Website audience analysis compares the visitors a website attracts with the actions those visitors complete. Build a consistent segment table from an existing analytics export, calculate conversion rates, and check the totals before changing a campaign.
Website audience analysis compares who arrives at your site, how much traffic each segment represents, and how often that traffic completes a defined action. Start with an existing analytics export, choose a consistent counting unit, and calculate segment shares and conversion rates. The useful result is a reconciled comparison that tells a marketing team where to investigate.
An export can contain users, sessions, page views, and submitted forms. Those columns cannot substitute for one another. Google's session definition describes a session as a period of interaction with a website or app; a returning visitor can therefore contribute more than one session over your reporting period.
This example uses sessions throughout. Its conversion numerator is sessions containing at least one completed sales inquiry, counted once per session. It does not use the number of form events. That distinction prevents repeated submissions from inflating the rate.
Ask the report owner for the period, reporting time zone, geographic filter, excluded internal traffic, channel rules, device categories, and conversion definition. Keep an unknown category when the source cannot classify a visit. Removing it makes the visible audience appear more complete than the exported measurements support.
A US industrial supplier exports September 2026 website results. Each session belongs to one channel and one device category in this report. The simplified export covers only search and email traffic; it is not a claim about the supplier's entire website.
Place channel in column A, device in B, sessions in C, and inquiry sessions in D. Rows 2 through 5 contain the source counts. Add session share in E and inquiry rate in F.
| Channel | Device | Sessions | Inquiry sessions | Session share | Inquiry rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search | Desktop | 1,200 | 72 | 30.0% | 6.0% |
| Search | Mobile | 800 | 32 | 20.0% | 4.0% |
| Desktop | 600 | 60 | 15.0% | 10.0% | |
| Mobile | 1,400 | 56 | 35.0% | 4.0% | |
| Total | 4,000 | 220 | 100.0% | 5.5% |
In Google Sheets, enter the session-share formula in E2 and fill down:
=C2/SUM($C$2:$C$5)
Enter the inquiry-rate formula in F2 and fill down:
=IF(C2=0,"",D2/C2)
Format the results as percentages. A blank rate means there were no eligible sessions. It does not mean observed conversion was zero.
Segment share = Segment sessions / Total eligible sessions
Session conversion rate = Sessions with the defined conversion / Eligible sessions
Create a separate summary with Search and Email in H2:H3. Sum sessions in I2:
=SUMIFS($C$2:$C$5,$A$2:$A$5,H2)
Sum inquiry sessions in J2:
=SUMIFS($D$2:$D$5,$A$2:$A$5,H2)
Divide in K2, then fill all three summary formulas down:
=IF(I2=0,"",J2/I2)
Google's SUMIFS documentation confirms that it adds values meeting multiple criteria. Add a period criterion when the export contains several months. Covirage is not affiliated with Google.
| Comparison | Sessions | Inquiry sessions | Inquiry rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | 2,000 | 104 | 5.2% |
| 2,000 | 116 | 5.8% | |
| Desktop | 1,800 | 132 | 7.3% |
| Mobile | 2,200 | 88 | 4.0% |
Channel rows are one complete grouping; device rows are another. Do not add all four summary rows together. Their sessions refer to the same underlying visits.
Rates are rounded to one decimal place after division. Search has 72 + 32 = 104 inquiry sessions; email has 60 + 56 = 116. Desktop has 132 / 1,800 = 7.3%, while mobile has 88 / 2,200 = 4.0%. The desktop advantage is about 3.3 percentage points using the unrounded rates.
That does not establish a device effect. Email desktop traffic may contain existing customers using a familiar order process, while mobile traffic may contain new visitors researching products. Inspect landing pages and visitor intent before treating the overall comparison as evidence for a redesign.
For a separate comparison of shared known customer identifiers, use audience overlap analysis. Aggregated session counts cannot identify the same person across campaigns.
The four detail rows sum to 4,000 sessions and 220 inquiry sessions. Both totals must match the source report with the same filters. The total rate is 220 / 4,000 = 5.5%, calculated from counts:
=SUM(D2:D5)/SUM(C2:C5)
There is a second proof. Each segment's inquiry sessions divided by all sessions contributes to the overall rate: 72 / 4,000 = 1.8 percentage points, 32 / 4,000 = 0.8, 60 / 4,000 = 1.5, and 56 / 4,000 = 1.4. Those contributions sum to 5.5 percentage points.
This check protects against averaging segment percentages without their traffic weights. For period comparisons, the percentage change formula helps distinguish relative movement from a change stated in percentage points.
The marketing analyst owns the export definitions and reconciliation. The website owner reviews mobile inquiry completion, and the campaign owner checks whether channel targeting or landing pages explain the mix. Sales operations should confirm that a completed inquiry matches the business action the report is meant to measure.
Prioritize an investigation with sufficient traffic and a clear business question. The email desktop row has the strongest observed rate, but that alone does not prove incremental sales or justify moving spend. Use a separate outcome review to assess lead quality. Competitor audience analysis addresses the different evidence available for external comparisons.
Upload your aggregated visitor export or Google Sheet; Covirage maps the columns, and its tools compute and check segment totals, shares, and conversion rates. The external AI model explains the results with every figure traced to its rows. Create a free Covirage account, then set up your business and bring a sample of your own data.
See self-service analytics for the supporting approach to answering business questions from files.
Start with an aggregated website analytics export containing the reporting period, segment dimensions, visit counts, and the matching conversion count. Include definitions and filters. Sessions, users, and conversion events measure different things, so record which unit each column contains before calculating rates.
Only when the segments are mutually exclusive at the unit you are counting. A person can visit through several channels, so adding channel-level users can double count people. Use disjoint exported groups or obtain a separately deduplicated total from the source report.
No. A session conversion rate counts sessions with at least one defined conversion, divided by eligible sessions. Events per session counts all recorded events. Repeated submissions can increase event frequency without increasing the number of sessions that completed the action.