Better Understanding Your Audience With Google’s Consumer Barometer

Posted 25-06-2015 by Olivia

Although the concept of digital marketing has some people thinking of mysteriously technical algorithms and software, just like traditional marketing, it all begins with your audience. At ThoughtShift everything we do stems from your audience, so we were excited when we heard that Google had updated their Consumer Barometer tool as of June 2015. If you don’t know, the Consumer Barometer is research from Google which analyses thousands of consumers from 56 countries worldwide to understand consumer behaviour online in 2015.

You can use the Consumer Barometer in two ways:

Explore the key findings and have a look at some pre-packages insights like “The average UK consumer owns 3.3 devices in 2015, up 10% from 2014”.
Or dive into the data with the graph builder where you can filter data to get the most relevant information.

We’re going to be looking at the graph builder in this post so you can get the best insights for your website, based on industry and location. You may think you have a good idea of your audience, but the digital landscape is constantly changing and with that the way consumers use the internet changes.

How Can I Use the Consumer Barometer?

The Consumer Barometer provides data on quite a wide range of topics from consumer research behaviour to purchase behaviour and device usage. You can see the subject overviews here:

Consumer Barometer Menu — Image Source: Screenshot from Consumer Barometer

Whilst the tool may not drill down specifically into your exact audience, it is a good means of benchmarking the industry and consumer behaviour to see where you fall within the field. First and foremost we would suggest looking at your own website’s data in Google Analytics. Whilst this gives a good picture of your internal successes, opportunities and challenges, every business needs to also look at the wider external environment to aid business decisions.

Recommended Use of Filters

A good place to start with the Consumer Barometer filters is to select country, demographic and product purchased (which acts as a kind of industry segmentation).

Once you have filtered the data to be as relevant as possible (and not be so specific that it doesn’t return any data), questions like the one below can act as a kind of checklist for your online strategy. For example, knowing that your audience look at online video sites before making a purchase decision may help guide your eCommerce SEO strategy to create and optimise product videos.

Consumer Barometer Question — Image Source: Screenshot from Consumer Barometer

This is where your audience is looking for you online; could you be making your website more visible in these areas?

Thanks for Reading

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