How to compare new and return visitors in Adobe SiteCatalyst 15

This is not going to be a big post as it will discuss a bit about one of the silliest adobe sitecatalyst barries, the known to all of us from Google Analytics “Visitor Type”.

In GA, on the Audience report, you can select the Behaviour tag and then click on “New vs Returning”. This will automatically categorise

Then GA provides you

Unfortunately Adobe Analytics do not provide you a “User Type” report by default, however this is an easy fix by creating a couple of Visit type segments on your own.

The first segment you will create is the New Visitor one. We will name this “Visit Type: New visitor”

On the segment builder select “Visit Type” from your tag section then go to definitions and select Show: Visit from the drop down box and then “Visit Number” Is less than 2. Any report you run with this segment will refer to people that have been to your site less than 2 times.

Bear in mind that this report will suffer with pretty much what all “new visitor” reports suffer right now which is visits from different browsers and devices. Because Adobe uses browser cookies, until you sort out your cross-device tracking you are always in danger in measuring the same user who logs in from the office computer and then his tablet from his home.

New Visitor Segment

Return Visitor Segment

Once you have done the above, it is now time to create your “Return visitor” segment. You will follow the same process as described above with the difference that on the “visit number” you will choose “is greater than” 1.

This will measure a second visit from the same device, thus all data seen will be around return visitors.

Once you have done the new segments, simply follow Adobe;’s Instructions:

• Navigate to Site Metrics > Visitors, and then the desired unique visitors report
• In the segment dropdown at the top, select the  First Time Visits segment.
• Click the Dashboard button to add this reportlet to a dashboard.
• Select the segment dropdown at the top again, and create a segment.
• Select a  Visit container with the following rule:
• Include Visit Container where visit number is greater than 1
• Apply this segment to the report, and add it to the same dashboard.

The resulting dashboard shows both reports side-by-side, allowing comparison between the two.