First-time and returning sessions

Hi, this is Derek Tangren from the Adobe Analytics product team. I’m going to walk through a highly requested new feature that we recently released inside Customer Journey Analytics that gives you insights into first time and returning sessions for your users. An important way to distinguish users across any channel is whether this is their first session or if they are returning for a subsequent session. This can help provide an important insight into where they might be in their customer journey, as well as be a way to analyze how effective acquisition, conversion, or retention efforts are with those different groups. The way this works is that we apply a 13 month look back from the reporting period to identify previous sessions by user.

Let’s say that I’m a marketer and I want to better understand what are top marketing channels that are bringing new users to my brand. Up to this point, this has been a challenging question to answer in CJA. But we’re excited, this is now available to you. Let’s go into Customer Journey Analytics to see what this looks like. We’ll start with a new standard dimension called Session Type. This is a straightforward dimension that shows first time and returning sessions. From there, we can then drill in by Marketing Channel to see what marketing efforts are bringing people to our brand. In this example, we can see things like Paid Search and Comparison Shopping are the main efforts for first time users. While things like Text and Email seem to be what’s driving more interactions for those that have already interacted with our brand.

Let’s take a look at another example. In this scenario, we’ll assume we are a software vendor with different SKUs representing different pieces of consumer software. We want to understand what is generating the most traffic and purchases from first-time sessions. Inside Customer Journey Analytics, we’ll start with our SKU report and add one of the new standard metrics, First-time Sessions, to our report. In this case, I’ve also created a First-time Session Conversion metric which looks at the ratio of orders to sessions within the context of a first time session. Here, we can see that prd1036 has the highest sessions and decent first time conversion rate. We could consider highlighting this product for first time sessions, or if used in conjunction with the previous report, perhaps we test directing new users from paid search to a dedicated product lining page. There are other interesting use cases we anticipate you’ll be able to apply this great feature to, and look forward to hearing how you are leveraging it. Thanks for watching. -