Do you pay attention to your customer demographics via your website’s traffic? If not, you could be missing out on extremely valuable free marketing information.

This information can be used to increase your sales and convert your visitors into customers.

Regardless of what your business does within the marketplace, understanding your customers forms a big slice of the marketing pie. Customer demographics will help you to understand their wants and needs. In turn, this will help you to:

  • Refine and adjust your products and services to better suit your target market
  • Establish a loyalty base that will lead to ongoing customer relationships
  • Boost overall profitability by increasing your sales and hot leads
  • Attract new customers while keeping your costs low

With such significant benefits, the value of mining your website traffic for information is clear!

Each visitor has their own wants and needs and everything can be recorded and analysed to discover customer demographics information that can then support your business’s marketing decisions. There is a lot of diversity in marketing to your different customer demographics.

To guide you through the process of identifying the customer demographics information from your website traffic, here are five simple questions in the good old “who, what, when, where and why” format.

Who are your website visitors?

What you really want to identify in regard to “who” your website visitors are is their age and gender. With this information, you can make informed decisions about the content you decide to place on your website.

As an example, let’s say you had a website that published book reviews, and you discovered that a large percentage of your monthly website visitors were at least 65 and over. You could use that information to make assumptions about your customer demographics. This could result in changes being made to your website to improve the accessibility of content for people who may be hearing or vision impaired, or simply less technologically savvy, resulting in better user inclusion and retention.

From the information captured by our CSQD website we know that, for the month of June, the majority of our visitors were aged between 25 and 34. So, we use this information to help us make decisions about content topics to create and share for the upcoming month.

CSQD website visitor age

What are your website visitors interested in?

Discovering what your website visitors are interested in is another important facet of identifying your customer demographics. It is no secret that Google keeps an eye on your online activity and you can use this to your advantage. When a visitor reaches your website, they bring with them a whole host of data about their interests and past activity, all of which can be recorded.

Let’s return to the book review website example for a moment. If data captured indicated visitors were highly interested in celebrities & entertainment news then you could focus on reviewing more autobiographical books.

With the data we’ve captured, we know that the majority of our 25-34 aged visitors were interested in business services and/or advertising & marketing services. This helps us to narrow down new content ideas.

When do your website visitors visit your site?

Understanding when your visitors are actually visiting your website can enable you to hone your marketing strategies. If you monitor the times of day that visitors tend to hit your website, you’ll notice trends. Pay attention to those popular times and harness them in your other marketing strategies, such as social media or email marketing, to schedule posts or send content during the most active times of the day.

For us, 3pm each day is when our customer demographic group is consistently the most active.

Where are your website visitors coming from?

Where your visitors are coming (visitor location) from can help you to identify if your existing marketing strategies are working, and whether or not you are actually attracting the right visitors in the first place.

To give you an example, if you were to run an advertisement in your local newspaper, you would be able to track the success of the advertisement by monitoring the location of your website visitors to see if there is an increase in traffic from the local area.

However, just as important as geographical information is the digitally referred traffic source. By this we mean where your visitors were before they landed on your website and what got them there. Common examples include Google search, social media, paid advertising and direct traffic (people who enter your website URL in directly).

At CSQD, we know that from our 25-34 customer demographic group most of these visitors are coming from the Gold Coast, and that they find us through Google search.

Why are your website visitors visiting your website?

To answer this, you combine all of the answers from the above four questions. To comprehend why your visitors are visiting your website is to understand your customer demographics. Once you have gathered the answers to the questions above, you can create a customer demographics profile that will offer you a snapshot of who your customers actually are. Reviewing this customer profile on a regular basis will allow you to monitor any changes in your customer demographics which will allow continual refinement and improvement of your business and website.

Bonus question: How do I track my website visitor demographics?

The answer is with Google Analytics. This is Google’s free tool that allows website owners to record and track a plethora of information and analytical data from website visitors. Once Google Analytics is set up and installed on your website, all of the questions above can be answered quickly and easily using tools provided by Analytics.