Taking a few minutes to look at visitor segmentation in Google Analytics can help you tailor your website more to your visitors.

In this article I’ll focus on two main areas; location and language and explain how this data can be used.

Location

Log in to your analytics account and go to: Audience > Demographics > Location

Being able to see what countries people are visiting your website from is useful for a number of reasons;

• Are you getting traffic from countries you don’t cover or ship products to?

For example, if you run a company selling shoes and only deliver to the UK, you’d expect the majority of your traffic to be UK based. If this isn’t reflected in your data, and say you get most visits from the USA, you may want to consider shipping there too.

• Is your link building campaign generating lots of meaningless traffic?

A lot of small business owners get fixated with traffic and how many visitors they’re attracting. If you’ve employed an overseas link building company to work on your behalf, you may find you’re getting lots of clicks through to your site where people are leaving almost immediately.

• Identify cities your website is getting the most visitors from

As well as getting information on different countries visitors arrive from, you can also drill down into a city by city level.

This can be great if you’ve delivered leaflets to a certain city for example, and want to see how many people visited your website as a result.

Language

Go to: Audience > Demographics > Language

You can also use Google Analytics to find out the language spoken by your website visitors. This could be British English, American English, French, German, Spanish or something else.

You can use this data in conjunction with the location information to work out whether or not it might be worthwhile having your website translated into another language.

If you liked this article you may also want to read: New vs. returning visitors in Google Analytics

Image Credit: monique72

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 11:06 am and is filed under Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.