How to Build Google Analytics User Personas & Profiles
Building a Google Analytics Personas or Customer Profile is an essential practice that all marketers should use. This profile can be quickly created using Google Analytics and Excel. However, it must be said that there are issues with data collected from Google Analytics such as this data is just a sample. However, the sample size is large enough to be significant and insightful. For a persona, it does a sufficient job of bringing in motivation. This would need to be supplemented with additional data. So, I am keeping a profile and persona slightly separate. Check out the Instant Discount for Complete Digital Marketing and Analytics Course no code needed.
This dashboard was compiled by downloading the GA data to Excel and manipulated using Pivot Tables and Chart. So, we can analyze this data and put together a profile.
Google Analytics Profile
Overall Profile Characteristics:
Male aged 25 to 34 Technophile who is interested in career prospects. His preferred social networks are Reddit and Facebook. Other interests are social media, television shows, and web analytics. This user profile is interested in keywords and content such as Tableau, Analytics, and Tag Manager.
Finding User Interests
This profile was compiled using the affinity category in the interest section of the audience section. You can add a secondary dimension for age, gender or landing page. Affinity categories are up-funnel in the awareness and interest stages. This will definitely help to give us a generalization of our audience. Here is a quick guide to getting to this report if you are unsure.
- Open Google Analytics.
- Navigate to Audience
- Choose Affinity Category
- In the report window, change secondary dimension to age, gender or landing page.
What their goals?
Using the In-market report in Google Analytics you can find out what are the user’s desired actions and consumer behavior. The In-Market segment is built around consumer behavior. Therefore, we can use this to define the down funnel traffic which is more motivated. Google collects this data using cookies from DoubleClick Advertising.
What content and types of keywords are they using?
To find out what keywords and content they are using you can use the landing page report. Of course, finding out organic keywords would have to be estimated using reverse engineering. For example, your landing pages are optimized for specific keywords. You can then estimate the types of keywords used. If you are looking at Adwords traffic, you can retrieve the exact keywords used.You can create a pivot chart with Landing pages and create a second dimension with a dimension to get the segment you are after.
User Profile vs Personas
By definition, a persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Web analytics to a large degree can help you achieve this. However, this kind of data is mostly quantitative and demographics. It’s important that survey data is brought into the picture to help shape a customer persona. This level of detail will help to deepen the marketer’s understanding of the buyer’s motivation, mentality, and desires. You can try many surveys such as Hotjar or Qualroo.
