The point of this exercise is to see whether or not you’re effectively catering to visitors. We can see that most visitors are using IE, but that Firefox and Chrome make up an equally-large share. Since IE and the others treat web pages quite differently, we had better make sure we look good in all three (four if you add in Safari).

The site doesn’t have a mobile page yet, but considering that those visitors are only about 5%, it’s not really worth investing in right now.

Another good way to check if browser issues are affecting site performance is to change the dropdown “Contribution to Total” to another metric, such as New Visits or Time on Site. If you discover that one of these drops significantly for any browser, that means you have a problem with that browser that is affecting visitor experience.

Another metric I’m going to show you, which is a little more complex, is simply comparing the total visitors with new visits, and with returning visitors. (You can add these segments using the “Advanced Segments” dropdown above your chart).

This tells an interesting story, which I’ve highlighted in yellow. It’s great that we’re getting so many return visitors, but what’s this? The return visitors are performing much better than all other segments. Much lower bounce rate, and much higher time on site. That tells us one important thing: it’s really worth cultivating whatever is driving these return visits.

It also tells us what our marketing strategy should be: we’re getting the return visits automatically, doing little to entice people back to the store. That means we should focus on getting new visitors. If over 20% of visitors return, that means it should be very easy to increase traffic if we just get more exposure.

The last thing I want to show you is a little more complex, and is a conversions report. For this to work, you’ll have to have set up some kind of goal (getting to a page, completing an action), and even then the data might not be conclusive. In this case, it definitely is:

Here I’ve gone to the E-commerce section of the reports, and overlaid Visits with Conversions with Returning Visitors. Now, in this case a conversion isn’t necessarily a sale - it’s either a sale or a newsletter signup. But you can still see something obvious here: on days when there are more return visitors, there’s a bigger chance of desired visitor actions taking place.

This confirms our initial thoughts that return visitors are the most desirable in this case. Knowing where our visitors are coming from, and what to do with that information, will now lead to us being able to exploit those visitors more effectively.