Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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The following explains how in web marketing, tracking returning visitors is important. Here we will find out how many returning visitors you have and how to use this as a benchmark for increasing the percentage of returning visitors, which reflects visitor loyalty. The following steps help you set the target, again using Google Analytics:

  1. Open the report that calculates your percentage of repeat visitors.

    In Google Analytics, the best place to start is the New vs. Returning report. To access this report, click Audience and then click Behavior in the sidebar on the left. Then click the New vs. Returning option.

    For this benchmark, the time frame isn’t that important, so you can set it for as little as a month. Just be sure that you use a sufficiently long time period to account for weekly rises and falls in traffic, as well as any seasonal changes.

    In other reporting tools, you can look for the Returning Visitors or Visitor Loyalty report. The data will be the same: a comparison of one-time and returning visitors.

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  2. Take a look at the percentage of returning versus new visitors.

    In Google Analytics, you find this info on the Site Usage tab (toward the bottom of the screen). Here we show a returning visitor percentage of 22.50%, so that’s the loyalty target (which is something you always want to increase). But you can’t forget about adding new visitors, which here are 25,619, so that’s the new visitors target to improve upon.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

John Arnold is the author of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies and coauthor of Mobile Marketing For Dummies.

Ian Lurie is President of Portent, Inc.

Marty Dickinson is President of HereNextYear.

Elizabeth Marsten is Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc.

Michael Becker is the Managing Director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association.

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