Knowing your audience helps keep eyeballs on your site, website traffic up, and visitors eagerly returning to your site to consume your content, and buy your products.But a lack of understanding leads to a potentially dangerous domino effect. If you don’t understand your audience, you won’t understand what content it wants, and without that knowledge, your site traffic will suffer.Read on for 10 strategies to understand your website audience so that you can ultimately protect and grow your business: 1. You’ll certainly want to know if your audience is headed to a competitor after they visit your site.More than half of all websites, according to W3Techs, use Google Analytics, though there are dozens of other available programs. Understand Your Analytics We already know that a sizeable number of websites don’t attach analytics to their sites2 It doesn’t do you any good to have the data if you can’t tell what it means and you can’t use it to understand and then grow your audience.Reading the numbers isn’t hard, but putting the numbers together to tell a story is far more difficult. To start, you have to understand the keywords relevant to your business. That’s why it’s critical to know what keywords your audience uses when searching? You may think that it’s simply a matter of posting something on the world’s largest social media channel and then waiting for your audience to land on your website. Understand How Your Audience Reacts on Social Media Facebook is the biggest social media site with nearly 1.7 billion worldwide users, according to data featured on Statista. And Twitter has become an outstanding tool for breaking news and marketing messages that are pushing a specific product.There is no one size fits all in social media, and it’s incumbent on businesses to understand how their audiences use all of the available social tools. But audience comments, unjust or not, provide a window into what your customers think and how they expect to be treated.Experienced media managers know the value of monitoring comments and using the available tools to talk directly to customers. Giving your audience anything besides what they crave means you don’t understand their needs, and those customers will go elsewhere. But you have to know your business and what you provide, and not chase any business opportunities that detract from your core offerings.Additionally, you’ll know exactly what you should provide through your marketing data and analytics. Don’t Be Everything to Everybody This point ties very nicely into understanding your business. The analytics help to paint a picture of who your customer is so that you can ultimately increase your users.However, without a strong understanding of your audience, that growth will suffer. A strong analytics program and analytics team helps organizations better understand why customers come to your website, giving you a better chance of increasing the number of repeat visitors.