Case Study: Demographic Insights with YWA

Using YWA’s demographic reporting, YWA Consultant Network partner Location3 Media has been working with one of their clients to research their website visitor demographics.  This client has several business locations across the United States, which service the entire region for their location. In order to get a better understanding of the differences between demographics in these regions, Location3 Media created a unique segment for visits from each of the regions.

Using the Gender Report in conjunction with these segments, Location3 Media was able to determine some interesting statistics about this particular client’s website users.

Data from 5/01/11 – 9/30/11 from Yahoo! Web Analytics with a 95% confidence level.

It was generally known that the client’s prospective customers are typically about 55% female and 45% male, so a similar distribution would be expected for their website’s online traffic. However, the statistics from Yahoo! Web Analytics demographics data showed that western states like California and Colorado leaned towards a more even distribution between male and female web visits, while mid-western states like Georgia, Illinois and Virginia swayed much more heavily towards female visits. This is especially revealing when noting that the conversions for Virginia are still very equally distributed between male and female visitors, indicating that there may be an opportunity to better tailor offerings and information to the female demographic in Virginia.

What was even more interesting is the combination of age and gender demographic data from Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Data from 5/01/11 – 9/30/11 from Yahoo! Web Analytics with a 95% confidence level. (Conditional formatting added from Microsoft Excel 2010).

With this highly segmented data, Location3 Media can now look at their client’s data from a much more holistic perspective. Not only is the gender distribution different by region, it is also different by age range. In most regions, females have a higher percentage of 25-34 age visits and 18-24 age inquiries, whereas males tend to be slightly older, with mostly 35-54 age visits and 25-34 age inquiries.

Another interesting insight gleaned from this data was that across almost all regions, visits tended to be from older age ranges than that of inquires. This can give some insights as to various web behaviors. For example, older web users on the client’s website may be more comfortable calling for more information rather than filling out a form – phone calls would not register as an online conversion with the current setup. Knowing this, Location3 Media can suggest bolder, easier to find phone numbers with phone tracking for the client’s landing pages, specifically for campaigns targeted at an older demographic. Similarly, Location3 Media can explain to the client that campaigns targeting younger demographics with landing pages that feature simple contact forms and possibly an online chat feature would be ideal.

In addition to providing the client valuable insights on their online web user behaviors, this type of knowledge is incredibly useful for fine-tuning targeting within the Yahoo! network. For search campaigns, Location3 Media can experiment with different ad copy targeting different age ranges and genders for specific regions. For Yahoo! Network Plus, Yahoo!’s display network, Location3 Media can also do some specific targeting based on the web behaviors of these demographics.

To learn more about Location3 Media’s web analytics services, please visit their website or contact sbedford@location3.com.

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