Through these reports you can gain a better understanding of how users engage and convert on your site across different devices and browsers. In order for these reports to be accessible you need to set up User ID. These reports help you to better understand the customer journey of your users.

• Device Overlap Report

The Device Overlap Report shows you the type of devices and how many devices are used by users to access the content on your site. Through this report you can determine which combination of devices is more likely to produce results.

• Device Paths Report

With this report you can see the device path users take when browsing your site. For example, if you look at row 6, 47 users over the course of 555 sessions have visited your site first on a Desktop device, then on a Tablet device and then again on a Desktop Device. The table below is set to "Device Category" dimension.

The other dimensions you can use to view the data in this report include:

1. Device Category and Campaign
2. Device Category and Channel
3. Device Category and Medium
4. Device Category and OS
5. Device Category and Source

• Channels

The channels report shows the performance of cross-device channels in terms of acquisition, behavior and conversion.

Here you also have the ability to choose from different primary dimensions:

1. Default Channel Grouping
2. Source/Medium Path
3. Source Path
4. Medium Path
5. Ad Content
6. Campaign
7. Keyword

• Acquisition Devices

This report shows you whether a user converted on the originating device or on another one. An originating device is considered the first device a user used to interact with your site.

The first column shows you the originating device, the fourth column shows the Revenue from that originating device, and the last column shows the Revenue from other devices.

When looking at this report the most important column you should focus on is the Revenue from originating device, because that data can help you understand the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Custom Reports

This section is mainly for creating your own custom Audience report with custom variables, dimensions and metrics that you choose. This section consists of two custom reports:

• Custom Variables
• User Defined

I will not cover these reports as they are beyond the scope of this beginner friendly mini series. If you are interested in learning more about custom reports you can read this article for Analytics Help.

Benchmarking Reports

In order to populate these reports you must share your data "Anonymously with Google and Others". You can do so by navigating to the Admin Panel, in the Account column, choose Account Settings and check "Benchmarking" as shown below and click "Save"

These reports lets you compare how your site is performing with other companies from the same industry. You can consider at as competitive data analysis. Google Analytics provides you with a wide range of industries, more than 1600 to be precise from which you can choose.

Before you can look at the data in the reports you need to choose an:

1. Industry vertical- here you have to choose the industry which is the closest match to your industry.
2. Country/ Region- here you can either compare on an international scale or by a specific country or region depending on your business and on what geographical level it operates.
3. Size of daily sessions- here you need to provide the average daily sessions your site has which is an indicator of the size of your business.

• Channels Report

This report compares your Default Channels to the benchmarks for each channel for the industry you chose. For example, from the report below you can see that "Direct" is doing well compared to the industry benchmark, but all the other channels are quite below the industry benchmark. This report can help you analyze towards which channels you need to spend resources and put more efforts.

• Location Report

This report compares your Country data to the industry benchmarks for each of the Countries from which you receive traffic. If you are targeting towards a specific region/country through this report you can understand if your efforts are reaching the industry benchmarks.

• Devices Report

This report compares your device data to the industry benchmarks for Desktop, Mobile and Tablet devices. In the example below, you can see that the session data for mobile is underperforming, with this information you understand that there is some issue with the mobile version of your site.

Users Flow Report

This report looks quite different compared to the ones we looked at so far. However, it is an immensely useful report with which you can study and understand the "flow" of users through your site. You can choose from a list dimensions (predefined and custom) to view the flow.

For example, you want to see how users from different countries navigate through your site, you have to choose "Country" as a dimension, and the flow will look like this:

What you see here is a breakdown of the top countries your site receives traffic from and the pages the users from those countries visit. Firtly, you see the starting page for those users (i.e the first page they first landed on when accessing you site), then you have the 1st interaction (this is the first page the user visited after they landed on the starting page), and then you have 2nd interaction, 3rd interaction and so on. Below each interaction you can see the number of sessions for it and the number of users that dropped off on that interaction. The drop-offs in the flow are coloured in red and when you place your cursor on them it will show you the number of drop-offs for the specific page. For pages with a very high drop-off rate you can consider checking if there are some technical issues associated with them.