This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
Other analytics apps use New vs. Returning Visitors, but Independent Analytics Pro uses a New vs. Returning Sessions metric instead.
How it works
If you’re unfamiliar with the sessions metric, you can find a definition of it here.
The New vs. Returning Sessions metric compares the number of first-time sessions to non-first-time sessions.
For example, let’s say someone visited your site for the first time today. That would be counted as a “new” session. Then, if they come back tomorrow, that would be a “returning” session. Each time they return to your site, it will be counted as a “returning” session for as long as this visitor is recognized.
So if you see that there are 4,000 new sessions and 6,000 returning sessions, then you know that 60% of the visits to your site are coming from people who have already been to your website.
This is a simple way to gauge how often people are coming back and what proportion of your traffic is from people who have already been to your website.
Why count sessions instead of visitors?
If you are interested in understanding why we chose to count sessions instead of visitors for this metric, you can find our logic explained here.
After studying the New vs. Returning Visitors metric, we found that it is not clear exactly when a visitor should be considered new vs returning.
For example, imagine you are looking at the last 30 days. New visitors should only include people who visited your site for the first time in the last 30 days. But what if someone visited your site 29 days ago, returned 7 times, and completed a purchase a week ago? Is that really a “new” visitor? It seems equally fair to call them a “returning” visitor since they have returned and become a customer. However, if you call every visitor who returns to your site a returning visitor, then someone who visited your site this morning and then again this afternoon would be a returning visitor even though they discovered your site today.
Part of the problem is that “new” and “returning” are not really opposites. There needs to be a clear definition of what makes a visitor “new,” and this should be based on the customer life cycle rather than being decided arbitrarily by the date range being viewed i.e. if you view the last 7 days, then visitors who first visited 8 days ago are now considered “returning” instead of “new.” While designing a better solution, we realized things were getting too complicated…
In the end, what everyone wants to know is relatively simple: Are people coming back to my website? Instead of creating a system to define “new” visitors, we decided to use “new sessions,” which are straightforward and easy to define. If someone arrives at your site for the first time, that’s a new session. If they’ve been to your site before, that’s a returning session.
We think our New vs. Returning Sessions metric provides a clear and easy-to-understand solution without any risk of misrepresenting the data.