Google Analytics - New vs. Returning Visitors

The next report after the Map Overlay report is the New vs. Returning Visitors report. This report is pretty straightforward, but can still provide valuable insight into the nature of your visitors, and the ability of your website content to generate return visits. The report looks like this:

When you first load the report, you see a breakdown of your visitors, how many are new to your site, and how many have been there before. There is a small degree of error in the report, for these two reasons:

1. If someone visits your website at work, and then goes back to the site once they get home, then they're counted as a new visitor because there's no tracking cookie on their home computer.
2. Basically anyone within your company will go to your website regularly to check on and update data. That can artificially boost your return visit count.

As for how to interpret the results - a high percentage of new visitors indicates that you are successfully driving traffic to your site (through good SEO efforts, PPC, WOM, or referrals). A high percentage of return visitors means that the content of your site is engaging, and brings your visitors back. It can also means that they like your products or specials.

Filtering Results

By default, the second column shows you the number of visits. This isn't all that useful, because you can easily see based on the percentages where the share of your visits lay. However, filtering this second column can give you an idea about the relative quality and performance of each visitor segment. You can select any of the following views from the drop-down:

• Pages/Visit
• Avg. Time on Site
• % New Visits (this is unnecessary, as it will always be100% & 0% respectively)
• Bounce Rate
• [each of your goals]
• Conversion Rate
• Per Visit Goal Value

Why is this valuable? Well, let's look at the results filtered by Bounce Rate:

You can quickly see that returning visitors to your site are 10.2% more likely to stay on your site for more than one page.

Now take a look at Conversion Rate:

Again, it's clear that .11% of your returning visitors are more likely to convert. So, between these two metrics, it's obvious that your return visitors are of better quality, and it's in your best interest to get more of them!

Goal Conversions

You can switch from the default view to the Goal Conversions tab. You can filter by each of your goals, and see who's contributing what percentage to each goal, or to the site's overall goal conversion. If you have a far larger percentage of New visitors, it's quite likely that they will have a larger overall contribution to conversions, by virtue of their volume. However, this report can provide some added insight:

So, even though we saw before that return visitors only comprised 26.14% of the traffic volume on this site, they actually contributed to 30.58% of the goal conversions! So again, it's in your best interest to get people to come back, because they are more valuable to you. If you've tied dollar amounts to your goals, you can see exactly how much more valuable they are, how much they've contributed to your bottom line.

One other area where this report can aid you is in determining the effectiveness of your sales copy. If the percentage of conversion for new visitors is very low, that can mean that people simply aren't convinced of the value of your product/service when they first read about it. They may leave to compare competitors' products/services, or perhaps go look for reviews. This isn't always a terrible thing, but you'd have far more conversions if you could get people to convert right then and there, without leaving. So, continue to refine your sales copy!

On the surface, this appears to be a fairly basic report. But as you can see, it can provide some valuable insight!