2 replies to this topic

[az266]

For my estate agency website, I have a bounce rate of under 9%, my customers spend about 6 minutes each on the website and return frequently for many months. Yet, 75% of my visitors are new according to Google Analytics - this seems wrong.

I would have thought that new visitors should be about 50% or less? What do other people find as reasonable on their sites? I think that the Analytics cookie lasts 1 month but many people delete their cookies so how would this impact the results?

[A.N.Onym]

The most obvious explanation guesstimate would be that visitors learn most of the information on their first visit and move on to better sites or become your customers.

On the other hand, Javascript tracking scripts (including Google Analytics) do report less than real for two major reasons:
- if the page isn't fully loaded with the script, it won't show the visitor
- it doesn't show fake visitors from bots, scrapers, spammers, etc, who don't load the pages

It'd be interesting to hear someone with real, proven web tracking experience, too.

[hitechsol]

The # of visitors shown in Google Analytics and any other analytics tool are just an approximation. They are fairly good at telling you about a trend and no more than that. So, do not take the numbers as seriously. Rather, keep a close eye on the visitor trends over an extended period of time and then make your judgments on how the website traffic is behaving and what changes to make.