The cornerstone of a business is its success as an entity with customers, but customer purchases are not the base element of that. Instead, customer loyalty determines how well a business will do – with a finite number of potential customers in the world or in a city, what happens if everyone only visits your establishment once? Sooner or later, you run out of people to whom you can sell. Customer loyalty revolves around not only bringing people back time and time again, but bringing others with them. This applies not only in the brick and mortar world, but also on the web. In the following article, we will discuss a few important metrics via Google Analytics that you can use to track these trends and see how loyal your customer base is at any time.

Track Events

Whenever someone comes to your website, they are bound to engage in a variety of actions. Customer loyalty among existing users can be easily tracked through a variety of ways. You can do this by tracking one or more goals through Analytics, and choosing event for your goal type. With a tracking snippet included and in use, you’ll be able to monitor sign-ups for your newsletter, how many people have added items to your cart but not finalized their orders, and the number of views for one piece of multimedia or another. Pinging websites under your control with this snippet data and goal monitoring is one of the best ways you can keep an eye on what returning customers are doing – as well as first-time shoppers.

Track Shares

Whenever someone advocates on behalf of your brand, don’t you want to know? Customer loyalty comes in many forms, with advocacy and sharing being one of the ways it manifests. The use of social referral and social interaction tracking features within Google Analytics can be among the best ways that you can see how many people are sharing items, products or pages from your site. When you use a combination of Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and tracking snippets on your site, you’ll gain a valuable amount of insight into who is sharing what, and to which networks. This method can be especially helpful when you offer discounts or promote contests with entries earned by sharing via social media (though not necessarily in this case an ideal way to measure customer loyalty).

Track Returns

Last but not least, you want to be tracking who returns to your website – the ultimate demonstration of brand loyalty. If someone has visited in the past and/or purchased something, then comes back again, it is a good sign for your future prospects when this number is as high as possible. Analytics can provide tracking tools that will help you determine what percentage of your traffic comes from return visitors. Custom segments allow you to track this data in the system by defining the date range at which a user’s first session begins and ends. This is not the end all, be all solution for pinging websites for returning customer data, but it can be a simple way to get an idea of who is new and who is loyal.