Date: 27 Aug 2009 Comments: 2 so far

Segment Your Site Data for Returning Visits

When digging into your website analytics, I cannot stress enough how important it is to study your Returning Visits vs. New Visits.  The reason for this is you need to understand what is triggering people to come back to your site.  The internet is the greatest research tool we have at our fingertips.  Rarely does the searcher make a significant decision upon their first visit to a site.  A fantastic way to judge your site performance is by breaking down Returning Visits across as many segments as possible.

Take a look at your traffic sources – Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic – and break that down by Returning Visits vs. New Visits.  Observe your keyword traffic – paid and non-paid – and break that down by Returning Visits vs. New Visits.  If you are running an eCommerce site the best way to judge your effectiveness is by the revenue being generated from the repeat visitors.  Don’t stress if the new visit revenue is low.  That is perfectly normal.  I’m not saying to disregard it entirely as it is still revenue but I do not think that is the best way to judge your site performance.

Branded Keywords vs. Non-Branded Keywords and Returning Visits

A real life example is that a client of mine is doing outstanding on branded keywords.  They are showing up well in the rankings for all variations of their brand name, they get quality traffic based on key performance indicators and their returning visits from branded keywords are driving revenue.  In July of 2009 the Returners were dwarfing the Newbies by over $1,000 in revenue on the company name alone.  That isn’t even taking into consideration misspellings or other keyword / key phrase variations that include the brand name.

Using the same client as an example, their non-branded keyword traffic is finally getting traction after some solid SEO work.  They examined the non-branded keywords that were getting minimal visits per month but the visits were considered quality when looking at other KPIs.  Optimizing the site with those keywords in mind, they are not only growing organic traffic via the non-branded keywords but their repeat visitors are increasing as well.

Revenue has not increased from non-branded organic search, but that will come in due time.

Referring Sites and Returning Visits

The same metric is crucial for reviewing Referring Sites.  Blogs, Social Networking sites or industry partners should be mentioning your company name and linking to your site.  Getting new traction from referring sites is a great way to build your business.  The visitors to these sites trust the authors’ opinions so a link to your site is invaluable.  And if you notice specific referring sites are creating returning visits, you want to reach out to them and find out how to grow your partnership.

Attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter.  Your ability to create a customer for life is very difficult.  Loyalty is the great character trait you can develop within your customer base.  And it is for this reason you need to understand what your returning traffic is telling you.  What are you doing well?  Why do they keep coming back?  Are they telling their friends?

Know your analytics inside and out to build that loyalty and brand recognition.  Watch your traffic build and your business take off.