Users is a generic metric that tells you how many visitors visited your website. The visiting user can access the website via desktop, mobile or tablet.
Reasons to track the metric Users
Tracking users on your website, is one of the most common metrics that digital marketers track. Analysing the behaviour and engagement of new and returning users can show you, how these types of users interact with your website and how the behaviour might differ. Typically returning users have a higher conversion rate and analysis and evaluation of these users is highly important in order to increase your overall conversion rate. Therefore, understanding the difference in user behaviours of new and returning users as well as source traffic of these users is an important step forward for better conversions.
Common variations of Users
Users can be classified into these subcategories:
| Name | Description | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Direct users | These are the users that landed on your website directly, by typing in your URL or clicking on your link in a document/pdf or e-mail without parameters. | Various providers |
| Users channel Referral | These are users that found your website via another website. For example in a blog post, in a forum, list, article or social media. | Google Analytics |
| Paid users | These users came to your website via paid advertisement. It can be any ad-type. For example paid search, display ads, social media ads or youtube ads. | Google Analytics |
| Organic users | These are users that were proactively searching something specific on search engines and ended up on your website. For example, they found it by using a certain keyword that your page ranked for on SERPS (Search engine result pages). | Google Analytics |
| New users | These are users that landed on your website for the first time. They have not interacted with your website before. | Google Analytics |
| Returning users | These are users that have already visited your website earlier. | Hubspot |
| Unique users | These are users that might have landed on your website multiple times, but in analytics, it is still counted as one user. This is possible through the measurement of the IP address, user agents and/or cookies. | Google Analytics |
| Post Engaged Users | These are users that have interacted with your post on social media with a comment, share or like. | |
| Sessions per User | This is a metric that indicates how many sessions (on the website) one user has done. | Google Analytics |
How can tracking Users help you to become more data-driven?
Tracking users and understanding their behaviour on your website is one of the most crucial analyses of a digital marketer. In the end, tailoring your content to better user experience, more personalised content should be your main goal or aim.
Having an understanding of your user types and the channels they come from, can help you to identify better targeting for your business. Executing an in-depth analysis such as analysing demographics, gender or language of the users can bring valuable information for better user-targeting. Use this data to your advantage and compare how these different user types interacted with your website.
User traffic types can be categorized into various marketing funnel stages which help you to have a better overview of how your user traffic is distributed across the entire funnel.
By analysing further, you can get a deeper understanding of how your users find your website. A good example of this is Organic users. Therefore, make sure to have a look at the organic keywords that lead to your website to better understand the relevancy of searched keywords and the content you provide. Brand name keywords and other branded keywords are a good example of users that are in the Consideration stage already despite the fact that the traffic originates from organic search.
Nexoya Pro Tip: In the nexoya tool you can explore user traffic for every landing page of your website and make an analysis of their performance. Moreover, you can add different user types into your marketing funnel within nexoya and have a good overview of how the user traffic is distributed across different funnel stages.
Download our free ebook to learn the fundamentals of data-drivenness with 17 marketing KPIs!
Additional information on Users
- Read more about new and returning users and how to understand them
- Find out how you can get more returning users
- Read about the differences between users and sessions
- Read more about visits