Is Your Ideal Customer Visiting Your Website? Conduct an Analysis with Google Analytics

Is your ideal customer visiting your website? And how can you attract more of those people to your site?

For small business marketers and solopreneurs, identifying and understanding your ideal audience is vital. But it seems soo hard. 

Thankfully Google Analytics 4 will help you discover if the right people are visiting and engaging with your site. 

In this guide, I’ll show you how to use Google Analytics for ideal customer website analysis. 

We’ll delve into how you can identify your target audience amongst your website visitors. 

We’ll analyse their behaviour, and I’ll show you how to make smart marketing decisions based on what you discover. 

Prefer a video tutorial? I made a video for you.

Let’s dive in and make sure you’re attracting the customers that matter most.

Understanding Your Audience: Key Metrics to Track

Website Visitor Demographics

The first step in ideal customer website analysis is understanding the demographics of your website visitors.

To do this we start with the ‘User Attributes’ report in the reports section.

Focus on the ‘Demographic Details’ report.

Although you can break down your audience by attributes like ‘Interests’, ‘Gender’ and ‘Age’, Google doesn’t have this information on everyone who visits your site. 

The most accurate breakdowns are by ‘Country’ and ‘Language’.

In the ‘Demographic Details’ report, you can choose your key dimension by clicking the dropdown menu next to ‘Country’. 

In this example, I’m sticking with ‘Country’.

Here you can see the countries that drive the most visitors. But visits aren’t the most important metric.

To see the most valuable visits you can scroll across to ‘Revenue’, this is particularly helpful for e-commerce sites. 

Or for businesses that don’t sell directly through your website, ‘Key events’. Key events (previously called Conversions) refer to the actions you want people to take on your site.

You tell Google what these actions are and it will record when they are triggered in analytics.

For a service business, this could be someone joining your email list, downloading a brochure or filling in a quotation form.

What to look for

Which countries deliver the most revenue, the most key events, and the highest key event rate?

Any surprises there? Sometimes your ideal customer isn’t who you thought they were.

Diving Deeper: Analysing Audience Behavior

Device Type Analysis

What devices do your best customers use when they visit your website? Is it desktop? Mobile? Table? When you know the answer you can optimise their experience on your site.  

So far we’ve established which country your best customers reside in. Let’s add a second layer of information; the type of device they use to access and navigate your website.

We can do this by adding a ‘Secondary Dimension’. This lets you break down your audience further.

Click on the ‘+’ next to ‘Country’.

Start typing ‘Device’ into the search bar.

Choose ‘Device Category’ from the dropdown menu.

This will show you whether visitors use desktop, mobile, or tablet when they visit your site.

What to look for

Does one device type have a significantly lower Key Event rate? If so you should test the website yourself to discover what the issue might be.

You can also use a tool like Microsoft Clarity to view web sessions on mobile to see how real people are engaging with your site on different devices

Customising Your Reports: Customer Segmentation in Google Analytics 4

Setting Up Comparisons

Now you know who your most valuable website visitors are, you can use that information to analyse how they use your website.

To do that we’re going to use comparisons. You need admin access to create comparisons.

Go to your admin panel.

Select ‘Comparisons’ 

Now build your comparison based on the ideal customer you’ve discovered using the demographic report.

In the example below I’ve chosen: 

‘Country’ for my Dimension

‘Exactly Matches’ as my Match Type

‘Ireland’ as my value.

Next I’ll add a Device Category by clicking ‘Add new condition’

Here I’ll add

‘Device Category’ as my Dimension

‘Exactly Matches’ as my Match Type

‘desktop’ as my my value.

That means my segment includes visitors from Ireland who visit from a desktop device.

Next, give your segment a name and save. I’ve called mine ‘Ideal customers’

You can now use this segment to compare these visitors to other website visitors and to filter your standard reports to just these people.

Now you have your segment set up it’s time to apply it to your reporting.

Optimising Your Strategy: Detailed Reporting

Using Standard Reports To Analyse Your Ideal Customer Behaviour

Standard reports in Google Analytics 4 allow you to see exactly where your ideal customers are coming from and what content they engage with the most.

Let’s apply your new comparison to these reports to find out more about how your ideal customer uses your site.

We’ll start with the ‘User Acquisition’ report.

At the top of the report click on the ‘Edit Comparisons’ icon

Click the checkbox next to the new comparison you created and ‘Apply’

Now your report will show you two lines of metrics, those generated by ‘All users’ to your website and those generated by the comparison you created.

Click and ‘x’ ‘All users’ at the top of the report to filter it to just the behaviour of your ideal customers.

Below we can see the best channel for revenue from ideal customers is Organic Search. We also see that Organic Social drives the highest key event rate.

You can follow this process for all standard reports.

Alongside the ‘User acquisition’ report, I find the ‘Landing Page’ and ‘Pages and Screens’ reports helpful.

What to look for

Use this filter to see which marketing channels and landing pages drive the highest key event rate, and revenue.

This can help you focus on the ones that are driving more of your ideal customers.

Use the ‘pages and screens’ report to find out which website content attracts your ideal customers.

By following these steps, you can use Google Analytics 4 to determine if your ideal customer is engaging with your website and more importantly converting into customers. 

Once you’ve identified the right people you can get insights on the right marketing channels to use to attract them, what content they find most engaging and which offers entice them to become customers. 

It takes the pain out of creating customer profiles and helps you to find exactly the right people to target, with exactly the right offers, exactly the right content, on exactly the right marketing channels.

Next read: Are people clicking the home button on your website