New GA Reports: Visitor Demographics & Interests, Site Speed Suggestions

Google Analytics continues to roll out improvements to the data you can get about your Web site visitors. Of these updates there are two great new reporting features you need to check out.

1. Demographics and Interests Reporting

Google has made profiling your online customers easier than ever with the addition of the new Audience reports within Google Analytics. The latest edition to these reports is the Demographics and Interests reporting. The Demographics category allows you to analyze how people of different ages and genders respond to your site. The Interests reporting allows you to target those visitors even further by giving you a glimpse of what they like and may have in common with one another.

For example, if your site sold women's purses you could prove through Google Analytics that music loving women in their 30s are more likely to purchase a green Hermes bag than 40 year old male sports enthusiasts. Perhaps that contest giving away tickets to the next Broncos game should be swapped out for tickets to Michael Buble.

Regardless of your industry, the more you understand your customers the better you can target them with marketing and site changes. The new reporting categories are still being rolled out; to see if you're included in the first wave just look for the Demographics and Interests options within the menu of the Audience section of your analytics profile. If you see them as options you'll just need to make a small change to your tracking code and enable the reporting within Analytics. Full instructions can be found here.

2. Speed Suggestions

As you may already know, Google's announcement that <...