Repeat Website Visitors: Why They Matter and How to Track Them

It's been a little while since I've done a tech-themed update, so I thought this week might be a nice time to poke around the my minutia-glutted brain and see what kind of tech tips I could dig up. Besides a lot of frivolity about Star Wars and video game codes from when I was 10, I was able to come up with this gem: How to measure visitor loyalty to your website.

Why does visitor loyalty matter? Knowing how many repeat visitors you have to your site can be a helpful way to evaluate certain efficiencies of both your website and your business. Do you have a ton of repeat visitors that aren't being converted into sales? Do you have high traffic but almost no returning visitors? Or, do you have the opposite problem of almost all of your web traffic being loyal return visitors, and virtually none of it new business?

Answering "yes" to any of the above questions would obviously qualify as a "bad thing," but you'd never know about it unless you're keeping a careful eye on your web traffic. There are a lot of different ways to keep this "careful eye," most of them being a pain and a little inaccurate, but if you use Google Analytics to track your web stats, there is a small trick that can make counting repeat visitors easier.

In Google Analytics, you can set up something called an "advanced segment," which among other things, allows you to filter traffic by how many times a person has been to your site. It's a little better than the somewhat useless "% new visits" that Google offers by default, since advanced segments will separate
people who might just be casual browsers (2-3 visits) and people who are serious prospects/diehard clients (let's say hypothetically 10+ visits).