How many of your users are new? How many are returning? How engaged are they? How many pages deep are they getting? You can get all these statistics in Google Analytics. I’ll help you answer those questions in this article.
New versus Returning Readers
This feels like an age-old question, and in many ways it is. Shops know their new customers and they know their returning or repeat customers, so why aren’t you looking at yours?
We would have looked at this briefly in the first article on the basics, but this time we’re going to look at it on a deeper level.
The bounce rate seems to be higher for returning visitors rather than new visitors, however, returning seem to spend more time reading more articles than the new visitors.
Page Depth
Page depth tells you after your user has visited your site, what next they do. Do they leave (which increases the bounce rate) or do they read another article.
Here we can see that most sessions read two articles, but the interesting stat is the last one, 7 sessions read 20+ pages, which means that there are users who just sit and read article after article. Great if you’re content driven!
Session Duration
This is a more detailed breakdown of your time on site or session duration.
Sadly, 331 sessions lasted less than 10 seconds which is really bad for content. However, there is a bright side, there are over 50 users spending more than 3 minutes on the website, which is not great, but could be worse.
User Flow
The User Flow allows you to see your traffic more clearly, and you’d be quite surprised by the stats.
Green indicates traffic coming in, and the red bits are the drop offs. Here you can see how the traffic just whittles down into nothing. Nearly all the traffic which started on an article dropped off, indicating a lack of engagement. Few who started on the home page did go to other pages, but then, they just disappeared.
All in all…
Users need to be more engaged. The session duration was pretty poor, even though the page depth seemed to be in a better state. There is also a high number of users dropping off after an article. This would indicate that a better content navigation system should be in place. Also, most of the users are new users, and not enough returning. Content topics should be re-evaluted for efficacy.
