Cool custom report: How first visits are different

Comparing the behaviors of first-time visitors to veteran visitors can be a real eye-opener. 

Unless you take a close look at first-time and veteran visitors separately, you won’t know if your site works exquisitely for people who are already familiar with it but is an overwhelming unhelpful mess for newbies.  Or the other way around. 

Happily, WebTrends makes it easy (if you know how) to separate first-timers from experienced visitors. 

The first-time-versus-veteran-visitor report is so fruitful that we return to it every couple of months.  Here are some things we’ve found in past analyses that would not have been evident from an undifferentiated look:

• Pattern uncovered:  First-timers linger on the home page and then apparently give up on the navigation they see there and use on-site search instead.  Veterans on the other hand use the navigation because they’ve apparently become familiar with the site structure or labels.  (alternative interpretation:  first-timers who use on-site search just don’t come back!)  Lesson:  Do user studies of the home page and find that the labels are baffling first-timers.  Do simple text changes that produce big changes for first-timers who enter at the home page.
• Pattern uncovered:  A variation of the above.  First-timers plunge into the navigation and after flailing around for several clicks they resort to on-site search.  Veterans meanwhile go immediately to on-site search.  Lesson:  Do user studies with veterans and find out why the navigation still doesn’t work for them after they know the site fairly well.   Find that the site’s huge numbers of products are sorted into product groups using a categorization approach that doesn’t fit with how the public thinks.  Allow products to be in more than one silo and change categorization to fit with card sorting exercises done in the user studies.
• Pattern uncovered:  A big chunk of first-timers use search but revert to using navigation because the search results are useless.  Veterans know about the typical irrelevance of search results and hardly ever use search.  Lesson:  Identify some common search terms, run the searches, show results page to management and get immediate funding for fixing search. 
• Pattern uncovered:  The main distinguisher between first-timers and veterans’ page views is the Advisor feature.  Returning visitors have found that the Advisor is a great way to narrow down their choices intelligently.  First-timers don’t know what “advisor” is and use it late in the visit if at all.  Lesson:  Make Advisor more prominent and explain it better.  Watch for better KPIs and return visits among first-timers.
• Pattern uncovered:  Visitors’ first and second visits resemble each other a lot.  But somewhere around the third visit, they diverge.  The later visits include more product detail, specifications, downloads, comparisons, and warranty views.  Lesson:  you’ve discovered some of the timing of the decision cycle and a major dropout point in the multi-visit decision process.  Create an email campaign just for two-visit people.  Also, change one of the home page teaser panels to show content typical of late visits so visitors know it’s available.  Increase the amount and depth of the advanced information since it seems to be an enabler for eventual purchase decisions.
• Pattern uncovered:  First-timers are brought to the site by generic search terms.  Veterans almost always arrive by brand-specific search terms, if they use search engines at all.  Lesson:  make sure paid search terms that are generic go to landing pages that sell the visitor on your company as a whole and provide other first-time-critical info.  Monitor conversion and retention rates for the revised landing pages, concentrating on effects on first-timers.
• Pattern uncovered:  A large proportion of first-timers go directly to the “clearance” part of the site and then leave without looking at regular-priced offerings.  Apparently they are being brought to the site in large numbers by bargain-hunting sites.   Lesson:  make sure the clearance pages have lead-ins to related non-clearance content, with persuasive text about your company’s value propositions.
• Pattern uncovered:  Veteran visitors to your travel site use the “my dates are flexible” button almost half the time, while first-timers hardly ever use it.  Lesson:  make the button more prominent and add a “what’s this?” explanation that showcases the value of this feature.  After the change, monitor first-timer behavior especially with respect to use of that feature, conversion, and return visits.

Convinced?  Want to try it?  WebTrends makes it easy because the count of past visits by each visitor is a special parameter attached to the first hit of every visit after the visitor’s first visit. 

• You must be sessionizing with a persistent cookie to get at this information.
• You must have visitor history turned on
• You must have enough past history to be confident that a first-time visitor is, in fact, probably new to your site (as opposed to simply being new to the WebTrends cookie)
• You must have enough visitors to make the subgroups large enough to give statistically reliable results.  I wouldn’t base any decisions on fewer than 5,000.

It’s important to realize that the best cutoff point between newbie visitor and veteran may vary from site to site.  A common starting point for the definition of “veteran” is the fourth visit.  It depends on your site’s audience.  Explore.

Here’s the generic way to create custom reports on Pages (or content groups or scenario analyses or whatever you want as a dimension) for visitors with different amounts of site experience. 

To make a filter that includes only first-time visitors: 

• Create a custom visit filter based on New versus Return.  The screen will refresh giving you radio buttons for New or Return.  Choose New.

To make a filter that includes only visitors with at least three visits:

• Create a custom filter of the Visit type.  Filter on Entry Page, matching values equal to *.  (The asterisk  means it doesn’t matter what page the visit started on. )   Do not check the Regular Expression box.  Specify a URL parameter named WT.vr.vc with a value of >3 (if you want 3 to be your cutoff point).  Make sure you also indicate that this is a numeric parameter, or else the “greater than” sign won’t mean anything.

That’s it.  Apply each parameter to its own custom report with a dimension of Pages or Content Groups or Scenario or whatever you like.   Compare using your favorite comparison method.

If you’re curious about how we know about WT.vr.vc, look in the “Visitor History Parameters” section of the Administration User’s Guide, available in the Product Documentation section of the Customer Center.  There are nine types of visitor history parameters!

Tags

first visit, first-time visitor, repeat visitor, return visit, veteran visitor, visit filters, visitor history, visitor history parameters

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