Complete Web Monitoring

How Good Is My Relationship with My Visitors?

Once you’ve got your site in order, traffic is flowing in, and you’re making the most of all of your visitors, it’s time to be sure your relationship with them is long and fruitful.

In the early days of the Web, the main measure of engagement with your visitors was loyalty—how often they returned to your site. Today’s users receive messages from a wide range of social networks, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, email subscriptions, and newsgroups, all of which push content out to them without them first asking for it.

As a result, visits don’t count as much. The definition of loyalty needs to be amended for this two-way relationship. It’s not just about how often your visitors return; it’s about how willing they are to let you contact them and how frequently they act on your advances and offers.

Loyalty

The best visitors are those who keep coming back. Thanks to browser cookies, most web analytics applications show the ratio of new to returning visitors. Strike a healthy balance here: get new blood so you can grow, but encourage existing visitors to return so they become regular buyers or contributors.

For this, you need to look at two additional metrics. One is the average time between visits, which shows you how much a part of your audience’s daily life you are. The other is the number of users who no longer engage with the site. Since users don’t usually terminate an account, this is measured by the time since their last login.

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