Building and Using Audiences in Google Analytics

Learn about Audiences in GA, a feature to segment your web audience, and use it for comparing user behavior or for ad targeting.

in Strategy

In Google Analytics, audiences refer to groups of users who share common characteristics or behaviors. These characteristics could include demographic information like age, gender, location, interests, traffic channel or behavioral traits such as how frequently they visit a website, which pages they view, and what actions they take.

How to set up Audiences in Google Analytics

There are essentially two ways of creating and viewing audiences in Google Analytics:

  • Suggested audiences: Google’s suggestions, templates and predictive audiences.
  • Custom audiences: Creating one from scratch based on a set of self-defined rules.

To view and build audiences in your Google Analytics property, navigate to Admin > Data Display > Audiences.

How (and where) to use Audiences

Google Analytics automatically generates two audiences for every property:

  • All users: Includes users who have ever launched your app or visited your website.
  • Purchasers: Includes users who have completed a purchase.
While these are geared toward e-commerce websites, you can make use of ‘ templates’ to understand user behavior based on criteria you set. The templates available in Google Analytics are:
  • Demographics: Segment your users based on their age, gender, language, interests and country. (To segment by age, gender and interests, be sure to turn on Google Signals for your GA property.)
  • Technology: Segment an audience based on web technology, browser, device type (mobile, desktop, tabs etc.).
  • Acquisition: Build an audience based on the traffic channel.
screenshot of the "Audience" feature in Google Analaytics.
“Build new audience” screenshot. (Click to enlarge)

You can also build custom audiences based on a combination of a wide variety of criteria. Following is a screen recording of building an audience of mobile visitors to CSU’s news website SOURCE.

There are two ways you can use Audiences in Google Analytics:

  1. Comparison in reports: You can use the ‘add comparison’ option at the top of any standard GA4 report to compare groups of users based on certain conditions, including the audience name. Following is an example of comparing key metrics for all users with those of the mobile visitors created above.

  2. Advertising: While you can use “segments” to slice and dice your comparison reports, too, you can truly leverage Audiences by connecting them to other Google products, such as Google Ads. Once you’ve linked your GA4 property to a Google Ads account and enabled Google Signals, you can use audiences as targeting options for paid advertising campaigns in the Audience Manager of Google Ads. The following video shows how you can import and use your Google Analytics audience in Google Ads: