Age and Interest Reports Nobody Switched On

A report waiting to be switched on

Open Audience, then Demographics, in many small business Analytics accounts and the report is empty. Instead of figures, there is a short explanation and a button to enable it.

Nobody switched it on when the account was set up, because nobody needed it then. Now someone is asking who visits the site: how old they are, and what else interests them.

Analytics can estimate that, roughly. Switching it on takes a minute, but the order matters: Google's policies require your privacy page to describe it first.

What the reports would show

• Age, in bands from 18 to 24 up to 65 and over.
• Gender, as a share of visits.
• Affinity categories, broad lifestyles such as sports fans or cooking enthusiasts.
• In-market segments, people researching a purchase such as a car or a home.
• Other categories, narrower interests drawn from browsing.

The fourth is the one most useful to a business that advertises, because it describes what people are shopping for rather than who they are. It is also the most speculative.

Where the estimates come from

Analytics does not ask anybody their age. Google estimates it, along with gender and interests, from browsing activity linked to an advertising cookie it sets in browsers on sites carrying its ads.

So the figures describe browsers and devices, not people. A family computer is described by whoever browses most on it.

And only some visits carry an estimate at all. Visitors whose browsers refuse advertising cookies, as Safari does by default, often have none, and the report says what share of visits its figures cover.

Switching them on

Two settings are involved, both in the admin screens for the property: advertising features, and the demographics and interests reports.

On Universal Analytics, both can usually be turned on there. Sites still on the classic tracking code need a change to the code as well, which is one more reason to finish that upgrade.

The reports start filling from the day they are switched on, usually within a day or so. They do not reach back into earlier months.

The privacy wording to add first

Google's policy for these advertising features asks for three things on your privacy page, in words a visitor can follow.

Say which features you use. Explain that you and other companies, Google among them, use first-party cookies such as the Analytics cookie together with third-party cookies such as Google's advertising cookie.

And say how visitors can opt out, with links to Google's Ads Settings page and the Analytics opt-out add-on for browsers.

If the site has no privacy page, write one before switching anything on. It belongs in the footer of every page, and it should match what the site actually does.

A share of visits, not all of them

For a small site, the share of visits with an estimate can be modest, and Google withholds rows when the numbers are too small to keep visitors anonymous.

So an age band can appear one month and vanish the next, not because those visitors left but because they dipped below the threshold.

Compare months only when the totals are large enough to be steady, and never read a missing row as zero.

Visitors are not customers

The reports describe everyone who visited: customers, competitors, suppliers, job seekers, and the owner checking the site from home.

A business whose staff and family visit often can see itself in its own audience figures. Filtering out the office's internet address helps with the office, but not with phones and home computers.

The interest categories also state the obvious. A bakery's visitors turn out to be interested in food, and the report says so with some confidence.

A worked example

A lawn bowling club with two greens in a city park and about a hundred and twenty members runs a small website: the draw schedule, learn-to-bowl evenings, and bookings of the greens for office parties.

Last spring the board wanted to know whether younger people were even looking at the site. A member switched on the demographics reports, without touching the privacy page.

By early summer the age table covered only part of the visits, and the 25 to 34 row appeared one week and disappeared the next. The interests report announced that visitors liked sports.

The board nearly rewrote the site around the largest age band, until the member pointed out how few visits were behind it.

The club added a privacy page with the required wording, kept the reports running as background, and added an optional question to the learn-to-bowl sign-up form: how did you hear about us.

That question, and a goal counting completed sign-ups, told the board more over the season than the age table did.

When the reports earn their keep

On a site with steady traffic, the reports are a useful check on assumptions. A business sure its customers are retirees may find a younger audience reading the pages, or the reverse.

They also matter for advertising. AdWords can aim display ads by age, gender and interest, and the reports suggest whether that is worth trying.

What they cannot do is replace knowing your customers. Asking them, at the counter or on a form, remains more reliable.

The counter-case

Some sites gain little from them. A site with only a few hundred visits each month sees mostly thresholds and noise, and a business that never advertises has little use for the interest segments.

And some owners would rather not add advertising cookies to their site at all, which is a reasonable choice to make deliberately.

If you do switch them on, update the privacy page first and read the figures as estimates about some visitors, never as a head count.

Before you switch them on

1. Check whether the reports are already enabled.
2. Read Google's policy on advertising features.
3. Add the required wording to your privacy page.
4. Link to the opt-out pages from it.
5. Switch on advertising features and the reports.
6. Add an annotation marking the date.
7. Wait a few months before drawing conclusions.

Step three gets skipped most often, yet Google's policy makes it a condition. The setting takes a minute to change; the wording should be in place before it.

Sites still on the classic code have another job to do first, covered in upgrading to Universal Analytics without losing events.

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