New Google Analytics interest tab provides marketers with a better glimpse into visitors' habits and preferences.

Marketers’ jobs would be much easier if they knew what made their customers tick. Every day, creative and strategic teams are challenged to determine what prospects want or need, and then find ways to present their brands as the solution. This is hard enough in the offline world where businesses have face-to-face interactions with customers, but internet marketers must overcome the challenge of anonymity as they learn the who, what, where and why of their website visitors.

However, the interests tab, a new Google Analytics feature could make it a lot easier to paint a detailed picture of customers and then market to them.

How Google’s making content analytics the crystal ball to conversions

Google now offers content analytics reports containing information about visitors’ interests, age and gender. The idea is that this data will help marketers better understand who is coming to their websites and what digital content interests them.

Google's new interests tab for content analytics provides more data for content marketers.

While immensely helpful to SEOs, this function isn’t necessarily groundbreaking. The search engine previously offered visitor-specific categories to marketers running paid campaigns on the Google Display Network, now allowing webmasters to funnel all of their analytics data into more insightful segments. In the past, advertisers could create interest categories and opt to display their brand content only to web users in those groups. The search engine gathers information about internet users’ demographics and interest from their activity on Google partner sites, taking contextual cues from the domains’ subject matter and target audience as well.

Google's new Interests tab for content anlaytics provides marketers with more data.

Now, it’s allowing webmasters to segment all of their analytics data into these comprehensive silos.

Marketers can benefit immensely by segmenting their traffic into more sophisticated categories because it brings depth and context to online customer personas. With clear insights about what target audiences look like and want, brands can refine their content marketing strategies to align with and exceed prospects’ expectations.

Google recently rolled out the interests tab for all analytics to give marketers more insights about customers.
Webmasters, roll up your sleeves

Information is power on the ‘net, but often comes with a cost. In the case of interests analytics data, marketers must do a little backend work to gain access to these insights.

According to the Google Analytics Policy requirements for Display Advertising, webmasters must update on-site analytics tracking codes. However, this also requires them to update their privacy policies to notify visitors that they’re collecting data about traffic through DoubleClick cookies.

As always, transparency is of the utmost importance to Google and marketers must follow suit to be within the search engine’s quality guidelines. Moreover, marketers might see their SEO strategies take off as they’re able to create highly targeted content that compels visitors to convert naturally.

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.