Understanding new vs returning users

• Created : Aug, 26, 2020
• Last Updated : Apr, 27, 2024

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE NEW VS RETURNING USERS :

As a marketer, you must be aware of the scenarios or problems you face while dealing with the users. Your users or customers are the center of your attraction as they are the ones who decide the fate or destiny of your e-commerce or digital marketing business.

Therefore, you have to keep a focus on the users who have recently visited your website or who did visit your website but never turned up again and last but not the least who time and again return to your website. Apart from counting on your revenues, these stats play a major role in your business as the users are the ones who could turn up into coNotifyVisitorsersions.

Read this article to know the difference between the new users and returning users and how to navigate to users in NotifyVisitors. Let’s get started.

Going back to our topic, there are two types of users who visit your website :

• People who have never visited your site before.
• People who have visited and browsed through your site.

This was a generalized difference between the new and returning users. Let us discuss the users in NotifyVisitors.

WHAT ARE THE USERS IN NOTIFYVISITORS :

Users are generally the visitors who have visited through your website, performed any action on it, and initiated a session with your app/website. 

How can you navigate to the users in NOTIFYVISITORS :

• Log into the NotifyVisitors account, navigate to the analytics section to view the PEOPLE. Here you can see the users as per the devices they have browsed through. You can view the users on the basis of the timeframe you choose i.e. yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days, this month or last month.

WHAT ARE NEW VS. RETURNING USERS IN NOTIFYVISITORS :

As stated above new users are the ones who have never visited your website before. Contrary to that, returning users are the ones who have been to your website or app before.

How NotifyVisitors determines if the user is new or a returning one :

Suppose a visitor has viewed our website, NotifyVisitors’ tracking snippet looks up for a tracking cookie on the visitors’ device :

• If the cookie is present, NotifyVisitors considers it as returning user and begins a new session.
• If the cookie is not present, NotifyVisitors creates one and considers it as a “new” user.

Note: There are certain cases where users have been to your website earlier but NotifyVisitors calls are not able to detect such users and call them NEW. In such cases, you might not get reliable and totally accurate results. This could happen in the following scenarios, where NotifyVisitors is not able to detect if a user is a new or the returning one :

• If a visitor is accessing the site from multiple devices. NotifyVisitors might count the session coming from a different user.
• If a visitor uses different browsers each time to visit the site. He will be assigned a separate client ID.
• In case the visitor deletes the cookies, they will be counted when he visits the site after the deletion of the cookie.
• Also, the visitors who are using the incognito mode will also be considered as new users.

Therefore if you have 20,000 new users to your site there could be possibilities that there would be similar users visiting your site with different IDs.

HOW TO VIEW USERS IN NOTIFYVISITORS DASHBOARD :

You can view the total number of users and new users by navigating to NotifyVisitors >SEGMENTATION> PEOPLE.

The overview report will give you a wide clarity of the total numbers of users who are reachable by different platforms. Also, you can take a look at the new and active users who reached your site during a specific time period.

You can view the following metrics in the overview report :

• View when a specific user was last seen on your website.
• Check out the no. of page views on your website.
• View the number of pages per session.
• See the bounce rates of your website which means a user visited your website but did not perform any actions on it.
• Last but not the least, you can view the new vs returning visitors.

What all can you view in the new vs returning users report :

• You can view the total number of users who visited your site.
• You can see the stats of new visitors as well as the returning visitors.
• Exaggerating the above point, the sum total of the new and returning visitors would not be equal to the total number of visitors. This happens because there could be a visitor who visited your site many times during the reporting period (average time spent by the visitor on your site). He could have visited your site for the first time and returned to your site many times during that period.

Note: With this report, you can spot out how much time do the new visitors spend on your site as compared to the returning ones. See which type of visitors have got higher coNotifyVisitorsersion rates. Simultaneously check out which type of visitors are bouncing away more from the website more.

How can you optimize the coNotifyVisitorsersion rate through the returning and new visitors :

• You can ask users (new as well as returning ones) for feedback as to why they are spending less time on your website.
• Take on the survey on the important pages of your website such as homepage and landing page.
• Ask about their experience on your site if they have visited for the first time. 
• Create questions according to the page such as for the homepage, you can ask :
• Is this your first time on this website?
• What did you find useful on the site?

You can go deeper with your feedback questions to know more about what is happening to your website and what changes you need to make in your website to nudge users to take actions on the site.

Acknowledging the difference between the new and returning users is quite important and relevant so as to view how different sets of users behave differently. Also, you can create segments for them to engage the users further.