How to enable Demographics and Interest reports in Universal Analytics

In this post we will look into enabling Demographics and Interest reports in Google Analytics – Universal Analytics. With Universal Analytics (finally!) out of beta, how many companies will now start to migrate to it? The only real reason not to in the past was the lack of support for dc.js. This was required in order to use of the Demographics and Interest reports. This short post will show you how to enable it in Universal Analytics.

Enable Demographics and Interest Reports

The first thing you need to do is to enable the Enable Demographics and Interest Reports. To do that go to Admin -> Property Settings. Under Advanced Settings you will find a button that will allow you to enable this feature. This must be enabled for each of the Web Properties you wish to see the Demographics and Interest Reports for.

Once that is complete you will need to edit the JavaScript tracking code on your site to use this feature. You need to add one line of code just before the send:

<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>

Demographics report

If you have not previously enabled the Demographic reports for your site you may see the following screens, when viewing the reports on the Google Analytics Website.

Click enable on this screen

Click “skip validation”

Conclusion

Remember like all of the other Standard reports it will probably take 24 -48 hours before the data starts to show up in the report. I like a lot of people have been waiting for them to finally release Universal Analytics from beta. Now that we have this final feature in place, I predict that we will see more and more people migrating to Universal Analytics.