Do Something With Your Marketing: Returning Users

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, I want you to take a very, very strong look at a number that a lot of us don't pay a whole lot of attention to, and that is the returning user. When somebody comes back to your web properties by any means, who are they? Why are they coming back? How many of them are coming back? What kind of loyalty does your audience have to you?

And it's really important to think about this because in a lot of cases, you may be putting out messaging on a marketing channel that if that's not where the user is if the user is paying attention there as a returning user, and you're putting out messaging like, hey, get to know me, find out more about me. And they're like, Well, I know who you are, right? Um, it can be very off-putting. So let's pay attention to returning users. Who are they?

Where are they coming from? And then is our are our efforts uh commensurate with sort of what they what what they have to offer. Also, do they convert better? It's a really, really interesting and important question to understand. Does the returning user have more value?

In s for most companies, that the answer is yes, not all. So let's go ahead and uh and take a look at this. I'm gonna switch this around here. Let's start actually in good old-fashioned straight Google Analytics. You you start with sort of your overview, and go straight to audience there.

We're in the audience, and you can simply add in the system built segment called returning users. It's a pre-built segment that Google Analytics provides for. You don't have to do anything for it, and you can very quickly begin to see. In my case, about 10% of my traffic, give or take, is a returning user. Let's expand this time frame back.

Maybe let's go back a year. Apply that. And make it a little easier to see. Generally speaking, yeah, about 11% of my traffic's returning users. Cool.

Now the question is, where do they come from? So I'm gonna go ahead and remove the all users. And let's look at that acquisition number here. All traffic. Looks look at uh let's look at channels first.

Bear in mind your channel configurations have to be correct. If they're not correct, this will not be helpful. And turn it on the bar graph just so it's a little easier to compare. And there's my returning users. In the last year, we're talking 68% come from search, 14% have no attribution, which important.

Normally we say direct, meaning there's no attribution data is bad, right? Because we have no idea where it came from. Uh usually at the case of not using uh UTM tracking codes properly, having misconfigured ads. In r the case of returning users, that's not always a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing because direct means Google has no idea where this person came from.

It's as though they typed your website's address straight into their browser bar with nothing else. Well, yeah, for a returning user, we want that. We want them to remember uh I'm gonna go to ChristopherSPenn.com or trust insights. There shouldn't be any attribution data. We'd love to see more of that actually.

So uh an important point there. Email, 6.7% for me. Referral a little under 5%, social and a little under 4%. So I now have a better sense in terms of channels of what brings users back. The one that is interesting and a little concerning to me is that organic search number.

It's it's too much, too much uh in one channel, too many eggs in one basket. So I have to think about how can I diversify uh and get more people from different places, particularly referral. Referral would be a good one to get uh more returning users from. Um social is not bad. So we figured out what our returning user rate is, where they're coming from.

You can obviously dig in uh to very granularly here and see uh you know what specific source medium again flip that over to uh to this and then be able to look okay, yep, six percent through my almost timely email specifically in the last year. Great. We can also start to look at uh some of those conversions. Let's just go to multi-channel funnels. Now here's a case where the segments go away, right?

Because these are not conversion segments anyway. These are these are not traffic segments, these are now conversion segments. So one of the things we would have to do is set up uh a uh conversion segment for uh returning users. So what I would suggest doing is set up something like this, a Google Data Studio dashboard on the left hand side have this be only new users, and on the right hand side be this be only returning users, and that way you can do sort of a side by side comparison. What percentage of your traffic are you getting from organic search for new users?

It's almost 70% returning users year to date, uh 64%, 18% direct, 16% uh direct for new users. Cool, that tells me you know, there's a the a delta there about two percent. So two percent of that traffic is probably folks who just are to typing the URL back into the dashboard, into the browser. 2.7% for email, 3.16% for returning users. Email is doing its job.

Probably needs to be a little bit more. If I need to get that number a little bit higher, get more people going back to my website from my email, calls to action, things of that sort of thing. For new users, it's coming from Facebook for this, but over here it's my social shares. So returning users are paying more attention to my social shares than they are coming um, you know, raw social networks themselves. Twitter also substantially more from returning users.

1.23% of Twitter users there, 0.79% there. So real interesting. Now remember, these are percentages. Uh and we as we saw early on, uh returning users are only about 10% of my site traffic. So of that 10%, how does it break down?

What I see here is I see things like the newsletter, something I have control over, those things I post on social, something I have control over, uh, are bringing in returning users, and so that's a good thing for my marketing strategy, if this was a company, because I would want to be figuring out how do I get more people back to my site, how to get more people back to places that I care about them doing things that help them convert, and if I can do that, uh then obviously I can spend more time and invest more heavily in the audience I already have rather than scrambling to get new audience. That's a critical point. I can't understate that enough. Overstate that enough. We as marketers spend a lot of our time on acquisition.

How can we get more leads, more traffic, more everything? We don't spend enough time on the right-hand side. How do I get my existing audience to deliver more value to my company? Obviously, a big part of that is how do I, as a marketer, deliver them more value, you so that you reciprocate at some point down the road. But if we spend all of our time chasing after new people and we don't spend any time serving the people we have, then that number is going to be low, low, low.

And the channels that should be driving returning users, like email, like our social properties that we have control over there, or we have posting control over. We need to have we need to see good results there. If we're not seeing good results there, it means that we're not giving enough love to that audience. So do this analysis, look side by side at the channels you have control over, and if the returning users aren't higher of the channels you have control over, you're not giving enough love to your audience. You're not doing enough for them, you're not providing them enough value so that they keep coming back.

Right? So that's this week's do something with your marketing. Focus on the returning user for a little while. Figure out how you can deliver them more value, how you can you can boost your numbers to be, you know, from one percent or five percent, or in my case, ten percent. How do we get to that to like twenty-five percent of our traffic?

Keeping in mind that it's not new versus returning users strategically. We want more of both. We want more new users, but we also want more returning users. So, how do we do both well and build that growth up and keep that those returning users coming back? So that's your challenge for this week.

Replicate this dashboard and then focus on what you can do to bring back more users. As always, please leave your questions in the questions box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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