Visit effect
The most important effect is that of the visit. The visit effect directly reflects the quality of the website and is the area where you have the greatest influence. You need to know what percentage of your sales occurred on the first visit versus what percentage of sales comes from repeat visitors. Most sites find that the majority of their sales go to repeat visitors. Amazon, for example, does not break even on a new customer until the third purchase.
You also need to understand the cumulative effect of repeat visits. Does the chance of buying increase or decrease the more visits someone makes to your site?
As people become familiar with the site, the effect it has on them will change. For example, design features are more important for initial visits than subsequent ones because the visitor becomes familiar with them. On the other hand, this familiarity means that elements that do not fit the familiar pattern have a greater effect in later visits than in early ones.
When it comes to the cumulative effect of visits, not all visits are equal. Some visits will have a greater or lesser effect than others. This is influenced by a number of factors, such as the nature of the visit (browsing visits have less impact than others), the time since the last visit, total visits already made, the effect of the last visit and the accumulated visit effect.
A very important and often overlooked component of the visit effect is known as the utility of connection. Utility of connection looks at the relationship between the content being served and the connection this content is traveling through. Primarily this is about how long it took to render a functional page (which has enough to use) and then the complete page.
Utility of connection is actually decreasing for a large portion of the web's users. This is because there is a general assumption in design circles that everyone has broadband. In actual fact, in the U.S. (and most of Europe), around 40 percent of internet users are still on dial-up.
