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Blog Post 2 min read

A guide on new vs. returning visitors

A guide on new vs. returning visitors — Cover Image

The ‘new visitor’ and ‘returning visitor’ metrics are both crucial metrics for your website’s success, giving you a deeper understanding of user behavior and helping you guide your digital marketing strategies and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. So you need to focus your strategies on attracting new visitors while also enhancing the experience for returning ones.

The difference between new visitors and returning visitors

New visitors are people landing on your site for the first time.The behavior of these first-time visitors, including page views and session duration, helps you gauge the success of your user acquisition efforts. However, new visitors also present a challenge in terms of customer retention, so it’s essential to monitor their conversion and bounce rates, so you can optimize their experience and encourage return visits.

Returning visitors are users who have visited your site before, and are a testament to the quality of your website content and the success of your customer retention strategies. Returning visitor behavior provides insights into what keeps people engaged, so you know how to improve the user experience. Returning visitors often have a lower bounce rate and a higher conversion rate, indicating their potential to become loyal customers and advocates for your brand.

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Monitor metrics with web analytics tools to get quality visits

New visitors and returning visitors both make up 50 percent of website traffic, according to numbers released in 2023. That’s why it’s essential to strike a balance between attracting new visitors and retaining existing ones. Monitoring metrics such as traffic sources, page views, session duration, bounce rate, and conversion rate with website analytics tools like Google Analytics helps you get valuable insights into user behavior, helping you optimize your website to attract and retain a larger audience.

What is Contentsquare?

Contentsquare is the all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform designed to be easily used by anyone that cares about digital journeys. With our flexible and scalable platform, you quickly get a deep understanding of your customers’ whole online journey.

Our AI-powered insights provide those “ah ha” moments you need to deliver the right experiences. You get to work faster and smarter with the confidence to know what to do next to improve your digital experiences. Leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer delight and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Our insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide.

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Marie Jehanne

Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!