Creating Buyer Personas Using Google Analytics

Do you really know your customer? Why did they purchase or seek services from you? Do you have any hard data to support this?

Most of you can make an assumption about who your customer is based on location and buying habits. While this information is helpful, it’s only a very small piece of the puzzle.

Let’s take a closer look at why your existing customers chose you and what brought them to your website in the first place. In order to do this, you must get to know your customers better and start creating “buyer personas”. This will help you better understand your customers, how they search, their needs, the type of information or products they are looking for, and more.

Let’s get started!

Creating Buyer Personas for Your Small Business

First off, what is a “buyer’s persona”. Well basically, a buyer’s persona is a detailed, characteristic sheet of a specific type of customer. You want to create an individual persona for each type of customer in your target audience. Spend some time thinking about who makes up your audience. Create as many personas as you want, but you should at least have around 3-7 unique buyer personas. This characteristic list is meant to help you attract and recognize qualified leads for your small business, and who to stay away from as well (known as a negative buyer’s persona).

The more information you provide in your buyer’s persona(s), the better you’ll be able to attract the right type of customers!

You want to include information like:

– Gender

– Age

– Family status

– Average income

– Geographical location

– Common needs/ problems etc.

This type of information may seem personal, and asking for it may seem intrusive, but knowing this type of information really will help build your customer relationships down the road.

Afterall, knowing why your customers choose to do business with you and what they’re unique needs are will allow you to better serve them.

There are two main ways you can collect this type of information. One way is to simply ask your existing customers to provide you with the information you need through a survey, a questionnaire, or in a meeting. Another method would be to use Google Analytics to help you gather some of this information yourself. However, I would encourage you to use both methods and not rely solely on one or the other. The more information you have that can be corroborated, the more accurate your buyer’s persona will be.

Using Analytics to Create Buyer Personas

Google Analytics offers you a wealth of information about your website and your website visitors too. If you’re not yet familiar with how Analytics operates (and even if you have someone else managing your account for you) I would encourage you to spend a few minutes in it. There are some pretty cool reports provided in Google Analytics that can help you out with your business projections, marketing and sales decisions, and customer relationship plans.

With that said, let me introduce you to the ‘Audience” tab in Google Analytics. You can find it on your left hand side navigation of the main Analytics page. If you click on the “Audience” tab, you’ll see a long list of reports appear in a drop down menu. I want to draw your attention to a few specific reports: “Demographics”, “Geo”, “Technology”, and “Mobile”. These reports are gold mines of quality information you can use while creating buyer personas for your business.

Take some time to browse through each report I mentioned above and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The reports and charts they provide are pretty self-explanatory, but I will explain them briefly here too.

Demographics: Breaks down the genders and popular age ranges of your website visitors

Geo: Breaks down the geographical locations where you’re receiving the most web traffic from

Technology: Breaks down what server types your web visitors are using

Mobile: Breaks down what device type are most popular to search your website (desktop, tablet, or mobile)

Once you start to review these metrics from your website, you may find your target audience is completely different than what you thought. The information provided in these reports will help you better conceptualize who your target audience is, where they are, and how they search your website. This information is essential in formulating successful marketing campaigns and website optimization techniques as well.

In Conclusion

After you’ve put all these details together, you’ll find that it will be pretty easy to get started creating your first set of buyer personas. Using Google Analytics to help you create buyer personas for your small business will give you concrete and provable data you can rely on. Take a look at the article above to learn what a buyer’s persona is and how you can get started using Analytics to create them today!