characteristics about your users.

This includes information about their geographic location or the type of device they use to

access your site. Other reports in the Audience section help you understand your users' behavior

over multiple visits to your site, like how often they visit and how much time elapses

between visits.

In this lesson we'll review:

How to learn about user behavior with the Frequency and Recency reports

How to access geographic data How to view data about mobile traffic to your

site How to access data about your custom dimensions

The Audience reports are designed to provide insight into the characteristics of your users,

what devices they use to visit you, and how loyal and engaged they are with your business.

Let's start by taking a look at one of the most commonly used reports in Google Analytics

-- the Locations report.

The Locations report lets you see where visits originate by Continent, Sub Continent, Country,

Region, Metro Area or City. For web visitors, this location information is derived from

mapping IP addresses to geographic locations.

The heat map can be adjusted to display any metric geographically. For example, switching

the map to show the metric % New Visits allows you to quickly identify mature versus emerging

markets for your business. Having this information can help you decide whether to focus more

on building awareness or instead on building customer loyalty in different locations.

The data table is useful for doing more detailed analyses.

For example, if you're looking to expand your business, you may want to identify the areas

from which you receive little traffic, but have seen that users who do come are likely

to be good customers. These regions could represent untapped markets where advertising

could help build more awareness and opportunity for your business.

Using the comparison view in the data table, you can add in a metric like "average value"

to see which of your least traffic generating regions perform above average.

You could also use the locations report to identify the regions where you already have

a large audience, but lower than average performance. For example, if certain regions have a higher

than average bounce rate, your advertising messaging, website or application may need

to be optimized to appeal more to the given audience. This could mean translating your

ads and site to the local language or adding more geographically relevant content to your

site. Let's move on to the Behavior reports in the

Audience section.

The first report in the Behavior section is the New vs Returning report. It gives you

a quick look at the ratio of your first time and repeat visitors. You can compare this

ratio for different time periods to see how your audience loyalty may be shifting.

You can also see the relative impact of new vs returning visitors by viewing the Ecommerce

metrics in this report. As you can see here, Returning visitors not only make purchases

more often, but also tend to spend more per purchase. Knowing this behavior, you might

decide to develop a customer loyalty program or remarketing strategy that helps grow your

returning customer base. The Frequency report lets you see how frequently

visitors return to your site within a time frame -- once, twice, or even more.

If visitors come once but don't return, you might infer that you're marketing your site

to the wrong audience, or that your site content and design are not sufficiently engaging or

easily navigable.

The Recency report shows how many days go by before users return to your site -- do

they tend to visit once a week or just once a month?

This information can especially be useful if you are a publisher or maintain a blog

on your site. Let's say you currently offer new content on your site on a daily basis,

but see from the Recency report that customers only tend to visit once a week. Knowing this

behavior, you might decide to develop a new email subscription option for your site or

other notification system to remind users to visit your fresh content when it's created.

Next, the Engagement report lets you see how much time people spend on your site in increments

of seconds, and how many pages they view. Note that single-page visits are assigned

to the 0-10 visit-duration.

Depending on the nature of your site, your target duration for a visit will vary. For

example, if you have a blog or news site, you're probably hoping visitors spend some

time there to carefully read through the content. On the other hand, if the purpose of your

site is to help people quickly troubleshoot a technical problem but users are spending

a lot of time on the site, you might conclude that your instructions are unnecessarily complicated.

As with visit duration, your goals for page depth can vary depending on the nature of

your site. For example, if you're running a website for a college in addition to finding

information about the admissions process, you want visitors to look at many pages of

your site in order to learn about the background of the school, understand the different departments

and faculties, and learn about available social activities. On the other hand, if the purpose

of your site is to provide contact information for store locations, you may want your visitors

to have to view only one or two pages before they find the information they need.

Now, let's move on to the Technology and Mobile reports.

Understanding the technologies visitors use to reach and consume your site lets you fine

tune current versions, and plan upcoming implementations. You want to be sure your website is fully

functional on your users devices.

You can use the Browser and Operating systems report to quickly identify whether users may

be having issues using your site in some browsers. For example, if your site has a comparatively

high bounce rate on a mobile browser, you may need to create a mobile optimized version

of your website with streamlined content and simpler navigation, or you may need to fix

a technical issue your users are experiencing.

You also want to understand the extent to which visitors are migrating away from desktop

to mobile browsers to plan your development accordingly.

You can use the mobile overview report to see a breakdown of visitors by whether they

visit using smartphones, tablets or desktop devices. Again, you can compare this breakdown

between different date ranges to see how quickly mobile usage of your site has changed over

time.

The Mobile Devices report lets you see additional details about the devices your visitors use,

including the mobile device name, brand, service provider, input selector, operating system,

and other dimensions like screen resolution.

These reports can give your developers and designers direction on how to create a mobile

optimized experience to best suit your users. Finally, with some help from your development

team to implement additional code, you can use Custom Dimensions to collect and analyze

data that Google Analytics doesn't automatically track, like demographic data.

For example, you might have a form on your website where visitors can indicate which

industry they work in. In this case, you can use a custom dimension to capture your users'

selections. Subsequent visits will remain classified under the segment a user selected

so that you are able to analyze how users in different industries engage with your site.

Custom dimensions appear as primary dimensions in Custom reports, rather than appearing directly

in the Audience report section, but they are still powerful tools for understanding your

audience better.

Note that you must be using the newest version of the Google Analytics tracking code to implement

Custom Dimensions.

Check out the resources in this lesson for more information about using Custom Dimensions

for your website or mobile application and for additional information on using the Audience

reports.