How to Calculate Your Web Marketing Loyalty Benchmark in Google Analytics

By John Arnold, Michael Becker, Marty Dickinson, Ian Lurie, and Elizabeth Marsten from Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

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:

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.
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.