Audiences in Analytics are users that you group together based on any combination of attributes that is meaningful to your business.
An audience might be simply current shoppers (include users who have > 0 product views; exclude users who have > 0 purchases).
Or you might need a more detailed definition that identifies shoppers who viewed the detail page for Product A, and then within 3 sessions or 7 days returned to purchase the product.
You can create broad definitions like all users who at any time purchased a product, or all users who have purchased within the last 12 months but not during the last 2.
Learn more about creating audiences.
Once you define an audience, you can:
- Activate that audience on platforms like Google Ads and Display & Video 360 so you can focus your marketing efforts on those users
- Apply the audience to your Analytics reports to explore their behavior in response to your marketing. You can use the audience as a secondary dimension in reports, and as a dimension in segments, custom reports, and custom funnels.
This article focuses on analyzing the audience data with the Audiences report.
In this article:Prerequisites
To see data in the Audiences report, you first need to:
- Enable Demographics and Interests
- Create audiences in Analytics
- Publish those audiences to Analytics (add Analytics as a destination for those audiences)
Data for an audience is available in reports starting from the date you publish the audience to Analytics. Data before that date is not available.
You can publish audiences to Analytics as you create them, and you can publish existing audiences to Analytics.
See Audiences data
- Sign in to Google Analytics.
- Navigate to your view.
- Open Reports.
- Select Audience > Audiences.
About the data
The report covers audiences you create and publish to the Google Analytics destination.
Data for the current day is not available in this report.
Limits
At any one time, you can have a maximum of 50 audiences published to an Analytics account, and a maximum of 20 published to any single property within that account.
Audiences that are based on custom dimensions that use query-time import mode are not supported. Audience data is evaluated at processing time.
Audiences are available only in the view in which you create them.
What the metrics tell you
Acquisition
The Acquisition metrics let you know the volume of users an audience is sending you (Users), and how well the audience works to get you potential new business (% New Users, New Users).Behavior
The Behavior metrics let you know how well your site engages users, whether they’re leaving after viewing only a single page (Bounce Rate), whether they’re viewing multiple pages (Pages / Session), and whether they’re spending the amount of time engaging with your content that you’d like.
Conversions
The Conversions metrics let you know whether users are completing transactions and goals, and generating revenue at the rate you want.
How to respond
If a particular audience is performing well in terms of delivering users who engage and convert, you can:
- Devote more of your marketing budget to bidding on ads for those users
- Expand the number of sites on which you bid for ads shown to those users
- Expand the hours through the day when you bid on ads shown to those users
If an audience is performing poorly overall, you can scale back the budget you devote to it, or drop it altogether from your marketing.
If an audience is delivering users in reasonable numbers but they’re not converting, there could be a disconnect between the ads they see and your content, or it could point to design or technical issues that prevent them from converting.
On the other hand, if an audience is delivering fewer users than you’d like but those users are converting, then you can use that audience as the basis for developing lookalike audiences and expanding your marketing to those users.
