Using Google Analytics to Find My Key Audience

One big part about blogging is building an audience. There are several ways to do this, but the question remains, how do you know if you’re actually catering to the right audience?

You could do a reader survey, but if you don’t have many come-back readers, that may not get you much to work with. This was my problem (and still is to some point), but the past few months, I’ve been using google analytics to find my key audience, and slowly, I’m building this up.
My only problem is that my key audience is mostly college students and I’m about to graduate, go figure. But today, I want to talk about how I’ve found my key audience, using google analytics.
Now, I’m not going to set it up for you, there’s plenty of tutorials to do that, but finding things on GA can be hard.
Do you know how to find your key audience using Google Analytics? Share on X
When you log in to your Google Analytics dashboard, you’re going to want to focus on the “Behavior” tab. There’s two specific pages I use to find out my most popular posts, and to see where people are dropping off.
In the “behavior” tab, click on “Overview” and you’ll see your page stats for the last 30 days. If you scroll down, you’ll find a list of the ten most viewed pages.
As you can see, all of these things have one thing in common: college! College is hard, people want advice and help. This was what first tipped me off that I had an audience that was looking for more articles, and if you’ve been around Ginger & Co. for a while, you’ve probably noticed I’ve been writing more college based articles in the past few months.
The other feature I’ve recently found is the Behavior Flow. This is a cool map that shows you where you lose people. One thing that strikes me is the number of drop-offs I have on my 404 page. I had a custom one set up that used to keep people on, but looking at this, I’m wondering it if it works now. Probably not.

The flow chart is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s another way to see what people are looking at. If you have multiple posts in the same category that are all popular, it’s easy to see what people want.
Finding your key audience, the one that is showing up, is important to the growth of your blog. If you write the right blog posts, you’re doing a service to them, and you want them to keep coming back.
What tactics have you used to find your key audience?