Up next in the Visitor Loyalty Reports is the Recency report. This one is very simple and straight to the point. The report data is presented in a bar graph and shows you the frequency of repeat visits to your site.
Once you set your date range the Recency report will show you the total number of visits during that period broken down by the number of days since the last visit. Google Analytics is using a cookie to calculate the last time a visit to your site was made from that computer and browser. That cookie is kept for 24 months or until the user deletes their cookies.
In the above example the majority of this site’s visits were made 0 days ago (98,690 visits or 80.45% of all visitors). Zero days ago means that visitor has not been to your site within the time period that GA cookie is stored (18 months). The last category, “365+ days ago” means the visitor last visited between 365 days and 24 months when the cookie drops off.
The data in the Recency report can be a gauge of how interested visitors are in your site and/or product based on the frequency of their visits. Keep in mind that the data in this and other Visitor Loyalty reports is “bucketized” meaning that all visits must fit into one of the predefined buckets or categories. When you are searching for insights to improve your users’ experience be sure you are looking at data in context.
Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Length of Visit
Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.
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