I’m always happy when people return to my website: it means they liked what they saw the first time and want some more similar stuff. Keeping your returning visitors happy it’s very important.
Here are two big reasons for being so interested in the happiness of your returning visitors:
- A returning visitor means a potential client in the future: conversions don’t happen from the first visit.
- These people already like your website so it’s more likely they’ll tell others about your website/product/service
So, what I did is I created a Custom Report in Google Analytics that show me what Returning Visitors are viewing and other metrics, that I’ll talk about in just a minute. If you know nothing about Custom Reports you can check out my introductory article for Custom Reports and I also have an article about how to track what pages were viewed because of a keyword, using Custom Reports.
Now let’s get back to the custom report from today. Log in into your Google Analytics account and click create new custom report. Give it a suggestive name like “Happy Returning Visitors”. The thing is that you don’t have a direct metric for returning visitors. So here is what metrics you’ll choose to display and then I’ll explain why.
Metrics to choose to view: Visits, %New Visits, New Visits, Avg. Time on Page, Pages/Visit and Bounce Rate. The first dimension to apply these metrics to is Page Title. As optional drill down dimensions chose Visitor Type and Source/Medium.
Here is how to look at this custom report: you’ll basically look at the pages that have the less percentage of New Visitors. Click on that link and from the new table choose Returning Visitors. Now you’ll see how the Returning Visitors chose to return to your website (the source and the medium), the bounce rate, how many pages they saw and what was the average time on page.
Of course that you can also check this information for New Visitors as well. This custom report shows you relevant metrics for each page New and Returning Visitors.
What do you think of all this? Share your ideas for custom reports and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.
I am trying to figure out how to auto email custom reports. Do you know how? Thanks for the custom report article.