Who & Where Is Your Audience… Really?

Marketing teams spend hours optimizing tiny details, like button sizes or colors, in a never-ending battle to improve conversion rates — but they often miss the forest for the trees. The most effective way to improve conversion rates is to know your audience and identify where their needs overlap with what you're trying to sell.

Let's take a look at how to find out exactly who (and where) your audience is and how to capitalize on those insights to maximize your conversion rates.

Going Beyond the Basics

Most businesses use Google Analytics to measure things like page views, but the free analytics platform provides more than vanity metrics. With a little digging, you can discover everything from your audience's demographics to their specific interests. These insights can be invaluable when writing copy or putting together marketing campaigns.

Google Analytics' most under-appreciated metrics include:

• Demographic: What genders and age groups are visiting your website? If 75% of your traffic comes from 18- to 24-year-old women, you may want to focus your promotions on them; alternatively, it might be worth investigating why you're not reaching 45- to 54-year-old men.

• Location: Where are most of your visitors from? If you have a high percentage of international visitors, you may want to develop separate promotions to effectively target these different markets.

• Interests: What are your visitors' other interests? Affinity categories will show you broad interest, such as "Movie Lovers", whereas in-market categories will show you specifics, like "Mobile Phones".

Social media platforms provide similar insights into your followers, who tend to be less transient than website visitors. These data points can be helpful for understanding your company's biggest fans and building highly-targeted marketing campaigns using social media platforms and landing pages rather than your website.

The two most important platforms to watch include:

• Twitter Analytics provides a treasure trove of information about your followers, including their interests, locations, demographics and even who they tend to follow. By identifying influencers, you can

• Facebook Insights tells you a lot of the same information as Twitter, as well as the purchasing behavior of your followers (e.g. how frequently they purchase and the purchase methods that they tend to use).

Finally, mid to large businesses should track brand mentions around the web in order to better understand their customers. Third-party reviews can be especially helpful since they are both candid and unsolicited. You can better understand why they purchased a product and what might lead them to recommend the product to others.

Don't Forget the Competition

It's equally important to know your competitors and their audience. For instance, a startup competing in an established space can look to the competition to see how they're targeting customers. These companies may have been optimizing their marketing for years, and by looking at those insights, you can benefit from their time and investment.

Some competitor metrics to watch include:

• Content Marketing: Ahrefs and other content marketing platforms make it easy to see how a competitor's blog posts and other content are performing in search engines. By knowing the keywords they're targeting, you can gain a good understanding of their target audience.

• Advertising Efforts: SEMRush and other marketing platforms make it easy to gain insights into the pay per click campaigns that other competitors are running. Like organic keywords, these keywords provide insights into how they're targeting potential customers.

• Website Copy: A quick look at a competitor's website can tell you a lot about who they are targeting with their images and copywriting. You can also look at their marketing campaigns over time to see what might be working for them and adopt some of those insights for your own efforts.

User Location & Localization

There are countless resources focused on fine-tuning market campaigns based on demographics or interests, but location is perhaps the most under-appreciated.

Localization can have a significant impact on conversion rates, but it remains one of the least-used marketing tools. For example, a sports apparel ecommerce shop may want to show promotions for local teams, or a sporting goods retailer may want to show ski equipment in Colorado and surfboards in California in order to optimize conversion rates.

Language and Localization - Source

It's equally important to note that locations may differ by medium. Your website visitors may be primarily from the United States, but your social media followers may be from the U.K. Rather than tweeting links to your U.S. ecommerce shop, you could improve conversion rates by sending out links to U.K.-optimized landing pages.

There are many tools that make localization easy to implement. For instance, Geo Targetly provides a variety of tools designed to redirect visitors or dynamically change content based on location or GeoTargetingWP provides a powerful API to geo-target content for WordPress content. Other plugins provide automatic translation and payment related customizations.

WonderProxy makes it easy to test these localization capabilities using proxy servers. With more than 250 servers across more than 80 countries, covering 97% of the world's GDP, the company provides reliable testing for any business that uses geo-location or other localization strategies. You can use the easy browser extension for manual QA testing or use the Sauce Labs integration to automate testing for larger applications.

The Bottom Line

There are many different ways to optimize conversion rates, but knowing your audience provides the highest return on investment. Using common analytic frameworks, you can learn all about your audience's interests, locations and other information that can help you when targeting marketing campaigns or optimizing your website.

Localization is one of the most under appreciated optimizations that can have a significant impact on conversion rates. By tracking customer locations, you can fine-tune your website and marketing programs to maximize your return on investment and set yourself apart from the competition.

Sign up for WonderProxy to help ensure that your localization testing efforts are working properly and incorporate localization into your automated test suites.