Audience Reports – Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics – Moz

What “Audience Reports” Really Mean (And Why They’re Your Fastest Wins)

Audience reports answer one deceptively simple question: Who are the people behind the pageviews?
In practice, that breaks into three beginner-friendly buckets:

• Demographics & geography: where visitors are and what language they use (and sometimes age/gender/interests).
• Technology: devices, browsers, operating systems, screen resolutionsaka “why does the site look weird on my aunt’s phone?”
• Behavior & loyalty signals: new vs. returning users, engagement, and segments (audiences) you can reuse for reporting and marketing.

Moz’s Beginner’s Guide frames Google Analytics as a reporting tool that turns raw activity into organized reports
you can segment by users, sessions, and eventsso you can make decisions with data instead of vibes.

UA vs. GA4: Where Did “Audience” Go?

In Universal Analytics, you’d click Audience and get a neat menu: Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behavior,
Technology, Mobile, and so on. UA stopped processing new data on July 1, 2023 for standard
properties, and GA4 became the default going forward.

In GA4, “Audience” is still a concept, but your audience-style insights live mainly under:

• Reports → User (User attributes like demographics, and tech/device reports)
• Admin / Audiences (creating audience definitions you can reuse)
• Explore (deep segmentation and analysis when you’re ready)

Translation: GA4 didn’t delete your audience reporting. It reorganized it into “User” and “Tech,” and added a
stronger focus on events and engagement.

Before You Trust Audience Data: 3 Setup Checks

1) Make sure you’re measuring the right thing (users, sessions, events)

GA4 is event-based. That means a lot of reporting flows from events (page_view, scroll, purchase, form_submit,
etc.) and the sessions those events belong to. You’ll still see familiar metrics like users and sessions, but
GA4 tends to tell the story through engagement.

2) Understand engagement rate (because “bounce rate” got a makeover)

GA4 defines engagement rate as the percentage of sessions that were “engaged.” A session counts
as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has 2+ page/screen views. Bounce rate is
essentially the inverse of engagement rate in GA4’s definitions.

3) Expect thresholds and consent impacts (especially for demographics)

Demographic reporting in GA4 is aggregated and may apply data thresholds when counts are low to protect user
privacy. Also, some demographic insights only appear when users have consented and when your configuration
allows it.

How to Find Audience-Style Reports in GA4 (Step-by-Step)

Demographics: “Who they are” (as much as GA can responsibly tell you)

1. Open GA4 and click Reports.
2. Go to User (or “User attributes,” depending on your navigation).
3. Open Demographic details for breakdowns like country/city/language (and more, if enabled).

If you can’t find the report, it may have been removed from your default navigationeditors can add reports back
to the left menu.

Technology: “How they access your site”

1. Go to Reports.
2. Open the Tech details report.
3. Review browser, operating system, device category, screen resolution, and other tech dimensions.

This is where you go when a stakeholder says, “The checkout button is broken,” and you want to respond with,
“On which device, browser, and OS?” (in the nicest possible way).

Demographic Details: What You’ll See and How to Use It

Start with the reliable basics: location, city, language

Even without extra configuration, GA4 commonly reports on location and language. These are excellent for
beginner insights because they’re usually available quickly and help you tailor content, shipping info, store
hours, or even spelling preferences (color vs. colourchoose your fighter).

Example: If your blog post about “winter roof maintenance” is unexpectedly popular in Florida, you may have a messaging mismatchor a lot of snowbirds with property up north.

Age, gender, interests: powerful, but requires the right switch

If you want age, gender, and interest categories, you typically need to enable Google signals
in GA4. This can unlock additional audience insights (again, aggregated and privacy-aware).

Once enabled and after enough data accrues, you can use these insights for practical decisions like:

• Content planning: If “DIY beginner” content overperforms with certain interest categories, build a series instead of a one-off post.
• Offer alignment: If a city shows high engagement but low conversions, check shipping costs, currency display, or local trust signals (reviews, return policy clarity).
• Ad sanity checks: If paid traffic claims to target a certain demographic but your engaged sessions tell a different story, you may have targeting drift.

Common beginner mistake: treating demographics like gospel

Demographics are directional, not destiny. Use them to generate hypotheses (“Maybe this audience prefers X”),
then validate with behavior (engagement, key events, conversions).

Tech Details: The Report That Saves Your UX (And Your Sanity)

The Tech details report helps you understand the technology people use to access your site or
appbrowser, operating system, screen resolution, and more. This is crucial because “the website” isn’t one
experience. It’s a thousand tiny experiences across devices.

What to look for first

• Device category: desktop vs. mobile vs. tabletthen compare engagement and key events.
• Browsers: if Safari has lower conversion rate, check cross-browser issues (forms, sticky headers, payment popups).
• Screen resolutions: if smaller screens bounce more, your layout may hide the CTA below the fold or make buttons hard to tap.

Example: diagnosing a conversion dip

Let’s say your newsletter sign-ups dropped 18% last week. A beginner-friendly tech workflow:

1. Check Tech details for a spike in a particular browser or OS version.
2. Compare engagement rate and the newsletter key event by browser/device.
3. If one combo is tanking (e.g., mobile Safari), test the form thereespecially autofill and validation messages.

This is how you turn “I think something’s wrong” into “It’s specifically iOS Safari on the email field.”
That’s the difference between panic and progress.

Audience Building in GA4: Turning “People” into Reusable Segments

In GA4, an audience is a reusable definition of a group of users. You can create audiences for
reporting and (if your setup supports it) export them to ad platforms for remarketing. Audiences can be built
from conditions like events, user properties, traffic sources, and behavior.

Beginner audience ideas that actually help

• Engaged readers: users with 2+ page views and 60+ seconds engagement time.
• High-intent visitors: users who viewed pricing + started checkout (or submitted a lead form).
• Local audience: users from your service area who visited contact/location pages.
• Content category fans: users who viewed 3+ posts in “home improvement” within 7 days.

Why beginners should care

Audiences help you stop answering vague questions like “How are we doing?” and start answering better ones like
“How are high-intent mobile users doing compared to last month?” That’s where the good decisions live.

How to Read Audience Reports Like a Pro (Without Becoming a Spreadsheet Goblin)

Use comparisons instead of drowning in totals

Totals are fine. Comparisons are better. Compare:

• Mobile vs. desktop engagement rate
• New vs. returning users conversion rate
• Top city vs. “all other cities” performance
• Organic search users vs. paid users engagement patterns

Pair “who they are” with “what they do”

Audience reports are most useful when you connect them to outcomes. For example:

• Country + purchase rate → localization and shipping strategy
• Device category + form_submit → UX improvements that increase leads
• Language + engagement time → content readability and translation priorities

When default reports aren’t enough, customize

GA4 lets editors/admins create custom detail reports when the pre-made views don’t fit your business questions.
For beginners, this is useful when you want one clean report that answers one clean questionlike “Which devices
drive the most engaged sessions for blog readers?”

Beginner Playbooks: What to Do with Audience Insights

Playbook 1: Content site (blogs, publishers)

• Use demographics (location/language) to plan seasonal and regional content.
• Use tech details to ensure your reading experience is solid on mobile.
• Create an “Engaged Readers” audience and track its growth month-over-month.

Playbook 2: Local business

• Confirm traffic is coming from your service area (city/region).
• Check device categorylocal searches often skew mobile.
• Compare engagement and calls/form submissions by city to spot underserved neighborhoods.

Playbook 3: Ecommerce

• Use tech details to identify checkout friction by device/browser.
• Use location reporting to align shipping expectations and trust badges.
• Build audiences: cart starters, product viewers, repeat purchasers.

Playbook 4: Lead gen (services, B2B, SaaS)

• Compare new vs. returning users: are you building repeat interest?
• Track key events (form submits, demo requests) by device category.
• Use audience definitions to measure performance of high-intent visitors over time.

Common Pitfalls (So You Don’t Accidentally “Optimize” the Wrong Thing)

• Small sample sizes: Don’t make big decisions from tiny numbersespecially with demographic thresholds.
• Internal traffic: If your team visits the site constantly, filter or exclude itotherwise your “audience” is just coworkers doom-scrolling.
• Confusing engagement with success: High engagement is great, but tie it to key events or conversions when possible.
• Forgetting context: A spike in traffic from one city might be a PR mention, a referral link, or a bot wave. Always cross-check acquisition sources.

Conclusion: Your Audience Report Checklist (Quick, Useful, Repeatable)

Audience reports in GA4 help you understand the people behind your performance: where they are, what tech they use,
how engaged they are, and how to segment them into meaningful groups. Start simple:

1. Find Demographic details and confirm your top locations/languages match your business reality.
2. Open Tech details and compare engagement/key events by device and browser.
3. Enable what you need (like Google signals) and be patient while data accrues.
4. Build 1–2 audiences that reflect your real goals (engaged readers, high-intent visitors, local users).
5. Make one decision from the datathen measure the outcome.

That’s the secret: Google Analytics isn’t a place you “visit.” It’s a tool you use to decide. And once you can
confidently explain who your audience is and how they behave, your marketing stops guessing and starts steering.

Real-World Experience Notes (The Stuff You Learn After Clicking Around)

Beginners usually expect audience reports to feel like a tidy biography: “Here is your visitor, Jamie, age 29,
who loves hiking and oat milk.” In reality, audience reporting is more like reading footprints in the sand.
You don’t get every detail about the person, but you do learn where they came from, how fast they were
moving, and whether they stopped to look at your “Buy Now” sign or sprinted away like it was haunted.

One of the most common experiences: you open Demographic details, hoping for age/gender/interests… and it’s
mostly country, city, language. Cue the dramatic music. The fix is usually not “GA4 is broken,” but “GA4 is
cautious.” You may need Google signals enabled, you may need more time and more traffic, and you may be running
into privacy thresholds. When the numbers are small, GA4 would rather be vague than accidentally expose
something sensitive. It’s like the analytics version of “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

Another real-life pattern: teams obsess over demographics when the real problem is technology. A site redesign
launches, and conversions drop. Everyone argues about the audience: “Maybe we attracted the wrong people.”
Then someone finally checks Tech details and discovers the checkout button is misaligned on a common mobile
screen size, or a form validation message isn’t visible on a specific browser. Suddenly, the “wrong audience”
turns out to be “the right audience, trapped in a broken interface.” Tech reports quietly save the daylike a
superhero whose superpower is “reading the console logs” and “not panicking.”

A third experience is the “engagement identity crisis.” People migrating from Universal Analytics miss bounce
rate and session duration and try to rebuild the past. But GA4 nudges you toward engaged sessions and engagement
rate. The first time a team sees engagement rate, someone always asks, “Is this good?” The honest answer is:
it depends on the page and the intent. A blog post can have a high engagement rate with few conversions and still
be doing its job (educating). A pricing page with high engagement but low leads may signal confusion (people
are reading… and not liking what they see). The win is learning to pair engagement with key eventsso you’re not
celebrating “lots of reading” when the goal was “lots of sign-ups.”

And here’s a classic: the “Audience report argument.” Marketing says the audience is broad and top-of-funnel.
Sales says it’s all unqualified traffic. The compromise is building audiences (segments) that reflect actual
intent: users who visited pricing, users who hit a key event, users who returned within 7 days, users from a
target region. Once you do that, you stop debating opinions and start comparing cohorts. It’s surprisingly
calminglike replacing a shouting match with a whiteboard and snacks.

Finally, the best experience you can have with audience reports is the moment you make one small change based on
something real. You notice mobile users from your top city spend time on your services page but don’t contact
you. You shorten the form, add a click-to-call button, and simplify the above-the-fold message. Two weeks later,
key events rise. That’s when GA4 stops feeling like a confusing dashboard and starts feeling like a teammate.
A slightly nerdy teammate, surebut one that shows up with receipts.