What Are Returning Visitors?
This term refers to users who visit a website more than once to view its content.
Why Is It Important To Know The Number Of Returning Visitors Of A Website?
Knowing the number of returning visitors is as important as knowing the number of new visitors that land on a website.
This metric allows demonstrating whether digital marketing campaigns effectively attract and retain visitors. Knowing the type of users who return visits can observe the content that most attracts their attention, allowing for planning more successful strategies to obtain more conversions. It should be noted that search engines will also detect this recurrence because it will tell them that a website or content is attractive and relevant to search queries.
Another advantage of knowing the number of returning visitors to a website is that this type of user tends to be loyal to the brand and therefore generally spreads their experience and attracts new visitors, which in turn can become repeat users.
How Are Returning Visitors Calculated?
To know how to calculate the RVR or Rate of Return Visitors is very simple; just divide the number of returning visitors to a website by the total number of unique visitors to the same site in a period of time.
For example, if you had 20,000 total visitors in May and 8,000 were returning visitors, your RVR is 40 percent. The formula would look like this:
RVR= 8,000 / 20,000 = 0.40
If you want to know “What is a good percentage of returning visitors?”, the answer is very simple. Even though there is no set standard for the amount of returning visitors a website should have, it is said that if the RVR is above 30 percent, it is attractive to visitors.
How To Find Returning Visitors And New Visitors In Google Analytics?
One of the most complete and versatile tools used to obtain information about websites’ behavior is Google Analytics. One of its many functions is to provide data about the audience flow of a website.
To access this information is done in the following way:
Enter the Google Analytics console, Select the “Audience” tab, then drop down the “Behavior” menu and select “New and Returning,” after following these steps, a graph and a data table showing the following three aspects will be displayed:
- Sessions
Contains the number of new and returning visitors a website receives.
- Behavior
At this point, you can see what is the behavior of recurring visitors and new visitors, such as what is the “Bounce rate,” how many pages they visit and how long they are in each of them before leaving, etc.
- Goals
In Google Analytics, you can set goals for a website; once configured with this information, you can know if new or returning visitors are completing the planned objectives that may be to subscribe to a newsletter or make a purchase and make a comparison between them.
Recommended reading: Everything you need to know about GA 4 Property
SEO Best Practices To Increase Your Returning Visitors
- Create an email newsletter
With this practice, a connection with the audience is achieved by reminding them of the brand and increasing the possibility of return. There are multiple marketing tools available in the market to perform this task.
- Obtain followers in social networks
Currently, social networks generate a high percentage of traffic to websites; it is said that more than 30 percent comes from it. Therefore it is essential to develop marketing strategies to increase the number of followers and turn them into repeat visitors, such as creating Facebook groups or a profile on Linkedin and ask them to join it; you can also make sweepstakes establishing as a condition that the participant tags several people, among others.
- Establish a list of push notifications
Another way to increase returning visitors is through automatic notifications, and what better way to do this than with a list of push notifications, which will appear on the different devices of the users, and when they give their consent to receive them, they will be able to access the website directly.
- Create new content and publish it frequently.
One of the effective ways to bring visitors back to a website is to continuously create new, original, and entertaining content.
- Modify existing content into smaller notes and publish it on different platforms.
This practice seeks to make previously published content available to visitors in small excerpts to make them more accessible on different platforms, generating more traffic and reducing the work of creating new content.
- Rewarding visitor loyalty
An example of this practice’s use is to make a rewards program or offer exclusive offers for new visitors to convert them into returning visitors.
- Retargeting ads
It consists of strategically showing people who have interacted with a website advertisements to return to it; these work using tracking cookies.
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