We all like to know a little about who we’re speaking to, buying from, working with. It helps us to understand that individual, their needs, and expectations. Demographics matter. They help us to relate.

And that doesn’t change when you go online. It’s just as important to get to know who’s visiting your site, who’s interested in your product or service.

How much do you spend getting to know your users? Knowing your market demographic means you can optimise your site to your users’ needs. You can tailor the user journey to suit that particular community. You can target that specific group with ads.

A little information really does go a long way when it comes to audience targeting.  Here’s a quick Net Vis guide to the tools freely available to help you get to know your user demographics and optimise your ads.

Where can I find out about my user demographic?

Just as with face-to-face interactions, getting to know your online users’ takes a little time, a bit of digging, and a smattering of persistence.

Analytics and Online Tracking are your first port of call. Tools such as Google Analytics allow you to analyse your website data.  To see your demographics, you’ll need to link your site to a GA4 account – or you can check your demographics in Google Ads if you’re using them. This data will tell you about the age, gender, location, and interests of your online audience. Is it what you expected? If it isn’t, you need to think about how that affects your marketing strategy.

Enabling tracking on websites lets you gather even more user data, drilling down further into what you’ve already discovered and helping you to tailor content and personalise the user experience.  A GA4 linked account will give you the top-level data on this. If you’re a Net Vis client already, we’ll also be doing some specific tracking to look at button clicks etc, per demographic for you. 

Last but not least, don’t forget your social media insights. Social Media platforms often provide audience insights and demographic data for business accounts. They’re another window into the behaviour and engagement of your users.

What else can I do once I know my user demographic?

When you’re happy you’ve got a good snapshot of your audience and it’s needs, then you can increase your visibility further by leveraging platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. (We know a company that’s pretty sharp on that if you’re interested…)

Ads enable you to proactively target your specific user demographic (rather than waiting for them to come to you). You can also use the demographic data from your ad interactions to help make data-based decisions for an even more targeted and personalised approach.

It’s really worth plundering all these resources for information on your audience. We’ve had clients who thought they had female audiences in the north of England, when in fact our research showed they had mostly male buyers in the southeast. If you know who your audience are, and where to find them, then you’re able to focus your marketing resource on the right place, rather than spreading yourself too thin trying to be all things to all people.

Tell me more about ads and what I need to do…

Ok, if you insist!

Google Ads:

Leverage Google’s audience targeting features to refine the reach of your campaign. Google lets you define specific demographic criteria when you set up your ads (age, gender, parental status, etc.,) Google also provides Audience Insights, allowing you to explore demographic data based on user interests and behaviours. Add to this the power of Google Analytics, as we’ve already mentioned, and you’ve got a pretty great arsenal of tools to pin down that user info.

Facebook Ads:

Facebook Ads also have some powerful demographic targeting capabilities. It allows you to define the age ranges, gender, locations, and interests of your desired audience. Facebook also has Audience Insights, which will show you the demographic data and interests of your users. There’s also Page Insights which will break down the demographics of your followers too.  Just like Google Ads, there’s an opportunity to optimise your ad campaigns based on demographics, ensuring your ads reach specific audience segments.

How about an example? Let’s say a Financial Services provider comes to Net Vis, asking if we can help them promote retirement planning services to people approaching retirement age.

Once we’ve done our initial analytics and tracking and checked the site has some well-placed landing pages we move onto ads.

In this case we’d suggest:

Google Ads: We would target users aged 50-65, as this demographic is more likely to be interested in retirement planning. We’d further narrow that focus to users who have shown an interest in personal finance, investment, or retirement-related topics. What we’d call a captive audience. They’re already looking, so we need to put our product under their noses.

Facebook Ads: Again, we focus on users aged 50-65 who have shown interest in finance, investment, or retirement planning. Then we’d further narrow down the audience by including criteria such as income level or job title to target individuals who are more likely to have significant retirement savings.

The bottom line:

Know your users. Collecting and analysing your data is the best way to gain a better understanding of your target market. The more you know your customers, the better you can engage them. The better you engage them, the more successful your business will be.

We’ll say it one more time, just to make sure: Always, always check your user data!

And if you’re not feeling too confident about poking around in the data and doing your own analysis – then let us help. This is our bread and butter. We know user data inside out and back to front.

We can provide you with a user analysis report to clearly lay out your user demographic, from age and gender through to which days of the week (and even times of day) are the best converters on your site. And if you let our grey hair and young flair loose on your ads, we’ll optimise them for you, increasing budget at peak times and reviewing and removing poorly performing demographics, making those ads visible to the right people, at the right time.

Go on, give us a call. Let’s see what we can do for your visibility.