The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.
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Note: For a complete overview of Google Analytics persona creation methods, see Persona Creation Using Google Analytics: Summary of Methods

To continue with our discussion from Personas with Segment Analytics (Part 1), to perform a persona inspired segmentation using your web analytics tool (here we are using Google Analytics for our platform as an example), these are some details about your customers you would need to gather which will be later used to create personas:
- Age and Gender: You can see the breakdown of your audience by their ages if you navigate to Audience>Demographics>Overview
We will use the age group with largest demographics to make our 1st persona. For more information about this group. We shall find affinities of this user group.
- Affinity: For this we will expand Age > Secondary Dimension, Within Secondary dimension, type “Affinity”.
Now you can see the categories associated to your 1st personas age group and gender. Google Analytics uses different types of factors such as browsing history, time on page, and then associates this with a ready-made user profile (i.e. ‘shoppers’, ‘technophiles’, ‘foodies’, ‘music lovers’). Note down a few of the top affinities.
- In-Market: This helps us to know what kind of products your audience actively compares and researches. For this, within Secondary dimension, type “In-Market Segment”.
Note Down a few of the top products.
Location: If you navigate to Audience>Geo>Location. You can find out the countries your 1st person likely belongs to.
Device Used: By clicking Audience>Mobile>Devices, you can see exactly which brand of mobile they’re using and even what service provider or operating system they prefer.