It’s always nice to see a familiar face. Waving at a neighbor on your daily walk or meeting up with an old friend for coffee always feels good. But it’s also always fun to make new friends. When it comes to marketing, both new and returning friends are important to consider.
When we’re talking about returning users, we’re referring to retained customers who provide you with recurring engagement and conversions. New users are people who are engaging with your website at the start of their customer journey. They are the customers you hope to acquire.
Read on to learn about the differences between new and returning users, why it’s important to measure each one, and how you can find the data needed to identify them.
New vs. returning website users
The definitions of new versus returning website users are pretty straightforward. A new website user means that they haven’t clicked on your site before and they’re exploring it for the first time. A returning website user is someone who has engaged with your site before, and they’re doing it again. However, a returning user doesn’t always indicate that they have made a purchase with you before. It just means they’ve visited your site more than once.
There are two key differences to keep in mind when comparing website users: cost and behavior.
- Cost — It’s always less expensive to cater to an audience who is already familiar with you. User retention strategies tend to have fewer costs than user acquisition. Trying to find new users requires more marketing and advertising money than is needed for customer retention because you’re already on a returning user’s mind. Plus, marketing to returning customers has a higher return on investment (ROI).
- Behavior — New users will behave quite differently on your site than returning users. Someone who has been to your site before may jump immediately to the pages that they’ve visited before, instead of navigating throughout the site like a new user. However, new users tend to have high bounce rates and lower conversions if their attention isn’t grabbed immediately.
Why it’s important to identify new vs. returning website users
It’s clear that every website user is essential, as they all provide the opportunity to bring you revenue. But what’s the difference between the impact that they can have on your marketing strategy?
- Optimization opportunities — It’s important that your site is set up to appeal to the current user, whether they’re new or returning. For new users, you can help them engage with introductory content using intriguing calls to action (CTAs)s. Easy-to-use navigation can help move them further along the customer journey. For returning users, you can nudge them in the right direction so that they’re either revisiting where they went last time or going straight to the purchase page.
- Personalization — Whether they’re new or returning users, personalizing their site experience is essential for increasing conversions. When a user is returning to your site, let them know that you remember them and appreciate them coming back. This can include asking for feedback or having personalized ads based on the data you gathered from their last visit. For new users, you can make recommendations with CTAs or pop-ups to help guide them through conversions.
- Recognizing successful marketing efforts — By seeing how many people visit your site for the first time during a specific time period and how many continue coming back, you can gain a better grasp of what’s working in your marketing efforts and what needs to be tweaked. It can indicate the success of your current efforts, such as tracking visitors who came from seeing a social media ad for the first time. A returning visitor might have engaged with an email you sent after they provided their information.
How to identify new vs. returning website users
So how do you find out which of your website users are new, which are returning and how they’re interacting with your site? Luckily, Google has a tool for everything. You can use Google Analytics to gather the data you need on each type of visitor to make the appropriate tweaks to your strategy.
Google Analytics 4 has a New vs. Returning report, which will provide you with a variety of key insights, including:
- Pages per session
- Average session duration
- Transactions
- Conversion rate
An interesting thing to note is that if a user returns to the site as a returning visitor, but it’s been more than two years, they will be marked as a new user. You should strive to have a returning visitor rate of more than 30%.
At BURG+CO., we can help you identify the trending behaviors for your new and returning users. We’ll help you optimize what’s working and adjust what isn’t.
Want to attract new and returning visitors to your website? BURG+CO. can help
Increasing traffic to your website plays a role in increasing conversions and leading to new clients. However, it’s difficult to attract visitors to your site when you don’t know what to do. Fortunately, this is what we specialize in at BURG+CO.
Our team has years of experience in helping businesses improve their digital presence to attract new leads and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more visitors to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help. Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
