Monitor new vs returning users

Report new versus returning users for the current quarter so the founders can see acquisition quality. Pull user counts by week from April 1 to June 30, show the percentage that are new and returning, and break out the top three traffic sources for each group. Deliver a CSV and a one-slide summary for the founders.

Before I send the new vs returning breakdown to the growth team, make it easy to approve: surface the delta week-over-week, highlight any sudden shifts in the new/returning split, and flag sources where returning users dropped more than 20%. Add a brief interpretation of whether shifts suggest acquisition issues or retention decline.

We launched a paid acquisition push and the share of returning users dropped 18% the following week. The CEO will assume the campaign is poor quality. I don’t know whether this is normal dilution from a big new-audience buy, a tagging mismatch marking returning users as new, or an attribution window issue. Compare user-level identifiers where available, check cookie changes or tracking updates the week of the campaign, and say which diagnosis is most likely and the least risky message to send to the CEO.

Over several quarters we overreact to shifts in new versus returning users—changing bids, pausing channels, and blaming creative—only to find the moves premature. I want one repeatable rule to decide when to act. Propose a threshold and set of three prior checks (sample size, tag integrity, campaign overlap) that must pass before the growth team changes spend, and say who owns the go/no-go call.