Returning Visitors: Why It's Important To Analyze

6:58 PM

Web analytics can provide a substantial amount of information for both businesses and personal use. Creating a user-friendly website, using the right keywords, and optimizing for different mediums like mobile, tablet, and desktop are all very important, but to really know whether a site is successful or not the website traffic and engagement must be analyzed. Two metrics that are critical for success are returning visitors and bounce rate.

Returning Visitors

Returning visitors, which falls under the visitor characterization category, can be defined as the, “…number of unique visitors with activity consisting of a visit to a site during a reporting period and where the unique visitor also visited the site prior to the reporting period.” (WVU, 2016). This metric can be beneficial for businesses for several reasons, including brand loyalty. According to the Digital Analytics Association (2007), “The return visitor metric, when compared with the new visitor metric, is helpful in determining the overall loyalty and affinity of visitors to the site being analyzed.”
Before diving into new versus returning visitors, it’s important to know how the information is tracked. On Google Analytics, each visitor is given a tracking code or unique ID called the client ID, which is sent to the Google Analytics server (Sharma, 2015). This means that every time someone visits the website without an existing client ID they are counted as a new visitor. This ID is then used to track how the users’ interactions with the website. However, it’s important to note that if someone visits a website, leaves, decides to delete their ‘cookies’ which includes the client ID, and then returns to the website, this will then count as a new visitor rather than a returning visitor even though they were just on your site. It is also important to note that if a user leaves the website, but returns to the website within the same reporting period, they will not be counted as a new visitor (Digital Analytics Association, 2007).

Search Engine Watch, 2013


The image above shows just how important returning visitors can be for a website. In the graphic above, the returning visitors stayed on the website for an average of 30 minutes longer. Although the number of returning visitors was substantially less than the new visitors, the returning visitors had much better interaction data (Lewis, 2010). According to the Cam Foundation (2015), it generally costs at least five times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. If a business is able to find users that have returned to their website, it will be easier to isolate them and find out why they returned and what their engagement was on the website through the audience behavior metric. Once the metrics have been analyzed, businesses can take it even further by properly segmented visitors. For example, when a returning visitors are arriving to the website directly (without referrals from other sites), a business can see which pages they are most likely to arrive on and what pages they have bookmarked. This information can then be used to create similar content, market or share that content more, or maybe even use that data to attract new visitors. 



References

Reed College of Media (2016). Week 1 lesson: Intro to web analytics and the basics of web analytics. West Virginia University. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/

Sharma, H. (2015). Understanding users in google analytics. Optimize Smart. Retrieved from https://www.optimizesmart.com/understanding-users-in-google-analytics/
Kissmetrics. (2015). The 8 most important conversion metrics you should be tracking. Retrieved from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/the-8-most-important-conversion-metrics-you-should-be-tracking/
Digital Analytics Association. (2007). Web analytics definitions. Retrieved from http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitionsVol1.pdf

Share This Story

Tags:

You Might Also Like

0 comments

Popular Posts