New visitor

When a hit arrives the tool looks the identifier up. No match means new, and the identifier is then saved so the next hit finds it. How long the memory lasts decides everything: a two-year cookie remembers a reader across seasons, a one-day identifier remembers nobody.

Tarsier keeps no identifier across days, so someone who returns tomorrow can read as new again. The new share you see will run higher than in a cookie tool, and the honest comparison is this month against last month inside Tarsier.

A bike repair shop gets 3,000 visitors in a month and 2,400 of them read as new. The owner decides nobody comes back. Looking at the top landing pages, most of those people searched for how to fix a slipping chain, read one guide, fixed the bike on their driveway and never needed a second visit.

The shop then adds a booking widget to the three guides with the most new traffic. New share stays near 80 percent, but bookings from those pages rise from 4 to 19 a month. The number was never the problem.

A new visitor has no earlier record. A returning visitor does. A unique visitor is the de-duplicated total, so it contains both. New plus returning equals unique, which makes new share a way to read the mix, not a score.

Treating a high new share as a loyalty failure. Ignoring how long the identifier lives. Counting a cleared browser or a second device as a fresh person. Comparing the new share from two tools with different memories. Celebrating new share on a day when a bot swept the site.

Read the new share by channel. Search and social should be mostly new; email and direct should not be. If a content site is almost entirely new, give first-timers a clear next article and a reason to subscribe, then judge the result by sign-ups, not by the percentage.