New or Returning Visitors | Which is more engaged with your site?

When analyzing a site, you may be segmenting your site traffic according to its sources. Looking at new vs. returning visitors and segmenting its metrics will give you great insights to which type of visitors are more engaged with your site.

Google Analytics has a powerful segmentation feature that allows you to slice and dice new and returning visitors in various ways. Some of the options are Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Goal Conversions, Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, % New Visits, and Per Visit Goal Values.

Here is an example screen shot of what it can tell you when you take your visitor type and slice it into several metrics.

I like this because in this example, it shows me that this site’s returning visitors are highly engaged in terms of page views per visit, avg. time on site, and bounce rate. Assuming this is a blog site, it totally makes sense because returning visitors are probably your core users/readers.

Within this specific time frame that the data is pulled, the new visitors may have not converted to returning visitors yet. So additional metrics you would want to look at is the “recency” metrics, to see how long it took for new visitor to become a returning visitor.

When you have high percentage of new visitors and recency of 0 day, that means your site is not doing well in acquiring returning visitors. In that case, there are various communication methods you may consider to acquire returning traffic. Such as, newsletters, SEM, Direct Mailing, etc.