Dan Zuzanski is a Paid Search Analyst here at Rocket Clicks and will be contributing to a blog post series about Google Analytics on a regular basis. Dan is Google Analytics Certified and has a goal of educating businesses on the ways that Google Analytics can help you analyze your website’s visitor interactions, in order to increase revenue for your business. Below is the first installment of this new blog series.
Optimizing Google Analytics to Increase Revenue: New vs Returning Visitors
Figure 1. Overall Website Traffic – New vs Returning Visitors
The graph above shows that over 70% of the visitors coming to this website are new visitors while 30% of the visitors are returning visitors. This data alone does not tell you much about how you should be marketing your website, but when you look at the next graph, Revenue from Visitors, it opens your eye to how these visitors are using your website to purchase.
Figure 2. Revenue from New vs Returning Visitors
This graph shows the percentage af revenue that can be attributed to new and returning visitors. Knowing where your revenue comes from makes you one step closer to figuring out how you should spend your mareketing dollars. The biggest insight when looking at both graphs is that over 64% of the revenue is driven by returning visitors, which make up only 29% of overall traffic. The data tells me that a marginal amount of visitors purchase on their first visit. The majority of purcases happen on subsequent visits. Big Action Take Away Knowing that the majority of visitors purchase on follow up visits, give the visitor a reason to come back to the website. This could be accomplised through newsletter signups, free offers, coupons after checkout, and offering valued customer discounts. If you have social networking pages like Facebook or Twitter, offer the visitor to sign up and become a “Fan” or “Follower”.
How Do I Get This Report?
- Once logged into the Google Analytics account, clicks on the Visitors tab on the left.
- From the Visitors menu, click the New vs Returning link.
- Now you are looking at Figure 1 that is shown above.
- To view the Revenue data ( Figure 2 ), click the Ecommerce tab right above the pie chart.
