I had an interesting debate recently on the topic of new versus returning visitors, and what might be revealed by analysing these segments.
New Visitors
A high proportion of new visitors suggests that your marketing is working well to get traffic to the site. From an analytics perspective however we need to dig deeper to understand what happens when these visitors engage with your site. By first creating a new visits segment in you data you can then explore further segments such as:
- paid and non-paid traffic
- keyword usage in each of the above segments
- top landing pages
- bounce rates ….
…. and so on. This provides a rich source of information on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and the reaction of these first time visitors to your website. In my view this is an extremely important area to examine, as the behaviour of new visitors will provide much more information about the effectiveness of your website from a conversion perspective. If these visitors are flowing through your site efficiently, picking up on your calls to action, and engaging immediately via contact forms, or newsletter subscriptions, you can be confident that your site is well designed from a usability perspective.
If on the other hand they spend very little time on site, and your bounce rates in this segment are high, then you really need to review your proposition and perhaps the marketing strategy.
Returning Visitors
A high proportion of returning visitors implies that your site content is engaging and that visitors enjoy coming back. In my experience analysing returning visitors is more difficult. Clearly there is a need to create a returning visitors segment, the further segmentation needs to be different to above however, and I tend to focus mainly on the following:
- top content
- goal conversions
I try to identify the most popular pages to determine what is particularly engaging and then to apply this to other pages in the site. If you have tagged downloads, then it can be revealing top see if visitors are returning for the quality of your downloadable content – perhaps this should be monetised in some way. Finally if it is an ecommerce site then repeat purchase information is the most telling statistic to analyse.
Ratios
The discussion inevitably led to the question of what are the best proportions of new to returning visitors. I don’t think there are any correct answers here, however a quick look at my most successful sites suggests that a 75% new to 25% returning ratio is fairly common. In the case of ecommerce sites where there is a strong prospect of repeat business the ratios tend to be much closer to a 50 / 50 split between new and returning.
Any other statistics you might have would be appreciated ……….