The Key to Loyalty: Understanding Your Website's Repeat Visitor Rate

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Long-term customer relationships, they’re essential for the success of any brand and content sites are no exception to that rule.

Your content may be designed to get you clients, or maybe it’s all about generating subscriptions, ad revenue, or paid downloads. Whatever the goal, you’ll want a base of loyal customers because they’re the ones who will come back to you, and if you’re doing things right, refer people to you and generate real growth for your content brand.

But earning that loyalty is no easy task, especially in today’s dense jungle of user-generated, curated, and created content. It’s also a world where customer expectations are high. In fact, 78% of customers say that the experience is a crucial factor in the brands they choose (Clarke & Kinghorn, 2018). It’s an experience that’s based on several factors, and 80% of customers place convenience, friendliness, knowledge, and efficiency at the top of their list (Clarke & Kinghorn).

So, how do you measure if you’re meeting these experience expectations on your content website and what kind of goals can you set for loyalty?

One approach is by monitoring web metrics that characterize your visitors. From a site loyalty perspective, your repeat visitor metric may hold the key. This metric is defined as how often Visitors visit your website during the reporting period (Kaushik, 2010).

Your repeat visits metric can help you better understand if your content website is proving to be a knowledge source for your customers because they’re coming back for more. The repeat visit metric can be especially telling in terms of convenience, indicating if a first-time visitor that converted (by completing an action like submitting an information form, downloading a file, or watching a complete video) came back and converted again (Patel, 2018).

Repeat visits can also shed light on your site’s friendliness factor by indicating if a repeat visitor submits comments, shares, or links to your content. While the efficiency factor can be understood in-site search results that convert to downloads or complete article reads, with the same conversions that occur after your readers follow guided navigation paths.

If you’re getting action from repeat users like the above, then you’ll know you’re on your way to creating loyalty. But how do you know? That comes to goal setting.

Benchmarks vary for repeat visit rate, but a target of higher than 25% is commonly viewed as an indicator of a healthy site while 30% plus indicates excellent health (Kursija, 2017). The goal of content optimization is a persistent factor here. It’s a matter of creating high-quality relevant content that users not only like, but also know is consistently refreshed.
The key to building that awareness lies in your ability to convert guests with email subscriptions or social media follows. So, keep an eye on your repeat visits and traffic sources, compare those sources of traffic with the number of shares, subscriptions, and downloads you’re converting. If the numbers steadily rise, you’re developing content that your audience likes and also leveraging the right promotional channels.
When it comes to setting goals for repeat visitors, it’s likely that your promotions will be primary drivers for repeat visitors. Take a strategic approach to how much you update and promote, weekly updates may be enough if you’re providing more “evergreen” content. Use a publication and promotion calendar to keep track of your plans and activity then bump those dates up against your repeat visitors report. To make your repeat visitors report, visit GoogleSupport for a walkthrough.
References

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer-Centricity. Wiley Publishing, Inc.: Indianapolis, Indiana.

Kaushik, A. (2011, December 12). Best web metrics/KPI’s for a small, medium or large sized business. Retrieved on October 17, 2018 from https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-web-metrics-kpis-small-medium-large-business/

Kursija, A. (2017, January 27). Metrics you should be tracking (but you’re not): rate of returning visitors (RVR). Retrieved on October 17, 2018 from https://www.foxmetrics.com/blog/metrics-tracking-rate-of-returning-visitors-rvr/

 Patel, N. (2018). The 8 most important conversion metrics you should be tracking. Neil Patel. [Blog]. Retrieved on October 15, 2018 from https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-8-most-important-conversion-metrics-you-should-be-tracking/

 Clarke, D.; Kinghorn, R. (2018). Experience is Everything: Here’s How to Get it Right. [Report]. Price Waterhouse-Coopers. Retrieved on October 15, 2018 from https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/pwc-consumer-intelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf

Comments

Mark Tietbohl said…
Hi Paul,

I used the blatant self promotion link in your post...good thought!
November 2, 2018 at 8:07 AM
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