Use Google Analytics to Align Your Ecom Store’s Messaging with Your True Audience

Brad Owens | Nov 03, 2021

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Hey, this is Brad with BGS here.

Have you ever checked to see if your homepage main image banner actually aligns with the real traffic that’s coming into your site?

If you haven’t, there’s a chance that there could be a disconnect between your website visitors and your UVP banner. So, I’m going to show you how you can use Google Analytics to quickly check this and really make sure that your UVPs, product, and site copy really align with your true visitors.

So, I’m on Google Analytics, on the homepage. And the first thing I want to do is see who’s coming in, and I want to get a breakdown on gender and age. To do that, you go down here to “Audience.” And then I’m gonna go down to where it says “Demographics.” 

If I click on “Overview,” it’s gonna break it down by age and gender. And for this site, I have within 30 days, but you can adjust that if you need to, and you probably do want to make it a little longer. But I can see my two main age groups: 25 to 34 and 35 to 44. 

I want to make sure that my imagery and my copy throughout my site resonates with that age range. And also, this is a pretty big difference right here: If I look at gender, I see that 69% of my website visitors are male, and then 30.9, so 31%, are female. 

Again, I want to make sure that, for the most part, that resonates with males more so than females, since majority males come into my site. Now, this is something that happened to me with my retail store and my associated website back in the day when I had a pretty even split as far as male and female with my customer base for my retail store. I just assumed that my website would be the same because it’s the same products, so it should be the same gender split. Well, no. When I looked at Google Analytics, there was this big gender gap, and it was more male than female. And what I was doing was, I would occasionally have main image banners on my homepage that featured female avatars or female product lines, like dresses, or anime, which have more of a female customer base. So, there’s a disconnect right there that I didn’t realize I had until I looked at Google Analytics.

But specifically, if you’re looking at the main image banner, it’s not necessarily the overall website visitors, it’s the people that visit your homepage. So, I could have a male-dominated bestseller that a ton of people are landing on, but they may never really go to my homepage, so I may actually have more female visitors on my homepage than that main landing page that I have. OK? So that’s something you also want to check out, and if you see that you have a disparity, see if it’s the same on your homepage along with your overall website.

Real quick, before we do that, another thing that you probably don’t need to check because it’s going to be similar, but go ahead and check it because this can be eye opening as well. If we go down to where it says “Mobile,” and then “Overview,” it gives you the breakdown between mobile, desktop, and tablet. Now, in revenue optimization terms, desktop and tablet are the same because it’s a very similar user experience. So, in this case again, almost 90% of my traffic overall to my website are people that are using mobile; only 10% desktop and tablet.

This is huge.

You need to make sure that your main image banner is mobile-optimized because, most likely, the majority of your traffic is probably going to be mobile. Some themes will let you have two separate main image banners, and if it allows that, that’s the best thing to do. Have one for desktop that’s gonna be your standard rectangular banner, but then have a square banner that is totally optimized, 100%, for mobile. The worst thing is if you have a main image banner everyone’s coming in on mobile, and you might have a headline or bullet points that are not legible because they’re so tiny on mobile, because it’s not optimized. Your big rectangle is just a small thin rectangle on the phone, and they really have to stretch it and expand it out to be able to read it, which is not a good user experience. So again, remember mobile.

Now, let’s look and see what the breakdown is specifically for my homepage. And for that, I’m going to go down to where it says “Behavior,” right below “Acquisition.” So, I go to “Behavior,” then “Site Content.” And then I can either go to the “Landing Pages” or “All Pages.” In this example, I’m going to do “All Pages” because they could come in on my landing page and still go to my homepage. So, I want to see just everyone that’s landed on my homepage, not necessarily those that went straight to my homepage as the first page on my site. I’m going to go to “All pages,” and then down here, you have the homepage, which is just going to be a slash with nothing else, that’s your homepage. I click that, and it’s going to give me all this information about the bounce rate, average time on the page, things like that. But I want to look at the gender breakdown. So, I’ll get a secondary dimension—it’s a little dropdown—and then if I just type in the first three letters, “gen” (because I’m looking for gender), there’s gender. I click on that, and now it’s going to give me a total gender breakdown on my page, and it shows that males on my homepage are 83.5% and then 16.44% are female. So, if I have a main image banner that’s like female avatars, or dresses, or feminine colors, that’s probably a big disconnect to the 83.5% of men that are coming to my site.

OK, so that’s how you can use Google Analytics. There are a ton of other things you can do. You can look at the geographic region they’re coming from, you can actually look at their interests (that can help you with the interest with your advertising and your marketing), so just a lot of information is available in these behavior, audience, and demographic reports. So, make sure you use that to really fine-tune your UVP, the imagery on your site, and the description and copy on your product pages and on your site overall.

That’s it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did like it, make sure you like, share, comment (we love to hear your comments!), and also subscribe to our YouTube channel. And again, as always, if you would like assistance with building, growing, or scaling your ecommerce business, make sure you go to workwithbgs.com and we can help you build, grow, and scale. OK, that’s it this time, and I’ll see you next week!