How to Make a Buyer Persona Using Google Analytics Data [FREE TEMPLATE]

A clear understanding of your customer or target audience is crucial to a successful digital marketing strategy.

Having a good grasp of who you’re marketing to is like having a reliable map to guide you to where you want to go, as opposed to just walking towards a general direction. The more you know about your ideal customer, the more effective your marketing efforts. When you know who you’re marketing to, you’ll know what they want, what to say, how to say it, and why they’ll be responding to your ads.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is the personification of your ideal customer. It is a refinement of the “rough idea” you have of who you want to buy from you—complete with a name, age, likes, dislikes, and personality profile.

To illustrate, let’s say your product/solution costs $1,000 and your shop/business is located in the Central Business District. Additionally, 9 out of 10 of your customers are women. You might therefore deduce that your customer works in a nearby office, and has a job that pays quite well. To have landed such a job, she must have graduated with at least a bachelor’s degree from a top university. Because she worked hard to get into a good school, it’s safe to assume that your ideal must be driven and career-oriented. And from there you can make an informed conjecture of what your customer wants in life, what matters most to her. A thoughtfully prepared buyer persona isn’t just a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal, it is the fulcrum of your digital marketing strategy. With it, you can:

• Write robust, persuasive copy
• Create relevant and helpful content
• Plan accurately targeted ad campaigns
• Build robust marketing automation systems
• Design delightful customer experiences
• Develop seamless user experiences
• Enhance sales processes and performance

How do you make a buyer persona?

There are several tools and templates for making a buyer persona readily available online. In this blog, we will share a free template on creating a buyer persona using your Google Analytics data. Please note that the data is limited to website analytics and needs to be paired with other sources of information. A holistic approach to creating a buyer persona entails market research, in-depth interviews, and customer insights. However, making use of Google Analytics data is a good start. Google Analytics is a great tool to get information about your customers. For example, it provides information about:

Basic Customer Profile:

• Age and Gender
• New Visitors or Returning Visitors?
• Location

Technology & Behaviour:

• Preferred Device (Mobile Vs Desktop)
• Mobile Device Model (iPhone Vs Android Users)
• Preferred Channel (e.g. Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search, Social)
• Preferred Social Network (e.g. Facebook, Instagram)
• Favourite Pages: (Homepage, product URLs)
• Top Interests (business services education)

How to access the Google Analytics Website Key

Audience Persona Template from Hackalogy

Step 1: Please log in to your Google Analytics (GA3) account

Step 2: Visit Google Data Studio and make sure it’s connected to the account that has access to your (GA3) account. Click the button below to access the template.

Step 3. Please replace the “Default Data” with your Google Analytics data.

We set the Google Analytics demo account as the source of data on this template. To view your data, please add your Google Analytics account.

Metrics Definition:

• Users: People who engage with your site or app over a given date range.
• Pageviews: This is the number of times users view a page that has the Google Analytics tracking code embedded. It’s a count of viewed pages and not individual visitors
• New Vs Returning Visitors: New visitors are users that have not visited your site before. Returning visitors will have made at least one visit to at least one page on your site previously.
• Direct Traffic: Users who are already familiar with you or your organisation and typed your domain name directly into the browser.
• Email: Traffic that is acquired from email or email marketing.
• Organic Search: Users who entered a keyword into a major search engine that drove organic traffic to your webs
• Paid Traffic: Traffic acquired from utilising paid ad platforms like Google AdWords, Bing, and Facebook ads
• Social: Traffic that is acquired from social media platforms.
• Referral: Traffic that comes to the site from another site other than social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• Other: Sources of traffic that Google has a hard time identifying and for some reason or another deems it as “Other” traffic.

We hope you are able to get better customer insights using our Website Key Audience Persona Template.

We are looking forward to hearing from you on how Google Analytics data helps you understand your customer better. Please don’t forget to share the template with your colleagues and team members.

One last thing before you leave this blog, make sure to download our 13-step Google Analytics (GA3) audit checklist to help you accurately track your conversion and sales.