Display Advertising is now in Universal Analytics

Simon Dahla

Many of the Google Analytics Classic (ga.js) features of has not been available in Universal Analytics (analytics.js). But since the beginning of April 2012, the Universal Analytics is no longer in beta and all functions are successively added to the service.

Support for Display Advertising was released this week and with it you can seeDemographics & Interests in your Analytics reports. There are four standard reports that you can break down your visitors in:

  • Age
  • Sex
  • ”Affinity”, categorizes visitors according to their lifestyle (art, music lovers, gamers, etc.). See below for details on how Google can find this information.
  • Other Categories, categorizes visitors with regard to the specific content they consume, along with how recently and frequently they consume content.

In addition to the standard reports, you can make Custom Segments with Demographics & Interests-data to break down and understand your visitors better.

To activate Display Advertising in your Universal Google Analytics account, you need to add a line of code to your tracking scripts.

ga('require', 'displayfeatures');

Your full tracking script should look like this:

<script>
    (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
    (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
    m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
    ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXX-XX', 'example.com');
    ga('require', 'displayfeatures');
    ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>

The new line of code should be set before the display of pages sent. Do you use Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Universal Analytics, you can read the Google documentation how to proceed to activate these features.

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