Google Analytics - Who is "New"?

Understanding Web Metrics - the fourth in the series

Scott Jemison
Designed by Carla

All of the information in Google Analytics can easily be overwhelming. While some of the information is pretty straightforward, it can remain mysterious in its relevance. For example, Google Analytics subdivides visitors into new visitors and returning visitors. As a business owner, why should you care?

New Visitors to the website are visitors who have not previously visited your site (based on the web browser's "cookies" information) wherea a new visitor to a web page is a visitor who has not previously viewed that particular web page.

There are several insights which can be inferred from this information.Pages which have a high rate of returning visitors would seem to offer relevant or interesting information. Refer to these pages as a model for other underperforming pages.

Pages with a high rate of new visitors would indicate a surge of interest in a particular topic or feature. Use these situations to your advantage to move these visitors to relevant pages where you can make the conversion to a sale.

Also, if a pages sees an increase in new visitors, check their referring site or traffic source. If you recently targeted this page for a PPC ad make sure your visitors are finding the content relevant and not bouncing. If visitors are coming from a new referring site this could indicate a golden opportunity for link building.

The most important consideration with any information from Google Analytics is to evaluate it in context. There is no single indicator of success or failure. By understanding how each analytic references others you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your web traffic.

The next article concludes our series on Google Analytics and attempts to put everything in perspective.